Elia Kazan’s career as a director was declining; that of his wife, Barbara Loden, was about to begin. Loden, who had acted in Kazan’s films “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass,” wrote a script in the early sixties based on a story she read in a newspaper, about a country woman who leaves her family and ends up on the run with a robber. It sounds a little like “Bonnie and Clyde,” but the movie that resulted, “Wanda” (which I discuss in the clip below), is closer in tone to the films of John Cassavetes. When writing “Bonnie and Clyde,” Robert Benton and David Newman had the French New Wave—with its clever recapitulations of earlier movies—in mind. Loden, however, was thinking of the so-called underground cinema and cinéma vérité, with the use of documentary methods to create fictions which, staying close to material reality, also aspired to a new intimacy with the inner life. Here’s Loden, interviewed in 1971 by McCandlish Phillips in the New York Times, soon after the film’s release:

I really hate slick pictures…. 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.

That metaphor is apt for what Loden avoided when making the film on a scant budget, without stars, in 16mm. The most striking thing about “Wanda” is its textures: the grain of cheap wood in a ramshackle house, the cold metal of a coffee shop and the marble of a bank, the dank warmth of a grim hotel room, and, of course, the skin of its people, with all its power to allure and to revolt, come through with a jolting physical power. The handheld cinematography by Nicholas Proferes, despite its agility, has a sculptural relief that amplifies the sense of uneasy intimacy. Here’s how Loden describes the “underground movement” that inspired her:

It’s not a new wave…. 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 anymore.

And she’s right; in 1971, it wasn’t floating. It took a buoyant new generation of filmmakers to make it seaworthy again, performing a philosophical trick—they replaced its lead parts with lightweight, synthetic ones, but kept its appearance the same. Meanwhile, “Wanda” won the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970, and won critical acclaim here at the time of its 1971 release, but the movie didn’t do much business, and Loden never made another feature film. She died, of cancer, in 1980, at the age of forty-eight.

P.S. Here’s a terrific article about the movie and its director, by Bérénice Reynaud.