The Reception History of

Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970): Reframing the Politics of Representation, “Use,” and Slippery Historical Objects

In 2007, the original film elements of Barbara Loden’s first and only film Wanda (1970), were saved from a landfill fate by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. A restoration by UCLA soon followed, as did a recuperation of the cultural memory of the film. 1 Wanda follows the wanderings of its titular character through Pennsylvania’s coal towns, after leaving her husband and children. While free from a life of domestic and reproductive labour, Wanda—listless, apathetic—finds herself drifting from man to man, eventually inadvertently getting involved with a petty criminal. While Wanda won the International Critics’ Prize for Best Film at the Venice film festival, the subsequent twenty-odd years saw it fall by the wayside.2

Wanda’s mixed reception history can be traced through the contradictory ways her difficult character has been criticized and/or interpreted. Two aspects of Wanda’s contemporaneous reception will be probed: first, the focus on her character as incompatible with conventional narrative and genre, and second, the negative reaction to the film from second-wave feminists. What might be found in the gap between these aspects of the original reception, and current, third-wave reappraisals of the film which examine Wanda and its temporality through intersecting lenses of gender and class? What gaps might still be found in these reappraisals? Broadly, the film’s reception history illuminates how modes of criticism have shifted with regards to the politics of representation. Wanda’s slippery historiography illuminates feminism’s shifting values and priorities in relation to the broader political and cinematic landscape as well as refigures the notion of what constitutes narrative and political “usefulness.”

It is key to note that Wanda did not receive a widespread release in America; as a result, perhaps, Bérénice Reynaud has noted that initially, “the meeting between Wanda and ‘serious’ criticism did not happen, at least not in the United States.”3 Wanda was, however, reviewed in 1971 by the prominent critic Pauline Kael. She found it mostly lacking — particularly the characterization of Wanda, whom she calls “a sad, ignorant slut,” writing that, “that makes her a sort of un-protagonist; generally you’d have to have something stirring in you to be that unhappy, but she’s so dumb we can’t tell what has made her so miserable.”4 Kael does not venture to interrogate the character beyond the functions of the narrative, yet neither does she fully engage with the affective or socio-political implications of the narrative itself. As Richard Brody writes in a more recent re-evaluation of Wanda, Kael “judged the film as drama, rather than as a conception of the world — not Wanda’s world but Loden’s. In short, Kael approached the movie, as she approached most movies, mainly [and perhaps fundamentally] as a consumer.”5 Kael’s consumer approach to criticism points to an implied rubric for what narratives or characters are “useful” or “worth” depicting on-screen.

While this focus on Wanda’s lack of intelligence is consistent throughout most reviews of Loden’s film, there seems to have been an unwillingness or disinterest in fully dealing with the character beyond someone who is a “rather stupid,” “ignorant slut.”6 Instead, many critics focused on situating Wanda as a kind of genre film, often comparing it to Bonnie and Clyde, released a year earlier. The Independent Film Journal’s Buying and Booking Guide, for example, declares that Wanda and Mr. Dennis’ “haphazard criminal career is probably meant to suggest a realistic version of Bonnie and Clyde.”7 In The New York Times, furthermore, Roger Greenspun argues that “it is worth remembering that “Wanda” [...] is a crime melodrama, not simply a study of its protagonist.”8 He found the portion of the film depicting the ill-fated bank robbery—arguably its most recognizably “narrative” element—to be its most successful in its “[suggestion of] a classic arrangement of dramatic priorities.”9 For Greenspun, this perceived adherence to a classical formula, slight as it is, is a significant virtue.

It is important to note here that Loden had conceived of the screenplay for Wanda in the early sixties, well before the appearance of Bonnie and Clyde in the cinematic landscape.10 This is thus an example of how the temporal and cultural context in which a film is released inevitably influences its reception. Because of the timing of the releases and their surface similarities,

