“that passive and numb”

On Barbara Loden’s Wanda

No film more animates a feminist film imaginary than Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970). It is a film about a working-class woman from mining country who abandons her given vocation as wife and mother, and proceeds to drift, eventually fastening herself to a small-time thief, Mr. Dennis, a petty tyrant and malcontent who harnesses the shiftless Wanda for his own purposes. Seeking bare attachment, the most rudimentary of human needs, she gets enlisted in his script, bidden to act in his drama – to stick up a bank. For the two transient loners, the heist ends badly. Wanda drifts onward.

Loden created the character Wanda from a relayed transcription and reimagining of another woman’s story. Loden read a newspaper article about Alma Malone, collaborator with a male partner in a bank robbery, who when sentenced to twenty years in prison, “thanked the judge”. Loden described her encounter with the story and the beginning of the script for Wanda, “I was fascinated by what kind of girl would be that passive and numb, so I developed that character.”1 Wanda Goronski, written into existence in the early 1960s and emerging on 16mm film in 1970, rose from this composite of realities and imaginings. The ineluctable expression of gratitude for an impending imprisonment, a willful submission to unfreedom and a punitive law, oriented Loden’s fascination and provides a tantalizing key to the film, of assent and acquiescence writ large.

Loden’s film sits at an uneasy angle to the discourses of women’s liberation of its time as well as to the demand for “positive” representations that would emerge in early 1970s feminist film criticism. Neither affirmative nor bound to psychological interiority, Wanda drew on an aesthetic palette associated as much with the French New Wave, cinema vérité, and the independent cinemas of Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes, as with the energies and formal strategies of underground films – as Loden had expressed a concerted affinity with more experimental work, its “take a camera and film it” ethos.2 It also seems to advance some of the motifs of dispossession in many of the drifter, road films of the late 1960s and 1970s – The Rain People (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Boxcar Bertha (1972), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) – but differs considerably from them in its mercurial style and in its unremitting pessimism. Loden’s aesthetic is distinct, set apart from these movements and developments, perhaps due to some combination of her marginality to the industry and her economic independence.

The singular historicity of Wanda, as the fledgling film of an actor-director-screenwriter, its rough-hewn style and spare precision seem to both instantiate and reinforce the film as a palimpsest of failures, textual and extratextual (despite the film’s resounding critical successes). Loden’s prescience rests in focalizing pressing considerations of labor, gender, and survival, made in advance of two key films of women’s refusal and drift: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985). The gestural specificity of Loden’s performance, her habitation within the exhausted lifetime of rural Appalachia, its aesthetics of passivity and failure, resonate deeply with tendencies afoot in contemporary cinemas of duration and observation.

The acute figuration of refusal in obstinacy and passivity that Loden’s Wanda calls forth has remained a difficult kernel for feminist criticism and film theory to digest, especially a critical project rooted in affirmative representations, positive images, and a politics of the cinematic apparatus that aims to eradicate social inequalities. Lauren Rabinowitz talks of the radical uprisings of the era of the “long 1968” in which revolution came in the “public demonstration of a refusal,” and in the revelation of the dependency of image culture on female bodies and the dirty realities of women’s work and care labor, “bringing into view the vomiting pregnant woman, the sink full of dirty dishes, the shitty diapers, as much as it meant revealing women’s erotic desires”3 (2001, 95). Wanda, in contrast, untimely and before its time, channels other strategies of image making and performance, ones bound up in affective presence, in the temporality and phenomenology of granular performance, and in an aesthetic less demonstrative than radically descriptive, in the burning cut of exposure . . . .

Wanda was a refusal of another order, in which she seized the means of production for her own ends. Loden called Wanda an “anti-movie,” a film antithetical to the romanticized coupling of Bonnie & Clyde (1968). Describing her style in relation to a developing cinematic new wave, and her distaste for “slick pictures,” she suggested in an interview that the “Hollywood albatross” had sunk, “the ship out of lead . . . won’t float anymore.”4 This statement also suggests an unabashed abjuration of the cinematic mode associated with her then-husband Elia Kazan.

