Situated Value and the New Cinephilia: The Case of ‘Wanda’

Prologue: recommending films

When friends ask me to recommend a current film to them, I often hesitate, even if I can think of candidates immediately. Recommendations are personal, and sometimes the fear of discovering a gap between my enthusiasm and a friend’s lack thereof is bigger than the desire to share my enthusiasm. I fear being in the position of having to defend a film I had recommended; I sense the need to find reasons for my attachment instead of merely enjoying the shared secret any recommendation ideally becomes.

Once I dare to start this journey, the actual act of recommending means to depart on a bumpy road, as I navigate the task of bringing a film, my attachment to it and the person to whom my recommendation is aimed (or my image of this person) in line. The reasons I find for any recommendation, the aspects I foreground to justify it, the claims I make to substantiate it, are, then, highly dependent on its target. In other words, I attribute value to a film, performatively, in accordance with what I assume another person expects from it; my arty friend from high school values other things to my sociologist father, while my mother, always impatient with non-linear narratives, reacts to different cinematic triggers than both my cinephile friends and those who go to the cinema only twice a year.

Hence, manifold things add potential value to the film at hand, but the nature of this value is relative. As I find reasons for why a specific person should watch a given film or not, I construct a precarious assemblage of potential value, collecting value statements that might or might not be attributable to a cluster of criteria: political, aesthetic, affective, and so on.

Intro: value, power, history

Reflecting on the cultural practice of recommending films, I carve out an insight that is as banal as it is crucial to remember: the value of a thing is a composition, and the building blocks out of which this composition is constructed are both personal and collective, as they themselves are subject to change. They are, first, personal and collective in the sense that there is no such thing as an individual taste unstained by the social. As queer theorist and cultural critic Lauren Berlant notes, ‘[t]he experience of social hierarchy is intensely individuating, yet it also makes people public and generic: it turns them into kinds of people who are both attached to and underdescribed by the identities that organize them’ Full reference in Zotero Library. They are, second, subject to change, as the discursive and political environment of a given period shifts and alters according to new frameworks which had not played any substantial role in earlier value discussions.¹It deserves emphasis and repetition that a certain type of discourse on “identity politics” pretends that there are now frameworks where there was nothing but neutral aesthetic evaluations before, an argument that confuses the recent increase in the explicit politicisation of differences with the age-old existence of the politics of difference.

Barbara Loden’s film Wanda (1970) is a case in point. Appreciated only by some critics when it came out in 1970, ignored or ridiculed by others, and largely forgotten by the end of the decade,²Some reviewers were appreciative of the film, and Wanda won the International Critics Award at Venice in 1970. Still, it was quickly forgotten and did not appear in any of the retrospective canonisations of New Hollywood during the next decades. In 1980, commenting on Barbara Loden’s death, Stanley Kauffman deplored that the film was not even available for rental and could not be seen at all Full reference in Zotero Library.it has recently been reevaluated. The only film Loden ever had the chance to make was finally recovered and restored in 2010, attributed with a new cultural authority. It now stands as an undervalued film, a unique work of art and an important political intervention.³In the latest installment of film magazine Sight & Sound’s poll on the ‘The Greatest Films of All Times’, the reception of which would make a great topic for a contribution to the study of “value” itself, Wanda for the first time entered the list, on position 48.Its reevaluation was the work of a complex actor-network: a new generation of film buffs and critics eager to search the archive for hidden gems; a feminism more attuned to the particularities of race and class; an online culture that facilitates transnational debates on film and politics; an increasingly efficient industry of recovering and digitalising older films; and a discourse on the manifold barriers with which female directors had to grapple when attempting to make movies, leading to a new canon of women filmmakers appreciated by film magazines, retrospectives and books.

In this insight, I will bring the reception history of Wanda into dialogue with Girish Shambu’s ‘Manifesto for a New Cinephilia’, published in Film Quarterly in 2019, in which the author makes the case for a new appreciation of film that adds political arguments to the list of criteria for evaluating a film. I will discuss, with Shambu, the early 1970s reactions to Wanda and its female protagonist, the film’s feminist reframing of New Hollywood’s romance of the road as well as its relation to the discourse of auteurism. Finally, I will use Shambu’s call for a situated form of cinephilia as an impulse to think about the situatedness of all value statements.