Wanda was necessarily situated in dialogue with Arthur Penn’s award-winning film. Wanda premiered at a peculiar time, or, rather, it was a peculiarity at the time it premiered— as Reynaud has argued, “as Hollywood was changing during the ’70s and B-grade movies were virtually disappearing, ‘non-virtuosic cinema,’ or cinema of imperfection, was somehow pushed to the margins.”11 Just as Hollywood was changing in the seventies, so was the landscape for women: Wanda’s release coincided with the height of the second-wave feminist movement. The general critical focus on Wanda is inseparable from a preoccupation with “use” — on a concept of narrative that is structured around progression. In the sense that, for example, she ends the film in much the same position she found herself in at the beginning, the character of Wanda is “useless.” For critic-consumers like Kael, and critics like Greenspun coming from a Classic context, Wanda is perceived to be a dead end, narratively speaking. Therefore, their methods of criticism do not allow for space to conceive of her — or the film — as anything more than that. This ethos is echoed in contemporaneous feminist critiques of Wanda, emerging from a political standpoint that demanded representations of women that were empowering, not subordinate like Wanda. In other words, Wanda was a depiction of women’s oppression, rather than liberation. Therefore, in the view of some feminists, Wanda also had no use in the feminist struggle at the time. For example, in her survey text Reel Women, Ally Acker cites a 1972 review of Wanda in the foremont feminist publication of the time, MS Magazine According to Acker, the article “said that the film shouldn’t be shown on the screen[,] [...] that, at that time, there was only room for films about women achieving things and setting examples.”12 Furthermore, though her assessment of Wanda was much less patronizing than Kael’s and less essentialist than MS’, the critic Marion Meade, as Reynaud has noted, “seems uneasy about the ‘message’ she reads in Wanda.”13 Meade ponders, “But now Barbara Loden arrives at the crux of the problem, which is, where do you go after you reject the only life society permits? And once a woman gains her freedom, what can she do with it? The answer: nowhere and nothing.”14 Again, Wanda was characterized as presenting a dead end, and what was to be gleaned from that?

Not unlike the character of Wanda, in hindsight, Loden’s film has a sense of being out of place in the landscape in which it was received. It was neither a slick New Hollywood feature, nor an empowering women’s liberation feature. Wanda’s position as what Kael calls an “un-protagonist” therefore emerges for us as a locus in which critical discourses of the past and present at once converge in focus and split away in interpretation.

If third wave feminism/ gender praxis centers itself less around essentialism and more arround “the destabilization of monolithic social constructions in favour of zones of indeterminacy,” Wanda’s placelessness has found more purchase in recent years, especially with feminist critics.15 After a long period of forgetfulness, Reynaud’s “For Wanda” represents an important foothold in its recollection in the nineties and early two-thousands. In particular, scholarship abounded following the film’s restoration in 2010. Elena Gorfinkel’s text “Wanda’s Slowness: Enduring Insignificance” is especially instructive of the ways feminist thought has shifted away from valorizing only empowering representations of women, with Gorfinkel exploring how Loden’s “prescience rests in focalizing pressing considerations of labor, gender, and survival.”16 This more nuanced critical approach reaches beyond the earlier, more narrative and representationfocused approaches, to tease out Wanda’s radical “aesthetics of passivity and failure,” and its “acute figuration of refusal in obstinacy and passivity.” Instead, Wanda is situated in a history of durational cinema.17

What is important to highlight in Gorfinkel’s work is the attention in her criticism to affect, and what lies between the lines of what is represented on-screen. In absolute opposition to Greenspun’s argument that Wanda finds its narrative footing in the bank robbery segment, Gorfinkel argues that at this juncture, “it is as if the aspirations toward narrative eventfulness are deflated, filmed at the same descriptive pace as that time of waiting.”18 Gorfinkel centers her text around the film’s temporality and the character of Wanda rather than simply narrative, reaching beyond what was deemed to be Wanda’s stupidity to explore her alienation. She writes, “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.”19 We also find this attention to what lies beyond articulation or language in Reynaud’s article, in which she describes the film as an investigation into “the opaque, ambiguous territory of unspoken repression that has so often defined the condition of women.”20 Both essays argue that the power of this “unspokenness” hinges on Wanda and Wanda’s slowness.

