A Suite for Barbara Loden

13/06/2025

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Lapsed Criticism

Film critic Richard Brody reckons Nathalie Leger’s A Suite for Barbara Loden, is “a work of surrogate biography that replaces the archival material and the interview answers that [Leger] can’t get with the work of implication and imagination, replaces the novelistic solidity of an extended biography with the lacunary lyricism of an array of resonant fragments.” (New Yorker) Brody also says in the same article that “every biography (as I discovered in the course of writing one) can be two books: one about its subject; the other about the adventures arising from the research. I wrote only the former, the one about the subject.” Brody’s biography is on Jean-Luc Godard, a big fat book by an American on a French man, Everything is Cinema. Leger is a French writer who has written a slim one on an American woman. There are practical reasons why Brody’s is so big and Leger’s so slender: Godard made fifteen films between 1959 and 1967, and many more in the decades after before dying aged ninety-one, an assisted suicide. Loden died at forty-eight of cancer, only having made one feature film, Wanda. A feminist might say that any biography of Loden is inevitably slim — she wasn’t given the chance to have the career a man could expect to enjoy. Loden was married to one such figure: Elia Kazan. A cynic would say that with little to write about, Leger fills her book with anecdotes about Leger’s life, her mother’s, and the divorce that left her father living with another woman next door to her and her mother. Someone more interested in dissolving boundaries between fact and fiction, between a biographical account and an autobiographical account, would insist on innovation, and this is what Brody sees when he compares what Leger has done with his more standard work of scholarship. Leger says that “etymologically, an obsession is a state of siege. One is under siege in oneself. What are you going to do, aside from trying to lend a form to what is happening? That is what we all try to do. That is, to transform an obsession into a book.” (Bomb) 

         This needn’t mean someone writing a biography isn’t obsessed with their subject. But it won’t become a component of the finished work, and it is unlikely the person writing it feels obliged to state that they are trying to make sense of their own life in the process of writing about somebody else’s. In Suite for Barbara Loden, Leger talks of four women: Loden, the character she plays, Wanda, Leger’s mother and herself. A straight comparison between Loden and Leger wouldn’t have been without interest, yet this middle book in a trilogy (Exposition and The White Dress are the others) explores a conundrum that is capable of much complexity, managing both to talk about the limited life options of women, and the roles they are expected to play, and to open these limitations up in a work that gives all four women a reality much greater than the realised life, even Leger’s — ostensibly the freest of these four women. 

      In a short piece on Wanda, novelist Don De Lillo ends his take on the film by saying, “there are certain biographical details that attach themselves, inevitably, to Barbara Loden's name. Let's skip them and simply note that she died in 1980, still in her 40s. This is the only film she directed.” (Guardian) There may be things outside the text but De Lillo refuses to talk about them, as if the amateur film critic offering an odd moment of professionalism as he shows he has concentrated on the film. By this reckoning, Leger offers rank amateurism: she doesn’t only talk about Loden's life within the context of Wanda, but also too her own and even her mother’s. Is this an appalling dereliction of critical duty or showing that there is a world of fictional possibilities within examining responses invoked by film? When Sight and Sound published a list of a hundred fictional works about cinema, most of the titles were books showing characters immersed in filmmaking, not film watching, and if the latter, the books usually showed a more general interest rather than focusing on a specific work. Great books like Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, do show more of an interest in cinematic perception over production. But most fictional works about cinema are on characters involved in making films: The Last Tycoon, A Ghost at Noon, Bukowski’s Hollywood, Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde. 

