Cinepoetics Lecture #21: Elena Gorfinkel

How does one write a feminist history of a filmmaker who has made a single feature? Especially in light of the difficulties women have faced within film industrial models that privilege feature length, narrative cinema? Actor, director, and writer Barbara Loden made the landmark independent film Wanda (1970) yet struggled to make additional features before her early death from cancer in 1980.

In her lecture, Elena Gorfinkel (King’s College London) delves into Loden’s creative career beyond Wanda, in the context of recent scholarship on the incomplete and unfinished work in women’s film history, notions of “minor” cinemas, and speculative approaches to the historical person. Understanding Loden as an artist who sought to develop her own idiom for the figuration and embodiment of vulnerability, she examines a diverse corpus of archival material. Among them are Loden’s 16mm educational films, photographs, unproduced screenplays, and theatre projects. Two short films by Barbara Loden and a documentary about the making of Wanda will be shown after the lecture.

About I AM WANDA (Director: Katja Raganelli)
"(...) Katja Raganelli wanted to get a document of Loden and the 62-minute film became a bit more than that when she learned (after filming had completed) that Loden had been battling cancer for a while and it was getting worse (she would pass away by the end of that year). The film presents lengthy interviews with Loden (as well as her husband Elia Kazan and others), with the last 15-minutes or so focusing around Wanda and its making, her noting how she originally just wrote the script expecting someone else would make it, though felt others didn’t understand the character. But most of the film has Loden recall her life, from her upbringing, to falling into acting, and then finally making her film, recalling some of the most significant moments. It’s a wonderful, rather personal portrait of the woman, Loden obviously intent to get her life story out there in some fashion. A really terrific inclusion. (...)" (Chris Galloway)
https://www.criterionforum.org/Review/wanda-the-criterion-collection-blu-ray

The Cinepoetics Lectures are organized by the research center of the same name at Freie Universität Berlin. (Hannes Wesselkämper)

Films:
The Boy Who Liked Deer Barbara Loden USA 1975 16 mm OV 18 min.
The Frontier Experience Barbara Loden USA 1975 DCP OV 25 min.
I Am Wanda Katja Raganelli FRG/USA 1980 DCP OV 63 min.