Barbara Loden Beyond ‘Wanda’: An Upcoming Film and Lecture Series Provides a Tantalizing Look at What Might Have Been

When film scholar Elena Gorfinkel first discovered Barbara Loden‘s “Wanda” 20 years ago, the format was a far cry from the restoration by UCLA and The Film Foundation so lovingly released by Criterion.

“The film had an active following among cinephiles, but it was difficult to see,” Gorfinkel told IndieWire. She found a bootleg DVD-R online that had been sourced from a VHS copy taken from a well-worn print, and in spite of the grainy, murky transfer, Gorfinkel was transfixed. “The force of the film still came through, and I think it has maintained that force and power over the years.”

Released in 1970, “Wanda” was Loden’s first and only fiction feature as a writer and director, but its vérité depiction of a woman (played by Loden herself) on the margins drifting through life after leaving her husband and children was riveting enough to win the film a prize at the Venice Film Festival the year of its release — and to place it on Sight and Sound’s 2022 list of the 100 greatest films ever made as chosen by an international critics’ poll. As Gorfinkel points out, ever since its release, “Wanda” has inspired new waves of interest among cinephiles thanks to its singular heroine and a style that stands apart from other New Hollywood movies of the era.

In fact, Gorfinkel says that to place Loden in context alongside New Hollywood auteurs like Bob Rafelson and Robert Altman is, to a certain degree, inaccurate.

“‘Wanda’ is really not a Hollywood film at all,” Gorfinkel said. “It’s very antithetical to it in that Loden talked about Hollywood as an albatross and a ship made of lead that wouldn’t float anymore. She was very influenced by experimental film and the films of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, and her very artisanal, low-budget approach is much more aligned with the American cinema of that stripe than, say, Arthur Penn, or what we think of as the New Hollywood.”

Placing “Wanda” in its proper context has been a mission for Gorfinkel in the 20 years since she first discovered it, and her research on the film has yielded a series of revelations about the myths surrounding its production and reception — several of which she debunks in her superb recent book on the film. Next weekend, Gorfinkel will host “Wanda and Beyond,” a weekend of films and lectures at the Joshua Tree Cultural Center designed to deepen and expand our understanding of Loden, her work, and the complicated tributaries of film history.

“A myth that I’ve come to find interesting and troublesome is the idea of the film as a forgotten work,” Gorfinkel said. “It didn’t have wide distribution, but it was in circulation. Many people did know about it.” Although prominent critics like Pauline Kael dismissed “Wanda,” Gorfinkel also disputes the notion that the film was poorly reviewed.

“75% of the criticism I read about the film was really positive,” she said. “There’s a sort of seizing on ways of trying to ‘rescue’ the film from history that we all have as part of the process of being cinephiles, but I think the romance of referring to it as overlooked clouds our understanding of how the film actually moved through film culture and who did see it and talk about it.”

In fact, Loden traveled extensively with “Wanda” at film festivals, and even in its early days, it was well known and highly regarded in serious film circles. “It’s often repeated that it only showed once in a theater in New York, which was not the case,” Gorfinkel said. “It was never meant to be a big-budget Hollywood film that would blanket all cinemas, but as an independent film, it was screening quite a bit in various cities and met with quite a lot of success and critical celebration.”

‘Fade In‘Courtesy Everett Collection

A more truly forgotten film is a movie Gorfinkel has programmed to screen alongside “Wanda” at the Joshua Tree Cultural Center, “Fade In.” Shot in 1968 but not released until 1973 — and then only dumped to television, not released theatrically as originally intended — “Fade In” marked Loden’s starring debut as a film actress following supporting roles in her husband Elia Kazan’s “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass” and her triumphant stage work in Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall.”

“Fade In” stars Loden as a film editor on location in Moab, Utah, where she has an affair with a local driver (Burt Reynolds, four years before “Deliverance” would make him a star) hired for the production. It’s a charming, beautiful romance with cinematography by the legendary William Fraker, an odd lineage; the movie was shot to piggyback on the production of the Western “Blue,” which was already shooting in Moab. “Blue” is the movie within the movie, and its stars Terence Stamp and Ricardo Montalban weave in and out of “Fade In” as themselves.

For whatever reason, “Fade In” was a doomed production; director Jud Taylor took his name off of it after disagreeing with studio recutting, and Paramount executive Robert Evans hated the movie so much that he never bothered to release it. For Gorfinkel, the movie asks tantalizing questions about what might have been since it was shot before “Wanda” but released after it. Had “Fade In” come out when intended and raised Loden’s profile as an actress, would it have impacted the way she made “Wanda?” Would she still have made “Wanda” at all?

“I think putting ‘Wanda’ and ‘Fade In’ together is an interesting way of thinking about different trajectories through film history,” Gorfinkel said. “It’s unclear what would have happened in Loden’s career if ‘Fade In’ had been released.” What is clear is that Loden had an oppositional relationship to Hollywood that might or might not have come from her experience on “Fade In,” the only time she was ever the star of a major studio production.

“She took a very critical, anti-Hollywood [approach] in the way that she presented and framed ‘Wanda,'” Gorfinkel said. “She really reduced the number of people on set, down to having four people on the crew.” Whether or not Loden’s stripped-down approach to shooting was a direct response to “Fade In” is a tantalizing question that will probably never be definitively answered (Loden died in 1980 at the age of 48), but the opportunity to see it on the big screen in conversation with “Wanda” is one that should not be missed by any cinephile able to make the trek.

“The Joshua Tree setting will bring its own set of questions,” Gorfinkel said, noting that one of the reasons she programmed “Fade In” was its status as a gorgeous desert-set movie that would resonate in the Joshua Tree surroundings. Mostly, however, she just wants people to explore Loden in her totality, and in terms of both the films she made and the ones she didn’t. “I think this is a way of thinking more expansively about the ways this single great work of cinema, ‘Wanda,’ really opens up the questions of someone’s life. How does one tell the history of the striving and all the potential and the creative imagination?”

“Wanda” and “Fade In” will screen as part of the Joshua Tree Cultural Center‘s “Wanda and Beyond” weekend on January 16 and 17.