   Yet Suite for Barara Loden, like Roberto Bolano’s ‘Days of 1978’, Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye, De Lillo’s own Point Omega and Cabrera Infante’s The Phantom of the Isolde, plays up the viewing experience, with Tawada and Bolano including, like Leger, detailed descriptions of given films. Rather than seeing Leger’s work as failing to meet the standards of critical evaluation, it is more useful to see it as opening up the space of viewing experiences that have been too narrowly focused on film criticism as a piece of non-fiction, or film production as fiction. In the former, the writer observes made cinematic works; in the latter, the writers show characters partaking in the filmmaking process. However, statistically far more people have watched films than have been involved in making them, and many writers despite having their work adapted to the screen might more fruitfully be understood through the films they have seen over those they have been involved in making. De Lillo’s White Noise, Cosmopolis and The Body Artist may have all been adapted, but to understand his work it may be more useful to think about the ones he has watched. As he says in a moment of lapsed criticism in the Wanda piece: “I went to the movies on weekday afternoons…drifting from the New Yorker Theater one day to the Bleecker Street the next, alert and ever expectant, ready to be taken out of the day, the week, the plodding writer's one-room life, and into a fold of discontinuous space and time.” (Guardian) It wouldn’t be an idle thought to muse over the films he would have watched, films that would have taken up some of his day and taken him out of his living existence.

       How many writers have had cinematic experiences which have marked them we might wonder, and Leger asks us to stop wondering and see what can come of such an experience. If Brody proposes Leger's work as a surrogate biography, it rests perhaps on many a viewing containing the emotionally biographic; that instead of identifying with characters, the viewer is more inclined to identify with feelings, and out of that relationship one can access a parallel life our actual lives can’t quite entertain, yet which a film can illuminate in various ways. It might make us more aware of parental sacrifices; of friendships we have let go, a love that was important but could never have worked out long term, and so on. In Leger’s case it is chiefly about seeing parallels between her mother and Wanda, most evident in a scene where Wanda passes through a shopping mall at a time in the early 70s when her mother did the same. Both Wanda and her mother were immediately coming off a divorce, and Leger sees in Wanda’s sense of loss her mother’s despair, her "unendurable grief….For hours she wandered around the Cap 3000, just wandered around, for hours. From the outside, she says, I must have looked like a doctor’s wife doing some shopping, from the outside what can you see of the deepest despair.”  It is as if the despair that Loden keeps on the surface (the film offers no voice-over; nor any great disclosure from Wanda), Leger sees in her mother internally — the exterior of the film somehow accessing the interior of the woman who gave birth to her. Speaking of the trilogy, Leger says, “if I had to sum up the intention that runs through these three books, that is the word I would keep in mind: recognize. But I only want to enter into this risky territory (speaking for one’s mother, for what one believes she couldn’t say, for what one imagines her suffering to have been) on the condition that I depart from our gruelling and perhaps fallacious face-to-face encounter.” (Bomb) Cinema becomes neither art nor entertainment but a form of periphrasis. It can speak to us about things which we can’t always share with others. When Leger describes the scene at the mall in the film and conveys to the reader what she knows about her mother’s divorce, whatever memories she extracts cannot be completely distinguished from the film she is watching. 

           Leger, a curator by trade, may not have gone into a trilogy of novels alluding to her mother with the intention of exploring this question, but that was at least partly the result. While auto-fiction would have been well aware of its intentions however subconscious may have been its findings, the sort of surrogate fiction that Leger practices discovers in cultural possibilities personal examination. Auto-fiction was a term created by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 and plenty of French practitioners have used the auto-fictional since, including Emmanuelle Carrrere, Annie Ernaux and Christine Angot. But Carrere for example has also often worked the auto-fictional in with surrogate fiction, writing books about a man who murdered his family (The Adversary) and a biopic of Philip K Dick ('I Am Alive and You are Dead’) that combines personal reflection with detailed analysis of the case and the writer respectively. In The Adversary, Carrere talks about his motives behind writing the book and reports how the murderer believed an earlier Carrere novel, The Class Trip, was an accurate depiction of his childhood. In the Dick book, I Am Alive and You are Dead, Carrere pays little attention to critical material written on the author, with Michael Moorcock in a review saying: “It's a shame this book contains no index and does not refer to the half-a-dozen or so other critiques and biographies of PKD, nor to interviews, such as Charles Platt’s.” (Guardian) If Carrere can seem self-referencing and cavalier in his refusal to reference others, the writer is usually much more narcissistically present in his work (in A Russian Novel and Yoga) and his celebrity rests on the naked revelations of his prose, no matter if aspects may be mildly fictionalised along the way. As Robert McCrum says, “throughout his work, Carrere has pushed personal candour to the limit, exposing his worst self to public scrutiny.” (Guardian) The same wouldn’t be said of Leger, who half hides behind the presence of the subjects she is writing on, as if through a combination of candour and discretion she finds herself discussing aspects of her life through the context of the lives of others. It may have been Carrere who wrote a novel called Other Lives But Mine, yet it sums it up well Leger’s project thus far. 