Where before, the critical focus on narrative produced an uncurious assessment of Wanda as simply “useless,” within and as a function of the narrative, Gorfinkel hones in on Wanda’s uselessness as integral to the film’s radicality and power. As she writes, “Wanda’s politics of slowness rests in its emphasis on the valuation and recognition of a woman’s experience, its failures, dead ends, and ambivalences, and of the oppressive demands to perform for another, rather than oneself.”21 Though it is arguably still a point of contention today, Gorfinkel’s text is part of a broader argument, in contrast to the second wave feminist desire for role models, that feminist films are not always tethered to “affirmative representations [and] positive images.”22 Instead, Gorfinkel is arguing for the importance of stayingwith, for the importance of the attempt to articulate the unspoken and affective experience of intertwined patriarchy and capitalism.

However, for all the recent critical discourse focused on Wanda’s exploration of female labour and failure, and combined patriarchy and capitalism, there is largely an absence of discussion surrounding whiteness in the film. Though these discussions seem to be sparse as of yet, Lawrence Webb, in an essay on the 1969 film Medium Cool, has made mention of Loden’s protagonist as part of a lineage of white female wanderers on film. Throughout the text Webb often cites Mark Betz’s book Beyond the Subtitle, which devotes a chapter to the phenomenon of the wandering woman in European art cinema, and the figure’s relation to histories of imperialism and colonialism. Betz draws heavily on Richard Dyer’s theorization of white femininity and the Failures of Empire. As Dyer writes, “when doubt and uncertainty [of empire] creep in, women begin to take center stage. The white male spirit achieves and maintains empire; the white female soul is associated with its demise.” He ultimately hones in on a sense of “white female narrative torpor,” which, though emerging from a context that more explicitly deals with colonial presence, is strikingly resonant with the enduring critical focus on Wanda’s uselessness.

Furthermore, many writers make note of the ways Wanda, in her aimless wandering, is often framed as embedded in the local mining landscapes; Reynaud observes, for example, that “she is in [the landscape], a tiny, white, almost incandescent figure, lost among the greyness.” Undeniably, on an individual level, Wanda is afforded a certain degree of privilege as a white female flâneur. Beyond this, however, taking a cue from Dyer’s work, there is perhaps a line to be drawn between Wanda’s whiteness, the extractive landscapes of the mining towns she drifts through, and the broader failures of a modernity defined by the legacies of European colonialism and the emergence of America as a neo-colonial empire (fig. 1). In this way, Wanda, as a filmic object, will continue to bear further examination, in which discourses surrounding female alienation and failure under patriarchal capitalism might be brought into conversation with decolonial frameworks.

Let us return to this sense of Wanda as being out of place. Gorfinkel notes that Wanda’s difficult reception, history, and rehabilitation in the cultural consciousness has produced “a time-shifting, mournful, reflexive sense of historicity” in the film as cultural object, “which has become part of its textual and extratextual meanings, inscribed in its scenes of reception.”23 Wanda’s placelessness has thus become part of its contemporary reception. In their text “A Past as Rich as Our Futures Allow: A Genealogy of Feminist Art in Canada,” Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson ask, in relation to the rift that has developed between conceptions of second and third-wave feminism, Is there, perhaps, a kind of temporal intersectionality to be advocated as well, running in tandem with the spatialized axes of coalitional politics and networked subjectivities? Does the blurring of boundaries extend through time, linking past, present, and future in multiple and disparate ways?24

Wanda as a historical object—once proto- and post-feminist in its depiction of feminist refusal and drift—is not exactly an answer to these questions, but perhaps, in its spectrality, allows us to inhabit the liminal space that Huneault and Anderson propose. In addition to posing questions about narrative, character, and “use” that are being probed in new, granular ways by contemporary critics and scholars, it also allows us to situate ourselves and understand many second wave feminists’ sense of what was at stake in the representation of women in media. Simultaneously, Wanda allows us to problematize the notion of a “second wave feminist movement” that was homogenous and unified, as well as invites further, expanded conversations around intersectionality that include excavations of the ways whiteness operates in the film. In this sense, Wanda’s difficult reception history, its very slipperiness and evasiveness, activates it as a powerful historical object.

1 Bonita Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity,” in ‘Real’ Indians and Others (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 138.

2 Pam Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw: Sex Discrimination Continues in the Indian Act,” uploaded to Youtube June 2019, accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOuLsGhMRh4

3 Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw.”

4 Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw.”

