With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins. (Barbara Loden, USA, 1970, 103 min.)
Presented as part of PENN CIMS Colloquium, Introduced by Elena Gorfinkel and followed by a conversation with Gorfinkel and Patricia White
Elena Gorfinkel is a film scholar and critic, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, and the author, most recently, of Wanda (BFI Film Classics, 2025) and The Prop, with John David Rhodes, (Fordham, 2025.) Her research focuses on histories of marginal, underground, and independent filmmaking, including the sex film (the subject of her first book Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s), and women’s filmmaking practices. She has curated film programs including “Wanda & Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden" (at BFI Southbank) and "Grandma’s Grammar" at the Open City Documentary Film Festival (London). Her criticism has appeared in The Metrograph, Criterion Collection, Film Quarterly, Sight & Sound, among other venues.
Patricia White is Centennial Professor of Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies Coordinator and Aydelotte Foundation Director at Swarthmore College. Her books include Rebecca; Women’s Cinema/World Cinema, and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. She is on the boards of Camera Obscura and Women Make Movies and is working on a study of contemporary independent US women filmmakers and/in world cinema.
This Penn CIMS Colloquium is co-sponsored by the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies/Program on Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, the Department of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, and Lightbox Film, Center.
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