      Katia da Cunha Lewin wonders: “Is this the subject in search of a form, like a crab looking for a shell, or a writer in search of her true subject constantly sidelined by detours?” (The White Review) Auto-fiction knows its subject (itself) and film criticism knows its subject: the film, actor, director, etc under discussion. However, Leger wonders in Suite for Barbara Loden what it is that fascinates her about Wanda, as if extending far further De Lillo’s take on the film that can just about absorb details less likely to be offered in a typical review (how regularly he would see films; what others were doing in the cinema before the lights went down). But De Lillo sees the subject of the film and he as a subject watching it as distinct entities. Such a claim might be deemed central to good criticism: the critic doesn’t confuse subject with object — doesn’t assume the film is about them, nor especially about the personal existence of the person making the film: hence De Lillo’s sly nod to the rudiments of good film criticism when he says he will say nothing about Loden’s life. But Leger insistently wants to practice both intentional and affective fallacies, speaking at length about Loden’s purpose behind the work and also what the film means to Leger herself. There is little talk about camera angles, sound design and editing, nor about how Wanda can be seen within the context of Direct Cinema in the sixties, with fiction films absorbing some of the freedoms apparent in this documentary movement. 

    Wanda’s cameraman Nicholas Proferes worked with Richard Leacock and DA Pennebaker, and when Leger does talk about Direct Cinema she brings in its most dedicated practitioner, Frederick Wiseman — but as a fictional addition who contradicts entirely his own practice by telling her to make it up, “all you have to do is make it up.” Leger does indeed — Wiseman reckons she should go and interview the baseball player Mickey Mantle, who knew Barbara Loden early in her career. That the actual Mantle has been dead for more than twenty years doesn’t seem to hamper her research as she talks with this baseball player about Proust and the difficulties involved in writing. Mantle seeks the sort of precision in prose he found easy to find as a baseball player with bat and ball. Wiseman may still be alive but that didn’t mean Leger spoke to him, though perhaps he serves as a stand-in for Proferes, who has always been reluctant to talk about the film. According to ex-student and filmmaker Christine Choe: “For years, I’ve begged Proferes to tell me more about Loden, about their collaboration, about the scripts they worked on after Wanda that nobody wanted to finance. He didn’t want to be interviewed for this article, saying only, “It’s Barbara’s film and she is your inspiration.”  (‘A Love Letter to Wanda’). It sounds like advice he could have given to Leger, and isn’t too far removed from what Wiseman says to Leger here. 

