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This blog is an edited version of Fjoralba’s paper, ‘Gender, Genre, and Class politics in Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), originally published by MAI, in Critical Reflection, 23 May 2019, and we thank MAI for permission to re-present it.
Barbara Loden’s indie road movie Wanda (1970) came out at a time when the genre was becoming highly visible in the Hollywood industry. It was also thematically and stylistically representative of the New Hollywood era, but it initially suffered from severe disregard, which only decades later gave way to some serious reevaluation of Loden’s film by critics and academics. In my approach to Wanda, I broadly consider how a feminine sensibility can be viable within a masculine generic category. […]
Wanda demonstrates a characteristically ‘realistic’ treatment of its subject matter by exposing the extremely limited options of the contemporary working-class woman of the time once she refuses to participate in the domestic life patriarchal society reserves for her. In this sense, the film is a document of the social reality of an era during which, as far as filmmaking goes, the road movie became a vehicle of opposition to second wave feminism in the hands of most male filmmakers. The question, thus, is how the genre-bender Wanda reconfigures the generic attributes of the road movie and shapes the path of its underprivileged lead Wanda.
Wanda is a very personal film and it is very political, too. It is the story of a woman, based on autobiographical elements combined with a true story/event, portrayed in the fictional character of Wanda. It has most of the elements of the New American Cinema – location shooting in natural light, shot on 16mm in documentary style, use of improvisation and unprofessional actors combined with a small budget and crew – but what makes it a special case study is its powerful and dynamic interplay of the personal and the political.
From this interplay derives a story about a woman on both sides of the camera, who is building a portrait of a female who does not have a life of her own. This problem with no name is never uttered; yet the viewer infers that it is the problem of patriarchal social structures which define and confine the woman’s experience and leave no available alternative options for her. Thus, my primary question and starting point here is whether there are any alternatives for women who chose to challenge and try to escape patriarchal society. The film seems to revolve around this simple question of whether Wanda can escape it; and if not, why? It is a visualisation of the question Marion Maede asked back in 1971: ‘where do you go after you reject the only life society permits?’ The two questions that accompany this first starting point are: 1) What happens to the genre when the protagonist behind the wheel is a woman? 2) What happens to the woman when she enters a genre that has traditionally been claimed as masculine? Finally, what do these recuperations bring to the surface?
The Female Road Movie
In the post-classical era […] road films are predominantly about male buddies who hit the road away from the constraints of marriage and family life, or about couples in which women usually occupy marginal positions. Then comes this peculiar form called ‘the female road movie’. Coppola’s The Rain People (1969) and Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) are two glaring examples of how the movie brats’ grappled with the idea of a woman itching for her escape and how they eventually fail to do justice to the real drama of the woman’s predicament in those melodramas of psychology. In a final analysis, they reveal and embody the fundamental difference between the male and female road movie: the former is mostly about men on the road, the latter is about women on the run. And, perhaps this is the main reason why road films with women in leading roles such as Coppola’s and Scorsese’s are mostly discussed as women’s pictures rather than as road movies (although in both films, female leading characters embark on journeys of self-discovery and escape from the constraints of their socially determined domestic duties). It is also worth looking at these particular films because they raise an important question regarding the nature of the genre itself. If it is a direct derivative of such male-dominated and male-oriented film genres as the western, gangster film and film noir, why is the road movie the only genre that allows a leading role to the woman and what does this actually entail?
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969) is the story of an unhappy pregnant, very likely middle-class housewife who runs away from home, possibly to have an abortion, only to be stuck with a brain-damaged ex-football player nicknamed Killer; she takes care of him until he is eventually shot dead by accident at the end of the film while trying to save her from the unethical intentions of a crude cop named Gordon. The film is very elliptical (in terms of full character development), fragmented (in terms of background material and social context), and crowded (in terms of how many side stories evolve parallel to the woman’s story); the narrative which begins with the premise of the wife running away from the husband, progressively turns hostile to the leading character, her quest and what she represents, and ends with her plan of running back to him.
Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) is another female road movie (Sotinel 2010), a woman’s film which tells the story of a recently widowed mother who is forced to learn how to become independent and self-reliant, but can’t help but fall for the charms of the classical Hollywood handsome for whom she will reconsider her childhood dream of returning to homeland and becoming a singer. In both cases, the treatment of the heroines behind the wheel reveals a conservative sensibility which drives the women literally back to domesticity. Compared to Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Natalie and Alice are very conventional, conservative representations of the woman of the time: as road movies they do not welcome the woman in the driver’s seat–as women’s films they are contextually irrelevant as they both fail to address realistically the genuine challenges and consequences of women’s predicaments.
Wanda, however, tells quite a different story. With its highly pronounced autobiographical element it at once brings politics, society, and identity to the same place. Loden re-inscribes the female body onto the landscape, not as a glamorous transgressive figure, but as a hidden, displaced, invisible figure that is estranged because she has been confined for too long. She brings the real woman on location in real time and produces a ‘specifically feminine language for cinema’ (Kuhn 1982: 172) in terms of narrative, character, and iconography. According to Thomas Elsaesser, ‘the significant feature of this cinema is that it makes an issue of the motives – or lack of them – in the heroes’ (2004: 280). If the ‘unmotivated hero’ within a non-linear, fragmented narrative with a journey motif is the reference point of the American Cinema of the 1970s (Elsaesser), then Wanda is the quintessential American film of the 1970s (although Elsaesser does not include Loden’s work in his study). If the outlaw couple was on the comeback trail in the 1970s (Kinder 1974), then Wanda is part of that wave of films about the return of the outlaw couple (although Kinder does not include the film in her study). If the New Hollywood poses as the anti-myth to the myth of classical Hollywood as Robert Brustein has suggested, then Wanda is the anti-myth to the pretentious nature of that newness. If ‘the glamour queen is unpinning her hair, exposing her faulty skin and puffy eyes’ (Brustein 1959: 23) then Wanda is the anti-myth to Bonnie.
In that sense, Wanda is the journey of demystification: not all heroes (or anti-heroes) are men, not all women are Bonnie, not all landscapes are beautiful and inviting, not all journeys are glamorous and not all of them lead to self-discovery. Wanda is a film that reconfigures the basic tenets of the road movie – narratively, thematically and stylistically – while at the same time it challenges our perception of genre and especially the woman’s film. It is an independent film, personal, experimental and avant-garde, oppositional, reactionary and counter-cinematic, which at its core unabashedly treats a significantly important social problem through a personal, autobiographical story which gave Loden the chance to make a film of her own. The confluence of Wanda, the underprivileged woman and Barbara, the independent director makes Wanda a progressive film. Ultimately, it is a film about the second-class status of women as gendered social subjects and women as gendered directors.
References
Brustein, Robert. ‘The New Hollywood: Myth and Anti-Myth’. Film Quarterly, vol 12, no. 3, 1959, pp 23-31 JSTOR
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s – Notes on the Unmotivated Hero [1975]’ The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Elsaesser, Thomas, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Amesterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004, pp 279-292.
Kinder, Marsha. ‘The Return of the Outlaw Couple,’ Film Quarterly (ARCHIVE), vol. 27, no. 4, 1974, pp 2-10 JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/1211389
Kuhn, Annete. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Verso, 1982.
Maede, Marion. Movies, New York Times, April 25, 1971, Section II, 11.
Sotinel, Thomas. Masters of Cinema: Martin Scorsese. Paris: Cahiers Du Cinema, 2010.
Fjoralba Miraka
Fjoralba Miraka is a research student and PhD Candidate at Roehampton University with a research focus on Women, Movie Brats and Sexual Politics in the era of Hollywood Renaissance. She is also a film critic for the online magazine Sbunker https://sbunker.net/autori/fjoralba.miraka. She holds an MA Degree in American Literature and Culture and a BA Degree in English Language and Philology, both from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2020 her entry on the History of Feminist Film Theory was published in the first International Encyclopaedia of Gender, Media, and Communication by Wiley Blackwell. Also, forthcoming publications include a chapter on The Great Shift in Hollywood Cinema: Men, Women, and Genre Revisionism of the American New Wave, to be published by Bloomsbury Academic. Currently she is working on a book proposal about the life and work of Albania’s first woman director, Xhanfize Keko, who is included in Mark Cousin’s latest project Women Make Film. She has translated part of the director’s memoirs as well as the protagonists’ memories for the Beni Walks on His Own book, published in 2020.
Women's Film and Television History Network - UK/Ireland 