Dr Elena Gorfinkel curates BFI season dedicated to director Barbara Loden

03 June 2025

Dr Elena Gorfinkel curates BFI season dedicated to director Barbara Loden

Dr Elena Gorfinkel, Reader in Film Studies, is the curator for the new BFI season Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden, dedicated to the career of the American independent actor, writer and director.

Still from Wanda (1970), written and directed by Barbara Loden

Book cover for Wanda by Dr Elena Gorfinkel

Barbara Loden (1932-1980) is most renowned for her film Wanda, which she wrote, directed, and starred in. The film received the International Critics Award at the 1970 Venice Film Festival.

The season takes place in conjunction with the recent publication of Dr Elena Gorfinkel’s new book Wanda (BFI Film Classics, 2025) and develops from her research on Wanda and ongoing archival exploration of Loden’s wider career, which is developing into a research project entitled ‘Barbara Loden: Feminist Constellations’.

A stunning work made on the cusp of feminism’s second wave, and Loden’s only feature as a filmmaker, it considers a wanderer who abandons her life as a miner’s wife and mother, electing to drift through America, taking up with several terrible men. Long difficult to see, Wanda has recently gained cult status, emblematic of all the films by women that remain unknown and unseen.
Dr Elena Gorfinkel, Reader in Film Studies

Poster for the BFI season Wanda and Beyond

What's on?

The film programme curated by Dr Elena Gorfinkel explores in depth, across four strands, Barbara Loden’s path from Hollywood performance to directorial independence, examining her cinematic inspirations and films that sparked her imagination. A selection of Hollywood, independent, non-fiction and avant-garde films of the late 1960s-early 1970s follows women’s revolt in this period’s cinema. Contemporary films by Loden’s inheritors – such as Kelly Reichardt, Valerie Massadian, and Nina Menkes – in women’s cinema illuminate the filmmaker’s legacies.

Loden’s life and work open a portal onto 1970s American cinema, replete with ‘mad housewives’ and wayward drifters, and to a moment of feminist urgencies, revealing the stakes of women’s creative labours. The constellation of Wanda’s genealogies and Loden’s legacies continue to inspire generations of filmmakers, writers and artists.
Dr Elena Gorfinkel, Reader in Film Studies

The season features a number of screenings of Barbara Loden’s films, some with curatorial intros, as well as a Barbara Loden Symposium, scheduled to take place on 7 June 2025. A day of talks, presentations, and conversations about the legacies of Wanda, and the career and ongoing impact of Barbara Loden, will feature scholar and critic Alice Blackhurst from the University of Edinburgh, filmmaker Ben Rivers and novelist Joni Murphy.

Still of The Frontier Experience by Barbara Loden

The Frontier Experience (1975, dir. Barbara Loden). Image: BFI

Restoring educational films

A talk by restorationist, independent filmmaker and essayist Ross Lipman, who worked to restore Loden’s film Wanda in 2010, will accompany a special screening of Loden’s educational short films.

Little-seen The Frontier Experience and The Boy Who Liked Deer, made in 1975 for the Learning Corporation of America, will be presented on 7 and 9 June as part of Gorfinkel and Lipman’s collaborative project to restore and upgrade these works, despite the challenges of poor extant prints and the lack of original negatives. This project has been funded by King’s AHRS Impact Development Fund with support from the Department of Film Studies at King’s.

At the symposium, Lipman will present his work to date on a digital upgrade of both films and will speak about the challenges of restoring ‘minor cinemas’, such as educational films. The restoration project aims to shine light on women’s filmmaking labours in arenas such as the “useful” cinema field in the educational film in the mid-1970s, and will highlight Loden’s affinities and collaboration with her friend and contemporary Joan Micklin Silver.

The new season Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden launched at the BFI on 1 June and will continue throughout the month. Explore the programme here.

Still from Fade In (1968, dir. Jud Taylor), starring Barbara Loden. Image: BFI

What’s next?

The program under the title The World of Barbara Loden will be presented at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan’s East Village between 25 July and 10 August 2025.

Thirteen programs of films, shorts and ephemera will include some new additions: little-seen work from Loden’s early acting career, particularly in television, on CBS' Studio One and in her role in The Glass Menagerie (1968), and the German documentary about Loden I am Wanda (1980).

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