      If film criticism is generally predicated on accurate detail (a biography will go to the archives; offer reliable quotations from magazines and journals that interviewed the actor or filmmaker; describe scenes from the film with care, precisely relating camera movements and lines of dialogue) does a work of fiction based on a film have the same obligation? This depends. In Leger’s case, if we respond to the book we accept, at the same time as accuracy and fabrication, an inverse responsibility perhaps from a typical critical biography — where one would allow the odd erroneous detail but be unforgiving towards anything made up. By predicating her work on the fictional, Leger has no such obligation, but there is more pressure perhaps on her to get other things right, to offer a perceptual precision a biographer can pass over more generally. Much of Leger’s short book is made up of describing with alert consideration Wanda’s life within the film as if she were describing a fictional character within a novelist’s own. “Wanda is standing in the parking lot of the courthouse, arms folded, handbag hanging off the crook of one elbow, held tight against her body, her face anxious beneath hair curlers.” “Wanda is asleep in a hotel room. In broad daylight, curled up naked under a sheet. Her empty, oversized vinyl handbag hangs from a hook like a piece of armour. She’s fast asleep; the man from the bar is moving about quietly; he tiptoes past the bed, furtively picks up his shoes; bends down then stands up again with theatrical quick movements: the silent, nimble ballet of the betrayer.”  Another example: “And suddenly from the depths, she cries out, it sounds at first like a distant murmur, then it’s a cry, a shout of refusal, an explosion of rage and stress, she’s kicking the man to get him away from her, she’s screaming and hitting, she won’t give in to him, she finds the strength and finally she manages to escape. Her bag, she doesn’t forget her bag.” There are numerous descriptions like these throughout the book, and these passages in a critical appraisal would likely be reduced to their component importance. In the first, Wanda turns up to the courthouse late and the judge gives custody to the father, which Wanda accepts. In the second, she has little money, no job and no place to go, and a man picks her up at a bar and after sleeping with him he wishes to take off without her. In the third, it comes after another man she becomes involved with makes a hash of robbing a bank, gets killed partly through Wanda’s incompetence, and Wanda ends up with another man, but doesn’t respond to his advances. Describing the scenes thus allows us to stay chiefly on the level of plot rather than offering up the descriptive qualities of the fictional. Leger insists it is the latter that chiefly interests her, and describes the events usually with accuracy (though she calls an ice cream a milkshake), all the better to speculate around them and to meditate upon the film more broadly. 

       When she talks of the scene where Wanda’s face is anxious behind hair curlers, Leger also notes that the people would ask Loden why she played the role, having to “negotiate the exhausting back and forth from one side of the camera to the other…Barbara would answer almost contritely, as if she were apologising, that only she could do it. ‘I was the best for it.’” Here Loden asserts herself over a character who is as unassertive, all the better to announce her own unassertiveness that she has moved beyond by creating a character only she could play (who better to capture that passivity?). Yet she simultaneously escapes this passivity by making a film indirectly about what she saw as her inertia. Leger says near the end of the book, “when Wanda came out in 1970 feminists hated it. Barbara Loden came in for a great deal of severe criticism. Many clearly reviled her." But as Leger describes it, and as critics have increasingly taken to seeing it, Loden’s insistence on showing a character so apparently docile was a type of obdurateness that was, if you like, symptomatically rather than radically feminist. It might have been Chantal Akerman several years later who combined both these qualites in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, about a passive, widowed, housewife who turns murderous, but Loden finds in Wanda a quality that captures well a woman caught between two feminist revolutions — the sexual and the social — and becoming a victim of both. In describing the scene where Wanda is in bed as the man tries to leave stealthily, Leger notes the nimble ballet of the betrayer, finding in the details of his movements the advantages he can take in elements of the feminist movement. This unattractive man can benefit from the sexual without being beholden to the socially respectful — as he tries to take off without even a polite goodbye. It isn’t dissimilar to an earlier moment when the boss who lays her off speaks to her in patronising endearments: he doesn’t screw her but surely screws her over as she leaves with less than half her earnings. The post-68 sexual revolution shows women now with potential control over their bodies, only for men to treat them with various forms of disrespect. 

       A critic may offer such observations within social critique, as just enough of the scene would be described to capture the events and allow for analysis. But when Leger zooms in so specifically it is partly so she can zoom out so revealingly — as the writer starts to draw links with her mother who was of Loden and Wanda’s generation, and also a little a few comparisons with Leger’s own, as though even, as a woman who has passed through various waves of feminism, has a curatorial career and is writing books, still might feel like she hasn’t quite escaped the expectations of men. Leger confesses that “once upon a time a man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men….he told me that he was afraid of that habit particular to women in general and me in particular…of being unable or unwilling to resist uninvited male desire, of the madness of giving in to whatever they asked of us.” Leger adds, “how could he not understand the sometimes overwhelming necessity of yielding to the other’s desire to give yourself a better chance of escaping it?”  