Marginalised worlds

Girish Shambu’s manifesto ‘For a New Cinephilia’ Full reference in Zotero Library might be thought of as an attempt to integrate the implications of recent political reevaluations into current and future evaluations of works of art. Shambu differentiates what he calls the ‘new cinephilia’ from an ‘old cinephilia’, which ‘has come to be installed as the hegemonic narrative of movie love, period’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Whereas this old cinephilia finds pleasures to be ‘predominantly aesthetic’, the new cinephilia, while valuing the aesthetic experience of cinema, has a ‘broader definition of pleasure’, finding it in a ‘deep curiosity about the world’, which is ‘powered by a spirit of inquiry and a will to social and planetary change’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Shambu summarises this ethos in a programmatic statement: ‘each cinephilic act of speaking, writing, citing, and curating must also be an act that intervenes in an unequal world’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

Shambu’s advocation for this ‘expansive notion of pleasure and value’ leads him to the affirmation that ‘films that center the lives, subjectivities, experiences, and worlds of marginalized people automatically become valuable’ Full reference in Zotero Library, suggesting that a certain topicality of a film attributes value to it, independently of how this topic is dealt with formally and aesthetically. One suspects a certain sleight of hand here, which has very much to do with the diversity of meanings potentially ascribed to the term “value”. If a film has value because it centres subjectivities who have been historically marginalised, this value could be ascribed to the film despite finding it lacking in aesthetic value. Shambu’s suggestion, then, would leave a universal idea of aesthetic value untouched while at the same time adding criteria for the importance of a cultural artefact that counterbalance the perspective of aesthetic value. The specific relation between politics and aesthetics, or the politics of aesthetics, is not really discussed here. One might, for example, easily think of films which centre marginalised lives but do so employing an aesthetic approach that exploits or actually justifies and reinforces the conditions which have marginalised these lives in the first place. Would such films be relevant politically but not aesthetically, or could they be politically problematic because of aesthetic decisions?

Wanda, though, seems to centre a marginalised world seriously, not merely as subject matter but as ethos and perspective. The film tells the story of a white working-class woman who, after losing a custody case, leaves her husband and child, starting a journey that places her at the disposal of strangers and chance. The film starts with Wanda asleep on her sister’s couch, then she walks through a deserted Pennsylvania landscape to a courthouse where she apathetically accepts the judge’s sentence. Already in these first shots, Loden’s film is sober, harbouring an almost documentary-like quality while painting the picture of a woman lost in the middle of a nowhere that appears to be her life. The passive acceptance of everything that is happening to her, an impression that will spread over the whole film, massively provoked film critics. While some reviews at least appreciated certain aesthetic merits, most were eager to record their own lack of interest in this protagonist. At a time when film criticism started to make a personal emotional involvement into a value criterion of its own, Winfried Blevins in the L.A. Herald Examiner concluded in his review that the film ‘engaged my mind only in making me think about why the picture did not make me care, and why it therefore bored me into stupefaction’ Full reference in Zotero Library. For Gordon Gow, Wanda tended ‘to stall the senses’. And infamous New Yorker critic Pauline Kael even insulted the character, calling her ‘an attractive girl but such a sad, ignorant slut that there’s nowhere for her and the picture to go but down’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

Wanda was no poster girl for the emerging women’s movement either, as writers struggled to find any clue for a will to empowerment. Within a 1960s feminist discourse around consciousness-raising, personal choice and human potential, there seemed to be no space for someone like Wanda, stubbornly refusing to liberate herself, ignorant (or maybe just non-naive) about her social position. In other words, Wanda’s portrayal of a working-class woman’s unintentional flight from home didn’t seem a natural match for the rebellious spirit of early 1970s feminism; there was no story of a consciousness raised, or an identity achieved. Even when reviewers found feminist undertones in Wanda, their wording often revealed the white middle-class bias of the women’s liberation movement around 1970, misrepresenting the film’s politics as a statement on an allegedly universal “female condition”. In the New York Times, Marion Meade detected a ‘universality extending far beyond the Pennsylvania coal fields’ and argued that the consequences Wanda has to face for leaving her home were ‘essentially the same for a middle class housewife whose mildewing liberal arts degree now qualifies her for a miserably paying clerical job’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

At the same time, almost nobody seemed to notice the radical critique of the gender and class bias of the romance of the road with which the countercultural cinema of New Hollywood classics like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Easy Rider (1969) was so enamoured.