Loden gained funding from family friend Harry Schuster, to produce her almost decade-old script, based on that newspaper story. Made on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, the film was shot by cinematographer Nicholas Proferes, who had previously worked under filmmakers associated with direct cinema, such as Ricky Leacock. Apart from Loden and Michael Higgins, who played Mr. Dennis, most of the remaining actors were drawn from a pool of local non-professionals. A four-person crew included Loden, Proferes, an assistant, and a lighting and sound assistant. Loden shot the film over ten weeks in northeastern Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Describing her aesthetic decisions, the small scale of the shooting and its work, Loden linked this work to the reproductive labor of the housewife:

It wasn’t that I knew what I wanted – it was that I knew what I didn’t want, all those overdone clichés. It was like being a housewife. You do everything, you don’t differentiate. I swept the floor, got the costumes together, dressed the sets. I don’t want to get into the system as it exists, I want to create my own corner.5

This corner is rendered in the artisanal labor of the film’s style, palpable in its naturalistic textures, focus on unvarnished mottled surfaces, 16 mm grain, and handheld cinematography. The film’s naturalism is also grounded in its attentive relation to the lived realities of a classed existence. Wanda’s opening shots track slowly, laterally across the Scranton-area coal mounds, surveying a landscape of extraction. A cut to an establishing shot of a house, dirty rugs hanging off the porch, a dog running out, and then a profile image of an old woman handling a rosary, as if a photograph from Walker Evans’ Depression-era portraits or Robert Frank’s photojournalistic The Americans, strikes with the incontrovertible milieu of rural deprivation. Inside, we see a crying child, alone, crawling on all fours through mussed sheets on an empty bed, a woman bleary with the measures of a time spent on reproductive labor, as she holds the baby and her husband rushes out the door, muttering. We see a figure on the couch, lying under a sheet, hiding from the noise and the pressure of the environs of childrearing, the domestic scene, undergirded with banal violence, the working-class decor of “slow death” as Lauren Berlant has described, the process of the wearing out of populations.6

The mute figure that lies wearily facedown, her blonde hair in a topknot pigtail, messily shagging her forehead, as her hands hold her forehead, here appears Wanda: this buried, inelegant, crumpled up woman, this shielded face unable to tolerate the details of this impoverished existence and its demands. So begins Wanda, as Loden’s direction insists, doggedly, on the unglamorous, the rumpled, the worn down, the extracted. Wanda is reviled, in Loden’s own words. The spectator concedes in this moment, three minutes into the film, that Wanda is, as Barbara Loden has herself described, a burdensome figure. She is – and she carries – a heavy load. 

Loden frequently spoke with a bracing frankness when describing the character, “Wanda has no direction. She’s just passing through life, mainly from man to man. But it’s not a woman’s film or a woman’s problem. Wanda is an object, something handled, dropped. That’s the story.”7 Loden’s words strike for their plain recognition of a dehumanizing abstraction, an alienation produced through the alchemy of gender oppression within economic privation. But they also describe something palpably material, the sensorial weight of the force of being and subsisting in this wretched life for a woman who has no resources or supports. What holds her up? The materiality of Loden’s description meets the descriptive claims of the film itself in its handling of its corporeal and spatial materials, carving their injunctions into its images.

The sense of Wanda’s burdensome weight is also forcefully visible throughout the film, in Loden’s construction of her character. Wanda’s destitution is quick and merciless. After Wanda’s stop at the divorce court, she falls swiftly into an encounter with a man at a bar who buys her a beer. Drifting, her aimless search for attachment is driven by transactional needs, forged out of immediacy – having little money for a drink and no roof over her head, she acquiesces to a night with a stranger. The film judiciously cuts between the scene of the Rolling Rock on the table, Wanda’s forehead in her hands registered in weary profile at the window of the diner, to the morning after in the wood-paneled motel room and messy sheets, as the travelling salesman sneaks around and out of the room while Wanda sleeps. An accidental noise wakes her; she springs out of bed, sensing her abandonment taking place.

