Wanda

A very rare screening for Barbara Loden’s only film as director, a forgotten masterpiece which as only recently taken its rightful place in the canon. Loden was an actress protege of Elia Kazan (you can spot her as Montgomery Clift’s secretary in Wild River), but her handful of film roles can only hint at the sensitivity and depth which bloomed in this vérité-style portrait of an inarticulate country girl — played by Loden herself — who takes up with a petty thief (“It’s the anti-Bonnie and Clyde“, Loden said). Marguerite Duras described her performance as “sacred, powerful, violent and profound.”

Jul 20: Intro by Mike Archibald, a writer, editor and filmmaker

A revelation… Here was an American movie that picked up where Italian neo-realism had left off, applying its moral principles and aesthetics to rural American backwaters, with an absence of the sentimentality that had derailed so many postwar European films. Here was an American depiction of outlaws that refused to glamorize (think of Wanda as Loden’s retort to Bonnie and Clyde and to Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie as a fashion icon). And most importantly, here was a feminist film that made visible a woman who had internalized society’s contempt for her so deeply that it was impossible for her to speak or act for herself.

Amy Taubin

Writer-director-actor Barbara Loden’s 1970 feature has a wonderful, hard-won sense of everyday rapture.

Chuck Bowen, Slant

If there is a female counterpart to John Cassavetes, Barbara Loden is it.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Wanda is precisely the kind of independent, deeply personal project that American film making badly needs.

Jay Cocks, Time (1971)