     Wanda’s complications might not be quite the same but they would be no less complex. The scene with the man in the bar jumps to the morning after, so we have no idea how much resistance or acquiescence there was in the deed, but what is unequivocal is that Wanda is lost, and the man determined to be of no help at all. It would seem that she wanted comfort and he wished for sexual gratification. A liberation that gives women freedom isn’t worth much if all that results is a man’s needs being met more easily  — and a woman is left with yet more manifold forms of dissatisfaction. Leger describes the moment of his gingerish attempt to leave as if well aware that far more delicacy has gone into his need to depart over his need to seduce. In liberated times and with a woman in desperate circumstances, Loden doesn’t bother with the details of seduction. She is more interested in the details of abandonment, and so it continues when Wanda does manage to persuade him to take her with him — only to ditch her at the first chance he gets at an out-of-town ice cream parlour.    

      In the third scene above, Loden does show the seduction attempt that turns into an attempted rape as Wanda resists the man’s advances, even if he might seem the nicest of the men she has encountered. Leger describes him as “a sweet guy, probably not too confident, obviously very happy to have found a girl who’s so easy, even if she does look perfectly dead.” But after they drive out to a quarry and he starts making out, Wanda is determined to take off, as though she has at last found the wherewithal to say no to something in her life. She has accepted the removal of her children, slept with a man out of indifference, and with another out of potential hope, and agreed to become involved in a robbery because she wants to please the man responsible for it, even if she is so scared in advance that she vomits. But here she is making a decision, and she manages to push the man away and leave. 

      What Leger does in describing all three quoted scenes (and many more), is give to cinema its reflective dimension over its projective demand: she says a film isn’t only a narrative projected onto a screen that we follow; it is also a series of audio-visual images that we can extract meaning from on terms that needn’t be met by the pace of a film, even a relatively slow one. The slowest films still move at 24 frames per second, still contain enormous amounts of information, and yet most reviews offer the same handful of plot points, character descriptions (heroes; villains, love interest) and nods towards dialogue and music. They understandably summarise a work that cannot otherwise be contained, but Leger’s book proposes that perhaps it needn’t be: there is space for works of literature on works of cinema. This isn’t so much about turning cinema criticism into an art form (James Agee, David Thomson, Pauline Kael and others have been credited with doing that), it is about turning an art form into another art form, a sort of high-end, personalised version of what has been on offer for many decades: the novelisation. Books have been adapted from hits like Jaws, Alien and The Spy Who Loved Me. It may seem odd in the latter instance to have a film based on a novel that in turn gets novelised, but irony often gets lost when money can be made. What can be less novel, so to speak, than a film from a novel that is turned once again into a book?

         There have also been very useful specific accounts of classic films in short-book form, more or less novella length. These include the many in the BFI series: Thomson on The Big Sleep, Laura Mulvey on Citizen Kane,  Marina Warner on L’atalante. Yet these are still critical works, slowing the film down to bring out the finer points of film analysis; they aren’t there to create the sort of autobiographical thoughts that link the film to the most personal of emotions. The novelisation and the extended analytic essay are pertinent works; Leger’s is an impertinent one. Yet this shouldn’t be cause for condemnation but closer to exhortation — to seeing that out of many thousands of films that have been made, very few have been given the sort of fictional factuality that writers like Leger insist upon when thinking of their own life, or the life of an actual subject. Why hasn’t this been happening for decades? Very few viewers go to see films because of camera technique or even directorial vision. Some will be going to see stars and others because they want to follow a story, and so it makes sense there will be film books on info behind making a film, why there will be many actors’ biographies and an increasing number of books telling you how scripts work. But what if most viewers are going to have a surrogate experience? Should we consequently have more surrogate biographies, books that tell us how someone feels while watching a film? Some books move in this direction, from Adam Mars-Jones’ account of Late Spring, Noriko’s Smiling, to Marc Auge’s account of Casablanca. These aren’t quite the surrogate biographies that allow a film to illuminate the writer’s life, but they are much more personalised accounts than the typical BFI analysis of a classic. The BFI’s purpose is, of course, to preserve the memory of film, not to preserve someone’s memory of a film. But there is surely a place for the latter, and Leger has found it writing about someone who could say in an interview Leger quotes, “It’s like showing myself in a way that I was.”  (New York Review of Books)