This scenario of contaminated use is a humiliation endured in process, played largely straight and cruel; in its pace and editing, it elides any romance, seduction, or pillow talk that might suggest anything other than instrumentality, the person of Wanda made visible as an “empty space” or placeholder that accommodates male desires and needs.8 Nevertheless it contains, in its bruising descriptiveness, the slightly tragic sense of the caper. As Dirk Lauwaert suggests, “Wanda is a grandchild of Buster Keaton, all the more so because we are unable to laugh (the Buster Keaton handicap).”9 Wanda scrambles, in torn lace underwear to dress and to catch up with this new yet reluctant companion. She barely gets a ride. He tricks her into getting him ice cream, and as we watch in long shot, the car drives off and Wanda is left for good, again a jettisoned object in the dreary parking lot. Wanda stands holding an ice-cream cone, which we presume was meant for him. It would be far too facile to see her abandonment here as some fatalistic reversal of her prior actions. Instead, Loden shows us Wanda’s doggedness. We see her effort of surviving through, of life as enduring, rendered through such moments of excruciating humiliation, of the most painful rejection – witnessed without expository buffers or redemptive salvos.

Loden avowedly avoids feminist models of representation as social or political correction, if we follow the critique Chuck Kleinhans directs at the film in his contemporaneous review, as he writes that we see in Wanda only “results” and not the “root causes” of her oppression.10 The film presents the inverse, alternate image of feminist documentaries likes Janie’s Janie (1970) and The Woman’s Film (1971), which sought ways to build forms of consciousness through the construction of an introspective, analytical, and ideologically critical autobiographical voice through the narration of first-person subjects in front of and for the camera.

Wanda’s relative muteness, her silence, what Loden called the “non-verbal” quality of the film, is paramount to understanding its subtly incendiary, and I would suggest descriptive politics. Refusing a diagnostic stance, the description of the character’s passivity may feel, as it did to Kleinhans, as lacking a “complexity, only the recording of actions and details,” as he further states, “this type of film easily takes the surface of things, takes the ‘reality’ presented as sufficient, and in the last analysis it usually accepts the world as it is.”11 The reduction of description to an acceptance of the world as it is rather than inscribed by a refusal marks a difference in reading and aesthetic sensibility about what the cinematic image does and does not do for and with politics. As if in response to such critiques, Loden described her sidelong relation to feminism, in that the “picture was not about women’s liberation. It was really about the oppression of women or people.” When asked if she thought her film should present solutions, she continued, “it should be enough for an artist to present something as they see it.”12

What the film clearly presents or describes is the very incapacity – economic as well as characterological – that Wanda’s silence portends. Wanda does not have the resources, in all senses, for a discourse about herself and of herself. In Wanda and Janie’s Janie, we have two images of women looking into mirrors at themselves, but they signify radically different conclusions about the possibility of recuperating social reproduction as a determinative aspect of women’s social and subjective identities, as well as the possibility of self-scripting at all. What Wanda trades off of the early feminist documentaries’ self-consciousness and forthright activism, it converts into an acute observational precision, an observation of a woman’s strike – a withdrawal of the only labor she was bidden to do, maternal and care work as a housewife.

Gestural and observational details sear an imprint, figuring the concrete conditions and temporalities of a life lived in stagnation, and in the absence of that voice that could or would narrate its self-recognition. Wanda’s dereliction of her wifely and motherly station lands her literally in a no-place, where she must again barter and renegotiate her utility and value, and her ongoing survival.

• 1Rex Reed. “Watch out for Barbara’s Wanda,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1971. 52
• 2Kevin Thomas, “Miss Loden’s Wanda: ‘It’s Very Much Me,’” Los Angeles Times, April 8 1971: G17.
• 3Lauren Rabinowitz, “Medium Uncool: Women Shoot Back; Feminism Film and 1968—A Curious Documentary,” Science & Society 65 (1): 2001. 95.
• 4McCandlish Phillips. “Barbara Loden Speaks of the World of Wanda,” New York Times, March 11, 1971: 32.
• 5Kevin Thomas, “Miss Loden’s Wanda,’” G17.
• 6Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (4), 2007: 754–80.
• 7Phillips, “Barbara Loden Speaks of the World of Wanda,” 32.
• 8Sarah Weinman, “The True Crime Story Behind a 1970s Feminist Cult Classic,” Topic Issue 4 (October 2017).
• 9Dirk Lauwaert. “Wanda . . .,” Sabzian, March 2018, trans. Mari Shields. Originally published in A Prior 15 (2007).
• 10Chuck Kleinhans. “Wanda and Marilyn Times Five: Seeing through Cinema Verite,” Jump Cut, no. 1 (1974): 14–15.
• 11Ibid.
• 12Madison Women’s Media Collective. “Barbara Loden Revisited,” Women and Film 5–6: 1974, 68.