These culturally celebrated films and those in its wake featured glamorously countercultural or passionately alienated rebels—almost all of them young white men—and were premised on ideals of choice, heroic resistance and the notion of an authentic emotional core, reflecting the merging of an older tradition of American romanticism with a new generation of white, middle-class youth, expressing their opposition to the dominant culture. Blevins notedthat Wanda ‘confines us, or at least me, that to be human is to want something, to be alive is to be in motion. Wanda is not. That is why she does not matter’ Full reference in Zotero Library. But he did not contemplate the possibility that this identification of life with untamed motion was precisely what Loden critiqued by evoking motifs such as the myth of the road and the couple on the run, while centring her film around a character who was ever only set in motion by outside forces. Loden herself called Wanda an ‘anti-Bonnie and Clyde’ Full reference in Zotero Library at the time.

As Cynthia Cruz emphasises in her seminal The Melancholia of Class, to which I will return at the end, one cannot grasp Wanda without discussing the issue of class: ‘To have choice is a luxury. The lives of the working class are defined by a lack of choice’ Full reference in Zotero Library. It was a lack of choice Loden herself knew all too well. Raised by her grandparents after her parents divorced, Loden grew up in Appalachia, before leaving the region at sixteen, working as a model and a dancer, before getting her first acting jobs and meeting her future husband, the director Elia Kazan in 1966. This same year, a friend offered her money to produce her own film. Filmmaking is an expensive practice, and, as Shambu notes, ‘filmmakers from marginalized groups—that is, nonwhite or nonheterosexual male—face significantly higher barriers in making fiction feature films’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Loden was unable to find any additional financial resources, and this ‘lack of funding informed all of her choices in making the film’ Full reference in Zotero Library. In the end, she made Wanda on a budget of only $115,000, almost exclusively relied on non-professional actors, and shot with a 16mm handheld camera and an extremely small crew.

Despite these dire circumstances, Loden wrote, directed and starred in her debut film, a fact that should have made her a prime example for the discourse of auteurism, which gained hold within American film debates in the late 1960s. Back then, young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese or George Lucas, as well as older ones such as Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, increasingly became recognised as artists in their own right. The idea that films, similar to other works of art, are the outcome of a specific artistic vision attributable to the film’s director, was the framework in which a substantial part of American film critics wrote their reviews in the early 1970s. Wanda, when using the standards brought forward by auterist critics, was the quintessential auteur film. It was much more the expression of a singular artistic vision than films such as Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider with their often-tense discussions between authors, directors and actors about which part of a film owed what to whom. Yet still, auteurism was rarely the framework in which Wanda was discussed, at least until recently. Hence, it seems fitting that Shambu calls the ideology of auteurism in his manifesto a ‘manspreading machine’ Full reference in Zotero Library,⁴Derek Nystrom argues that the discourse of auteurism was also an expression of a new consciousness in an emerging creative class, which he counts as part of the professional-managerial class: ‘Whatever critique of middle-class privilege the New Hollywood’s protagonists and plot structures offered […], the films’ deployment of art cinema styles and techniques both generated and relied on middle-class forms of cultural capital, the kind acquired in places like university film classes. Furthermore, […] this formal strategy of rewarding middle-class knowledge found its industrial counterpart in the practice of auteurism. The “politique des auteurs” was often marshaled in opposition to studio involvement in the creative process—a defense, if you will, of professional knowledge against capital’ Full reference in Zotero Library. which occupies space no longer open to others. Although Barbara Loden wrote several screenplays, she never directed another film before her early death in 1980 from breast cancer.

Conclusion: a situated cinephilia

Shambu’s short history of the ‘old cinephilia’ illustrates how a certain way of appreciating films has become a powerful frame by disguising its specificity under the cloak of universalism. Shambu notes how a very specific discourse of cinephilia has risen in post-World War II France, marked by an ‘auteur worship’ and a ‘cult of mise-en-scène’, a discourse that ‘has come to be installed as the hegemonic narrative of movie love, period’ via a ‘magic trick’: ‘the local has quietly become the universal’ Full reference in Zotero Library. If we do not take this universalisation for granted, we have to ask for the subject of the movie-loving experience, encapsulated, for instance, in James Baldwin’s crushing realisation, related in Raoul Peck’s film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), of how the mythscapes of film history relate to his own reality: ‘It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you’.