   Yet though we have talked of four women in the book, we should add a fifth: if Loden shows Wanda as the woman she once was, then who might that woman have been? This is where the book becomes in its later stages, almost a detective story, with Leger fascinated almost as much with the woman on whom Loden had based the film as with Loden. How to find out more about this woman? Leger hired a researcher and finally found the story in a paper from March 1960 called “The Go-For Broke Bank Robber. Her name was Alma Malone, with an incestuous, metal-worker father. Malone left school at fourteen, married and divorced twice, then took up with a recidivist and, after a bank robbery went wrong, ended up in jail herself — sentenced to twenty years even though she, like Wanda, never made it to the bank. She is released a decade later, around the same time as Loden’s film, which she probably never saw: Wanda was hardly, commercially, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Bonnie and Clyde. She is a woman we might say society very much touched, taking into account a remark Marguerite Duras made when speaking to Kazan after Loden’s death. “I think there is always some trace of something in yourself that society can’t touch, something inviolable, impenetrable, determining.” Leger quotes the passage, and also notes Duras saying, “there is an immediate and definite coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda.” (Comparative Cinema) But when some have few inner resources and fewer opportunities, society will touch them, often painfully. 

      If Duras can say that “there is an immediate and definite coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda” it lies partly in Loden’s ability to show, by both playing the character and directing the film, and doing so with a far greater interest in the socio-economic circumstances of her character over the narratively driven excitement of the crime, that society impacts on the inviolable and yet leaves the mystery intact. Leger, like Loden, is haunted by a remark Alma made where she thanks the judge and says, “I’m glad it’s all over.” A life must be a desperate one for a person to thank the judge for sentencing them to twenty years, and one in complete contrast to Leger’s as she muses over what so attracts her to Wanda. “I have never been homeless, I have never abandoned my children, I have never given over my existence or even my financial affairs to any man, I don’t think I have ever entrusted even the most banal area of my life to anyone.” Wanda looks like she is trying to put her life into anybody’s hands who will take her, and Alma Malone goes so far as to put herself into the judge’s hands as if he is just another man telling her what she should do. If Duras is correct to say there is something in oneself that society cannot touch, perhaps Alma expresses this in her remark that she is pleased it is all over, while also revealing just how little of herself society has finally managed to commandeer, no matter if she will have little freedom to be herself during a jail sentence.  

    It is this surplus aspect, the self that society cannot touch, even if its fingerprints are all over Wanda, that Loden manages paradoxically to reveal and that Leger, like Duras before her, wants to discuss. Duras says to Kazan, “have you ever made a film about somebody? When I say somebody, I mean someone you have singled out, whom you can see for who they are…?” There is in the query an accusation, even if Kazan may have tried more than most American filmmakers to do just that. It is the sort of question a writer would take for granted but a filmmaker perhaps not — even if both were writers and filmmakers, with Kazan a director who went on to write fiction (including a novel based loosely on his relationship with Loden, The Arrangement), and Duras was a writer who went on to become a director. In her question resides the sort of query a novelist may take for granted, and a filmmaker feels that they must resist — that a film is a much broader endeavour than a novel. This might be true, and if so proposes there is a space for the sort of work that singles out character and turns this into semi-fictional accounts of films that have nothing to do with BFI analytic classics, nor a novelisation of a box-office hit. Such a work can extract from all the filmic elements, a novelistic singularity. A Suite for Barbara Loden is a good example of this approach, and successful enough for us to wonder why there are so few of them.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

