book review
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Wanda: Film from the Future
Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) Anna Backman Rogers 154 pages Punctum Books, 2021 One of the complaints made about feminist films of the 1970s and ’80s was that they were too experimental, too avant-garde, too elitist. They refused the pleasures of pop cinema. They skipped the well-told story and refused the escapism of character identification. And beauty? Forget it! Take Barbara Loden’s Wanda, from 1970: it’s a desolate portrait of what New Yorker critic Paulene Kael dubbed an “ignorant slut” in a film described by Jump Cut’s Chuck Kleinhans as “flat and opaque.” Indeed, Wanda, who is […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 5, 2021 -
BOOK REVIEW: “PHILIP KAUFMAN,” BY ANNETTE INSDORF
One of the pleasures of Annette Insdorf’s new book on the director Philip Kaufman — titled, simply, Philip Kaufman (University of Illinois Press, $22.00) — is how jargon-free it is: while it implicitly subscribes to the auteur theory, which credits the film director as the creative author of a film, it does so through the type of patient close readings that have fallen out of fashion. The first book-length assessment of Kaufman’s oeuvre, which will reach 14 films when Hemingway and Gellhorn premieres on HBO in May, Philip Kaufman is a shrewd and very readable study. It seeks not only […]
by Charles Lyons on Apr 24, 2012
