The Miracle in Barbara Loden’s WANDA, opening Saturday at AFS Cinema

WANDA screens at AFS Cinema this weekend, September 1-3. Get tickets today.

Barbara Loden wrote, directed, and starred in WANDA with a crew of four people. They filmed in a Pennsylvania coal town on a $100K budget gifted by Harry Schuster. Without studio pressure, Loden could make the film that she wanted to. “There is a miracle in WANDA,” as Marguerite Duras puts it in her conversation with Elia Kazan, “Usually there is a distance between the visual representation and the text, as well as the subject and the action. Here this distance is completely nullified; there is an instant and permanent continuity between Barbara Loden and Wanda.”

In a great interview after the film’s premiere in 1971, Loden describes her flight from an “emotionally impoverished” home life to an equally alienating experience dancing at the Copacabana in New York City, the two ways of living that inform her film WANDA.

Here is that unearthed New York Times interview:

Barbara Loden Speaks Of the World of ‘Wanda’

by Mccandlish Phillips

The film “Wanda” opened recently at the Cinema II under banners of international critical praise. It bears the signature of Barbara Loden —she wrote it, directed it and played its central role—in other than obvious ‘ways.

More than merely a film she has made, Wanda is the woman Miss Loden might have become, before she discovered who she was.

The film was made in express rejection of Hollywood techniques. It was also made in express rejection of national values as Miss Loden sees them.

In its blighted atmosphere, WANDA discloses the poverty and ignorance of Appalachia. It tells of a passive, slatternly young woman who abandons her family and drifts, like a piece of wood caught on a slow tide, through dreary events in motels and bars.

“She’s trapped and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her,” Miss Loden said.

At first, her declaration that the film is in some respects autobiographical seems unlikely, but the improbability dissolves as she talks. Much of her mature life has been, perhaps only half‐consciously, a flight from categorization.

“I really hate slick pictures,” she said, coiled in a green chair in the sitting room in which she presides. as Mrs. Elia Kazan, wife of the stage and film director. The film was edited in a back room of their spacious townhouse near Central Park West.

“They’re too perfect to be believable. I don’t mean just in the look. I mean in the rhythm, in the cutting, the music — everything. The slicker the technique is, the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns into Formica, including the people.”

Miss Loden is made up of no parts Formica. Her countenance glows softly without a trace of cosmetics. She has wide, innocent eyes, strong cheekbones, and a turned‐up nose. She wore brown corduroy slacks.

“I tried not to explain things too much in the film, not to be too explicit, not to be too verbal,” she said. “My subject matter is of people who are not too verbal and not aware of their condition.

“I’ve been like that myself. I came from a rural region, where people have a hard time. They don’t have time for wittily observing the things around them. They’re not concerned about anything more than existing from day to day.

“They’re not stupid. They’re ignorant. Everything is ugly around them — the architecture, the town, the clothing they wear. Everything they see is ugly.

“It’s not a matter of money,” Miss Loden said, describing the produce‐and-consume‐and‐produce treadmill.

“It’s the same in Detroit,” she went on. “They work in the factories to make all those ugly cars that don’t last so they can get paid to buy a few of those ugly cars and to buy the things that others are making in other factories—own a color television. It’s a whole aspect of America.”

“Do you have any answer?”

“No, Miss Loden said quietly. “Just to change the whole society.”

The revolutionary currents that are running are evidence of a terminal distaste for the entire setup, she believes.

“People are always saying, ‘Why don’t they work within the system?’ They don’t because the system doesn’t work, you see,” Miss Loden remarked.

“I sort of made my way up, but I know if I had stayed where I came from, I would just be a wasted person.”

By leaving her rural setting near Asheville, N. C., and coming to New York, Miss Loden escaped a life of ignorance and routine drudgery, But she was immediately caught up in another banal categorization.

Since she had “a figure approaching perfection,” as one reviewer put it, and a face that undeniably suggested both the beauty of Bergman and the sensuous glamour, of Monroe (whose image she reflected in “After the Fall”), Miss Loden was credited with exterior assets only.

She danced at the Copacabana. Ernie Kovacs, who knew, a good thing when he saw one, dressed her in very abbreviated tights and had her romp through television slapstick parts. For several years she did little, else.

She sees both of these circumstances — the drab and hollow life at home, and the glittering and hollow life here—as having a single root in a misorganized society.

“I got into the whole thing of being a dumb blonde—sort of an object, as they say. I didn’t think anything of myself, so I succumbed to the whole role. I never knew who I was, or what I was supposed to do.”

“Do you know now?” “Yes.”

Had Mr. Kazan helped? “He helps me every way he can,” she said. “It’s good to have an expert around. What he tried to do was get me to do what I wanted to do, and that’s not the way he would have done it.”

WANDA was shot in 16mm and printed in 35mm. Miss Loden wrote the screenplay nine years ago. Her awareness of the far simpler techniques of the underground movement encouraged her to attempt it herself.

“It’s not a new wave,” she said. “It’s the old wave. That’s what they used to do. They took a camera and they went out and shot. Around that act this whole fantastic apparatus grew up — the Hollywood albatross. They made a ship out of lead. It won’t float any more.”

WANDA plays at the AFS Cinema on September 1st through 3rd.

• This piece contributed by Shane Pfender