A Suite for Barbara Loden

Lapsed Criticism

Film critic Richard Brody reckons Nathalie Leger’s A Suite for Barbara Loden, is “a work of surrogate biography that replaces the archival material and the interview answers that [Leger] can’t get with the work of implication and imagination, replaces the novelistic solidity of an extended biography with the lacunary lyricism of an array of resonant fragments.” (New Yorker) Brody also says in the same article that “every biography (as I discovered in the course of writing one) can be two books: one about its subject; the other about the adventures arising from the research. I wrote only the former, the one about the subject.” Brody’s biography is on Jean-Luc Godard, a big fat book by an American on a French man, Everything is Cinema. Leger is a French writer who has written a slim one on an American woman. There are practical reasons why Brody’s is so big and Leger’s so slender: Godard made fifteen films between 1959 and 1967, and many more in the decades after before dying aged ninety-one, an assisted suicide. Loden died at forty-eight of cancer, only having made one feature film, Wanda. A feminist might say that any biography of Loden is inevitably slim — she wasn’t given the chance to have the career a man could expect to enjoy. Loden was married to one such figure: Elia Kazan. A cynic would say that with little to write about, Leger fills her book with anecdotes about Leger’s life, her mother’s, and the divorce that left her father living with another woman next door to her and her mother. Someone more interested in dissolving boundaries between fact and fiction, between a biographical account and an autobiographical account, would insist on innovation, and this is what Brody sees when he compares what Leger has done with his more standard work of scholarship. Leger says that “etymologically, an obsession is a state of siege. One is under siege in oneself. What are you going to do, aside from trying to lend a form to what is happening? That is what we all try to do. That is, to transform an obsession into a book.” (Bomb) 

         This needn’t mean someone writing a biography isn’t obsessed with their subject. But it won’t become a component of the finished work, and it is unlikely the person writing it feels obliged to state that they are trying to make sense of their own life in the process of writing about somebody else’s. In Suite for Barbara Loden, Leger talks of four women: Loden, the character she plays, Wanda, Leger’s mother and herself. A straight comparison between Loden and Leger wouldn’t have been without interest, yet this middle book in a trilogy (Exposition and The White Dress are the others) explores a conundrum that is capable of much complexity, managing both to talk about the limited life options of women, and the roles they are expected to play, and to open these limitations up in a work that gives all four women a reality much greater than the realised life, even Leger’s — ostensibly the freest of these four women. 

      In a short piece on Wanda, novelist Don De Lillo ends his take on the film by saying, “there are certain biographical details that attach themselves, inevitably, to Barbara Loden's name. Let's skip them and simply note that she died in 1980, still in her 40s. This is the only film she directed.” (Guardian) There may be things outside the text but De Lillo refuses to talk about them, as if the amateur film critic offering an odd moment of professionalism as he shows he has concentrated on the film. By this reckoning, Leger offers rank amateurism: she doesn’t only talk about Loden's life within the context of Wanda, but also too her own and even her mother’s. Is this an appalling dereliction of critical duty or showing that there is a world of fictional possibilities within examining responses invoked by film? When Sight and Sound published a list of a hundred fictional works about cinema, most of the titles were books showing characters immersed in filmmaking, not film watching, and if the latter, the books usually showed a more general interest rather than focusing on a specific work. Great books like Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, do show more of an interest in cinematic perception over production. But most fictional works about cinema are on characters involved in making films: The Last Tycoon, A Ghost at Noon, Bukowski’s Hollywood, Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde. 

