Emulsion acrylic and tracing paper on hand tied acrylic vase 20 x 11cm 2021

My mother told me recently that she had wanted to call me Wanda, she had wanted to do a lot of things. I first saw Barbara Loden’s film Wanda late night on BBC 2 on a small Sony Trinitron in my council flat high above the London skyline. I had just agreed to let my teenage son go and live with his father after years battling for the critical importance of mothering. Seeing Wanda alone and isolated in the tower, the film left it’s texture and it’s aura with me, her blank cancelled out my blank leaving a beautiful after image of 16mm and at last the ambivalence of motherhood was there for me to see thanks to Barbara Loden. (1)

Years later the film has a deserved recognition and DVD release courtesy of the passion of Isabelle Huppert and I revisit Wanda. This time round I didn’t know what to make of it, it seemed mysterious, maybe this was because I was seeing it as a filmmaker with years of experience. When I first saw it I was full of promise..

WANDA DVD MK2

In her interview on the DVD, Huppert, who is known for her radical portrayals of women, speaks in French and there is no translation available on the disc, making it seem as if the French have taken ownership.  The quotations framing this beautiful object in graphic white black and red are by two French women, Isabelle Huppert (my own translation)

‘Wanda is a masterpiece, if she disturbs, throws us, it’s because she’s an angel who tells us her solitary journey in the land of men, it’s her turn to take over, her night enlightens us.’

and Marguerite Duras

‘I think there is a miracle in Wanda, normally there is a distance between the representation and the text, between the subject and the action, here this distance is completely cancelled, there is an immediate and definitive coincidence between Loden and Wanda.’

CINEMA AS HEIST

Mr HIggins smoking his cigar a conman a tragicomic figure

Isabelle Huppert describes Wanda as a film about Loden’s relationship to cinema, cinema itself and her relationship to herself.

I identified with Barbara Loden as an outsider, as a filmmaker struggling against rejection in the malestream and as a single parent.  And the more I looked into her life the more affinities I found. (2)

1.Movies have the capacity to access lost affect and alienated selves.

Ref Madelaine Sprengnether Crying at the Movies

2. Loden says she escaped her hillbilly roots because she had different equipment, she ran away to become famous, I too ran away to be a star but found myself studying Brecht.

Loden studied Stanislavski and was a chorus girl.

3. How the film was received by feminists? There was alarm at the passivity of the lead,

Wanda was an unapologetic victim. She created a new image.

With her contempt for institutions, she knows she is the truth.

We’re not in the dimension of a show or spectacle but of humanity and the repressed and the deceptive simplicity reveals it’s complexity through the image and the jump cuts. The script has a hard boiled feel to it, there is an absence of sentimentality, an absence of affect.