5 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “A Legal Analysis of Genocide”(2019), https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp content/uploads/2019/06/SupplementaryReport_Genocide.pdf, 24.

6 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “A Legal Analysis of Genocide,” 17.

7 Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw.”

8 Guy Sioui Durand, “Le ré-sauvagement par l’art : Le vieil Indien, les pommes rouges et les Chasseurs Chamanes-Guerriers. ” Capturés 3, no. 1 (2018): 10.

9 Carole Monnet, “History Shall Speak for Itself,” accessed September 30th, 2021. https://carolinemonnet.ca/Bio

10 Monnet, “History Shall Speak for Itself.”

11 Suzanne Newman Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms in the hyperpresent now,” World Art 9, no. 2 (2019): 109.

12 Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, ” 116.

13 Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, ” 109.

14 Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, ”113.

15 Art Gallery of Ontario, “Artist Spotlight: Sonny Assu,” Youtube video posted on May 21, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BRa6H3HFCA.

16 Fricke, “Introduction Indigenous Futurisms,” 114.

17 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 135.

17 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 149.

18 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 135.

19 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 135.

20 Eve Tuck, “Episode 4 – Red and Black DNA, Blood, Kinship and Organizing with Kim Tallbear.” The Henceforward Podcast, (July 25, 2016).

21 Tuck, “Episode 4 – Red and Black DNA.”

Endotes

1 Bonita Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity,” in ‘Real’ Indians and Others (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 138.

2 Pam Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw: Sex Discrimination Continues in the Indian Act,” uploaded to Youtube June 2019, accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOuLsGhMRh4

3 Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw.”

4 Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw.”

5 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “A Legal Analysis of Genocide”(2019), https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp content/uploads/2019/06/SupplementaryReport_Genocide.pdf, 24.

6 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “A Legal Analysis of Genocide,” 17.

7 Palmater, “Canada is an Outlaw.”

8 Guy Sioui Durand, “Le ré-sauvagement par l’art : Le vieil Indien, les pommes rouges et les Chasseurs Chamanes-Guerriers. ” Capturés 3, no. 1 (2018): 10.

9 Carole Monnet, “History Shall Speak for Itself,” accessed September 30th, 2021. https://carolinemonnet.ca/Bio

10 Monnet, “History Shall Speak for Itself.”

11 Suzanne Newman Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms in the hyperpresent now,” World Art 9, no. 2 (2019): 109.

12 Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, ” 116.

13 Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, ” 109.

14 Fricke, “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, ”113.

15 Art Gallery of Ontario, “Artist Spotlight: Sonny Assu,” Youtube video posted on May 21, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BRa6H3HFCA.

16 Fricke, “Introduction : Indigenous Futurisms,” 114.

17 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 135.

17 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 149.

18 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 135.

19 Lawrence, “Negotiating an Urban Mixed-Blood Native Identity, 135.

20 Eve Tuck, “Episode 4 – Red and Black DNA, Blood, Kinship and Organizing with Kim Tallbear.” The Henceforward Podcast, (July 25, 2016).

21 Tuck, “Episode 4 – Red and Black DNA.”

1 Karuka, Manu. Empire’s Tracks. Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).

2 Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010) 73-74.

3 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 74.

4 Schalk, Sami. “Metaphorically Speaking: Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Writing.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2013).

23 Kendall, Shaman, Nostalgias and the IMF, 4-6.

24 Asian Boss. “Summoning The Spirits: Life As A Shaman In Korea | ASIAN BOSS.” YouTube. YouTube, February 18, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YV_Uo4pmQ0c&t=678s.

5 Schalk, “Metaphorically Speaking”

6 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 74.

7 Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

8 Cheng, Anne. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 7.

9 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 8.

10 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 9-10.

11 Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociologi cal Imagination. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 7.

12 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.

13 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.

14 Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) 2.

15 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 32.

16 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 34.

17 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 36.

18

Krishnan, R. R. “Early History of U.S. Imperialism in Korea.”

Social Scientist 12, no. 11 (1984): 3–18, 4.

19 Krishnan, “U.S Imperialism in Korea”,

20 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 74.

21 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 74.

