HER OWN PERSON: Barbara Loden's WANDA (wri & dir by Barbara Loden, 103mns, USA, 1970)
American independent cinema's parallel 20th century story is as rich and varied as that of its bigger budgeted Hollywood sibling.
Barbara Loden's 1970 WANDA about a restless working class woman's life and relationship with a small time agitated thief is one of American independent cinema's lodestones.
Most courses or series trying to take someone through key indie American works would probably include the works of John Cassavettes, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, and WANDA among others.
Before independent cinema itself got coopted into something different, these movies were truly made by moviemakers who couldn't or didn't want to be a part of the system.
Renegades, iconoclasts, contrarians. Real independents. Like Barbara Loden.
Loden, an actor known to many through her 50's work on the Ernie Kovacs TV show and then as a tremendous talent on the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage, had attended the Actor's Studio. And that training feels like it infuses the tremendous craft of this movie.
Almost without making decisions at all, Wanda finds herself a criminal and partner to a petty thief…
WANDA is deceptively simple in its stylistic approach yet wildly atmospheric, well written, well crafted, and devastating. Loden focuses on the characters and their rootless migration through a late 1960's rural Pennsylvania already starting to buckle with industrial decline.
We meet Wanda sleeping on her sister's couch next to a mining operation. She then borrows money, almost misses a court date to officialize her divorce, tells the judge her kids are better off with her ex-husband, and goes to drink at a bar.
After a few rough one night stands, she falls in with "Mr. Dennis", a strangely atypical middle aged thief in glasses who is as rootless as she is. And strangely they form a kind of rough hewn affection for each other.
The long drunk bender of the lost American soul…
WANDA like Cassavetes' movies FACES and A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE refuses to pursue anything but the truth of these characters as Loden understands it. Wanda is not a typical "likeable" main character. In the first ten minutes she doesn't look at her kids in the courtroom and promptly leaves their lives.
Yet she feels like a real character. And her self-knowledge that she's no good as a mother may actually speak to an intelligence others would be hard pressed to recognize as such rather than selfishness or flakiness.
The movie is an engrossing snapshot of working class and industrial America during the Johnson-Nixon-Vietnam era. Working with a four-person crew (!!), Loden knows how to frame a small town, a Christian roadside attraction, a factory, a motel, a field, a quarry...
And her third act in which Wanda and Mr. Dennis decide to pull a bank robbery (versus the smash and grab cashier register petty thefts of before) actually moves the movie into a different narrative register.
The final scene (which we won't spoil here) is stunning and expertly realized.
Wanda is a strange, conflicted, frustrating, exasperating person. But aren't most of us?
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.