Overview

Actor-turned-writer/director Barbara Loden's only feature film, Wanda (1970), tells the story of an alienated working-class woman, Wanda Goronski (played by Loden), who abandons her life as a coal miner’s wife and mother, electing instead to drift. Bracing in its realist texture and proto-feminist in its sensibility, it received critical acclaim upon release, winning the Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. Today, Wanda is considered one of the most notable films made by a woman director and a core work of American independent cinema. Elena Gorfinkel's study of this singular film traces Loden's creative process and unconventional approach to filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, including scripts, interviews, production records, oral history, and previously unseen ephemera, she examines the film’s de-dramatised aesthetic, one that rebukes the artifice and “slickness” of Hollywood. Gorfinkel considers Loden’s craft in her framing of cinematic time, manipulation of gesture, voice, and posture, narrative ellipsis, and in her use of location and non-professional actors. Providing an account of Wanda's exhibition and reception in the 1970s and after, she traces the film's feminist legacies, and its lasting influence on contemporary filmmakers, artists and writers.

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9781839023040

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Reviews

An instant classic of critical analysis Gorfinkel’s Wanda matches its informed and passionate writing to the film’s own rigorous precision and beauty. Gorfinkel poignantly renders the complexity of the character’s classed and gendered dispossession while her impeccable research into Wanda’s production and reception restores Barbara Loden to her rightful place as a great and generative indie maker and actor. -- Ivone Margulies * Professor of Film Studies, Hunter College, USA * With tremendous verve, Elena Gorfinkel expands our understanding of a great film that has been much romanticized but too little historicized. In her detailed monograph, Gorfinkel sinuously explores both Wanda Goronski, among cinema’s most unassimilable protagonists, and the singular woman who created and inhabited her, Barbara Loden. -- Melissa Anderson * Film Editor and Critic, 4Columns, USA *

Author Information

Elena Gorfinkel is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017); co-author with John David Rhodes of The Prop, (2025); and co-editor of Taking Place: Location & the Moving Image (Minnesota, 2011), and Global Cinema Networks (2018).

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