Wanda

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by Elena Gorfinkel

Type

Studies

Subject

One Film > Wanda

Keywords

Barbara Loden

Publishing date

2025 (May 01, 2025)

Publisher

BFI Publishing

Collection

BFI Film Classics

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 120 pages
5 ¼ x 7 ½ inches (13.5 x 19 cm)

ISBN

978-1-83902-304-0

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
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).

See the publisher website: BFI Publishing

See Wanda (1971) on IMDB ...