The ‘new cinephilia’ Shambu advocates, then, is a ‘self-conscious cinephilia’, which means that it ‘foregrounds the social situatedness—the subject positionality—of the cinema lover’ Full reference in Zotero Library. This insight is crucial for discussing the stakes involved in assessing the term “value” in general. As an affectively charged and seemingly personal value discourse, cinephilia is a fitting example to insist on the situatedness of any actor attributing value to anything. This situatedness is something any concept of literary, artistic or cinematic value has to take into account if it is to engage seriously with the complexity of value discourses and practices of evaluation. Rather than add political value to the catalogue of allegedly more “neutral” criteria in evaluating works of art, as a simplistic understanding of the ‘new cinephilia’ might suggest, a situated notion of value claims that there is no attribution of value that is not in itself a political act, articulated from a certain social position, premised on socially and historically specific ideas and contingent ideals of valorisation structured by social hierarchies.⁵For this section, I am indebted to discussions with Raphaëlle Efoui-Deplanque, who formulated a call for a situated notion of value in a research area discussion of her interview with novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.Shambu’s manifesto proposes a new discourse on pleasure and value emanating from these insights, but one that does not solve the crucial question they raise: to exchange value judgements born out of a problematic idea of universal aesthetic value with value judgements that takes primarily the political context of a film into account—the subjectivities of those involved in the production or those portrayed on screen—is to leave a problematic binary between aesthetics and politics intact. The much more pressing question, however, concerns the relation between aesthetics and politics—and how to translate a diversity of social positions and perspectives into a diversity of aesthetic judgements that are informed by this relation, rather than opting for one dimension over the other.

The reception history of Barbara Loden’s Wanda is a case in point to the extent that it is not understood as a simple path of progress, starting from initial ignorance and misunderstanding to a deserved reappraisal, which finally puts the film in its firm position. What critics at the time understood as lack of motivation and consciousness has been reappraised lately as an astute statement on female disenfranchisement and the middle-class bias of the liberal women’s movement at the beginning of the 1970s, reevaluating not only the film but also speaking to the historicity of the value judgements at the time. However, the fact that the film by now has generated a vast literature of its own should lead to an even more thorough evaluation of its reevaluation. ‘For a film that has been so neglected by a public audience’, Anna Backman Rogers reports, ‘Wanda has amassed astonishingly voluminous amounts of column inches, book chapters, articles, and attempts to think alongside it and fathom its meaning’, so much that ‘it has passed over into the realm of myth’ Full reference in Zotero Library. One might even say that Wanda’s reevaluation led to the emergence of its own genre of literature, creating books such as Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, which documents the author’s personal encounter with the film and her research into the life of its director.

When I discussed Wanda in the context of my dissertation, I made use of Léger’s descriptions of film scenes and commentaries, finding the book to be an apt and poetic appreciation of Loden and her film. In an academic work in which I was eager to contextualise and situate allegedly universal works of art such as New Hollywood classics, I uncritically consulted Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden for reference, refraining from situating and contextualising the book’s account of the film and its surroundings. In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz does exactly that, taking Léger to task for hiding the specificity of class positions in Wanda in favour of a poetic, universal reading of it. Cruz uses Wanda and its reception by middle-class authors as an example of how social class is often pushed to the sidelines in a culture that echoes and is shaped by middle-class rules and values. Due to this erasure, she holds, Wanda ‘becomes a tabula rasa, a blank slate onto which middle-class writers project themselves’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Indeed, calling the film a ‘commonplace story’, and ‘nothing illustrative of any social drama’ Full reference in Zotero Library, and ruminating about her own similarities with Wanda, which she only finds in abstractions, Léger’s elegantly written book seems to miss a whole point, her reevaluation devaluing the film’s political core.

I had not “seen” this when I read Léger’s book, which I found to be a beautifully written, highly elegant account and appreciation of the film, a fitting appraisal for Wanda and its director. Whereas Cruz could not help but be annoyed by Léger’s reading of the film and her identification with the late Barbara Loden, untinged by class, I had attributed literary value to this book based on my own situatedness, writing from a social position far removed from the world Wanda talks about. I found myself valorising what I had found to be an innocent and witty reevaluation of a once under-valued film. The morale of this story, however, is not to deny Léger’s book its value, condemning the book for political reasons instead of celebrating it in aesthetic terms. Rather, it led me to interrogate the history and politics of my own aesthetic value judgements, which makes them neither false nor inconsequential but rather opens them to scrutiny. Furthermore, Cruz’s fierce critique of Léger cautions me to celebrate Wanda’s reappraisal as a final triumph, as if the value finally attributed to Wanda was something true, authentic, almost universal. Instead, it points to the precarious and always interminable quality of value statements—to a construction site never to close down.