22 Kendall, Laurel. Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) 2. Diasporic Haunted Memory and the Resurgence of Korean Shamanism Online

Diasporic Haunted Memory and the Resurgence of Korean Shamanism Online

25 THE MUDANG. “THE MUDANG: Korean Shamanism, How to Become a Mudang/ .” YouTube. YouTube, February 19, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vz4qIb6afTM.

26 Asian Boss, “Summoning the Spirits”.

27 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 7.

28 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 16.

29 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 16.

30 Kim, Youna. The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global. (London: Routledge, 2013).

31 Pentzold, Christian. “Fixing the Floating Gap: The Online Encyclopedia Wikipedia as a Global Memory Place.” Memory Studies 2, no.2 (2009): 255-72, 258.

32 Pentzold, “Fixing the Floating Gap”, 259.

33 Pentzold, “Fixing the Floating Gap”, 262.

34 Pentzold, “Fixing the Floating Gap”, 264.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Quality_control.

36 Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) 2.

37 Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 5.

38 Guisso, Richard W.L, and Chai-shin Yu. Shamanism: the Spirit World of Korea. (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1998) 61.

39 Lewis, Jason Edward, Suzanne Kite, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis. “Making Kin with the Machines.” Journal of Design and Science, July 16, 2018.

40 Lewis, Kite, Arista, Pechawis, “Making Kin.”

Objects

The Reception History of Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970): Reframing the Politics of Representation, “Use,” and Slippery Historical

1 Ross Lipman, “Defogging Wanda,” Current, March 25, 2019, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6237-defogging-wanda.

2 Ally Acker, “Barbara Loden,” in Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema 1896 to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1991), 79.

3 Bérénice Reynaud, “For Wanda,” Senses of Cinema 22 (October 2002), https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/ wanda/#1. Originally published as “Für Wanda” in The Last Great American Picture Show – New Hollywood 1967-76, ed. Alexander Horwath, 223-247 (Wennpennest, Vienna: Viennale Publications, 1995).

4 Pauline Kael, “Eric Rohmer’s Refinement: Claire’s Knee, Wanda, A New Leaf,” The New Yorker, March 20, 1971, republished in Kael, Deeper Into Movies (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973), 268.

5 Richard Brody, “Bringing ‘Wanda’ Back,” The New Yorker, August 29 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/bringing-wanda-back.

6 Roger Greenspun, “Young Wife Fulfills Herself as a Robber,” The New York Times, Mar 1, 1971; Rex Reed, “It’s the Story Of Her Life,” The Washington Post, Feb 21, 1971.

7 “Buying and Booking Guide: Wanda,” The Independent Film Journal, Feb 4, 1971.

8 Greenspun, “Young Wife Fulfills Herself as a Robber.”

9 Greenspun, “Young Wife Fulfills Herself as a Robber.”

10 Ruby Melton, “An environment that is overwhelmingly ugly and destructive: an interview with Barbara Loden,” The Film Journal I, no. 2 (Summer 1971): pp.10-15, quoted in Reynaud, “For Wanda.”

11 Reynaud, “For Wanda.”

12 Acker, “Barbara Loden,” 80. Unfortunately, I was not able to access the MS Magazine article itself, as their archive does not seem to be digitized and Concordia does not seem to possess early issues of MS.13 Reynaud, “For Wanda.”

13 Reynaud, “For Wanda.”

14 Marion Meade, “Lights! Camera! Women!” New York Times, Apr 25, 1971.

15 Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson, “A Past as Rich as Our Futures Allow: A Genealogy of Feminist Art in Canada,” in Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, ed. Heather Davis (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 22.

16 Elena Gorfinkel, “Wanda’s Slowness: Enduring Insignificance,” in On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations, ed. Ivone Margulies and Jeremi Szaniawski (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 28.

17 Gorfinkel, “Wanda’s Slowness,” 28.

18 Gorfinkel, “Wanda’s Slowness,” 43.

19 Gorfinkel, “Wanda’s Slowness,” 36.

20 Reynaud, “For Wanda.”

21 Gorfinkel, “Wanda’s Slowness,” 45.

22 Gorfinkel, “Wanda’s Slowness,” 28.

23 Gorfinkel, “Wanda’s Slowness,” 29.

24 Huneault and Anderson, “A Past as Rich as Our Futures Allow,” 22.