Lost in the landscape: the legacy of Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) on the contemporary American independent female road movie

The late 1960s and early 1970s proved a fertile period for creativity and innovation in American cinema. Moving film production from the confines of the film studio to the highways and byways of America, a number of now iconic road movies such as Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973), Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1973), Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973), and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) were produced, which directly engage with the topographical specificity of the American landscape. This body of work is associated almost exclusively with male directors. Yet, in 1970, Barbara Loden, perhaps better known at the time for her work as an actress and her marriage to director Elia Kazan, wrote and directed her erstwhile road movie Wanda (1970). Although Wanda was awarded the Critic’s Prize at the Venice Film Festival and lauded by European intellectuals such as Marguerite Duras, it enjoyed release at only a single cinema in New York and was subject to some excoriating reviews by American critics such as Pauline Kael, who described it as “such an extremely drab and limited piece of realism that it makes Zola seem like musical comedy.” It was arguably for a time written out of the history of American Independent Cinema until its limited rerelease on DVD in 2004. Since then, the film’s historical and cultural position within American New Wave cinema has been subject to reassessment by critics and academics such as Richard Brody and Bérénice Reynaud. Moreover, the year 2018 saw a digitally restored version of the film released on DVD by the Criterion collection. This chapter extends this reassessment of the film in two ways. First, to interrogate Wanda’s rendering of the American landscape and second, to reflect the position of marginalized women within postwar American society. Further to this, it investigates the legacy of Loden’s film in the road movies of contemporary female directors such as Kelly Reichardt and Andrea Arnold, exploring the manner in which the landscape in these films serves to represent and scrutinize the aesthetic, existential, and political representation of female figures stranded within the topography of the American landscape.