suite for barbara loden by nathalie léger

Perhaps it is a fusion of film review, novel, and a biography, in a sense we watch the movie through it, we read the book, we read about a book itself in it. The beginning of things is necessarily vague, tangled, and chaotic and we see that few things emerge from such beginning, similar difficulty is being faced to write a review of the book which itself is vague and chaotic-in short dynamic, and lively. What is to write about a novel that is not a novel in the first place, what is it then, a commentary on a film, a biography, or something else- a new genre altogether. Of late, I have been reading quite a few genre-bending books and this is one of the best examples of it. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.Ī Woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself on another, played by her but based on another. New insights into Loden’s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer’s evocative powers are put to the test. How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinema vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook. First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden.

Suite for barbara loden by nathalie léger