   Yet Suite for Barara Loden, like Roberto Bolano’s ‘Days of 1978’, Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye, De Lillo’s own Point Omega and Cabrera Infante’s The Phantom of the Isolde, plays up the viewing experience, with Tawada and Bolano including, like Leger, detailed descriptions of given films. Rather than seeing Leger’s work as failing to meet the standards of critical evaluation, it is more useful to see it as opening up the space of viewing experiences that have been too narrowly focused on film criticism as a piece of non-fiction, or film production as fiction. In the former, the writer observes made cinematic works; in the latter, the writers show characters partaking in the filmmaking process. However, statistically far more people have watched films than have been involved in making them, and many writers despite having their work adapted to the screen might more fruitfully be understood through the films they have seen over those they have been involved in making. De Lillo’s White Noise, Cosmopolis and The Body Artist may have all been adapted, but to understand his work it may be more useful to think about the ones he has watched. As he says in a moment of lapsed criticism in the Wanda piece: “I went to the movies on weekday afternoons…drifting from the New Yorker Theater one day to the Bleecker Street the next, alert and ever expectant, ready to be taken out of the day, the week, the plodding writer's one-room life, and into a fold of discontinuous space and time.” (Guardian) It wouldn’t be an idle thought to muse over the films he would have watched, films that would have taken up some of his day and taken him out of his living existence.

       How many writers have had cinematic experiences which have marked them we might wonder, and Leger asks us to stop wondering and see what can come of such an experience. If Brody proposes Leger's work as a surrogate biography, it rests perhaps on many a viewing containing the emotionally biographic; that instead of identifying with characters, the viewer is more inclined to identify with feelings, and out of that relationship one can access a parallel life our actual lives can’t quite entertain, yet which a film can illuminate in various ways. It might make us more aware of parental sacrifices; of friendships we have let go, a love that was important but could never have worked out long term, and so on. In Leger’s case it is chiefly about seeing parallels between her mother and Wanda, most evident in a scene where Wanda passes through a shopping mall at a time in the early 70s when her mother did the same. Both Wanda and her mother were immediately coming off a divorce, and Leger sees in Wanda’s sense of loss her mother’s despair, her "unendurable grief….For hours she wandered around the Cap 3000, just wandered around, for hours. From the outside, she says, I must have looked like a doctor’s wife doing some shopping, from the outside what can you see of the deepest despair.”  It is as if the despair that Loden keeps on the surface (the film offers no voice-over; nor any great disclosure from Wanda), Leger sees in her mother internally — the exterior of the film somehow accessing the interior of the woman who gave birth to her. Speaking of the trilogy, Leger says, “if I had to sum up the intention that runs through these three books, that is the word I would keep in mind: recognize. But I only want to enter into this risky territory (speaking for one’s mother, for what one believes she couldn’t say, for what one imagines her suffering to have been) on the condition that I depart from our gruelling and perhaps fallacious face-to-face encounter.” (Bomb) Cinema becomes neither art nor entertainment but a form of periphrasis. It can speak to us about things which we can’t always share with others. When Leger describes the scene at the mall in the film and conveys to the reader what she knows about her mother’s divorce, whatever memories she extracts cannot be completely distinguished from the film she is watching. 

           Leger, a curator by trade, may not have gone into a trilogy of novels alluding to her mother with the intention of exploring this question, but that was at least partly the result. While auto-fiction would have been well aware of its intentions however subconscious may have been its findings, the sort of surrogate fiction that Leger practices discovers in cultural possibilities personal examination. Auto-fiction was a term created by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 and plenty of French practitioners have used the auto-fictional since, including Emmanuelle Carrrere, Annie Ernaux and Christine Angot. But Carrere for example has also often worked the auto-fictional in with surrogate fiction, writing books about a man who murdered his family (The Adversary) and a biopic of Philip K Dick ('I Am Alive and You are Dead’) that combines personal reflection with detailed analysis of the case and the writer respectively. In The Adversary, Carrere talks about his motives behind writing the book and reports how the murderer believed an earlier Carrere novel, The Class Trip, was an accurate depiction of his childhood. In the Dick book, I Am Alive and You are Dead, Carrere pays little attention to critical material written on the author, with Michael Moorcock in a review saying: “It's a shame this book contains no index and does not refer to the half-a-dozen or so other critiques and biographies of PKD, nor to interviews, such as Charles Platt’s.” (Guardian) If Carrere can seem self-referencing and cavalier in his refusal to reference others, the writer is usually much more narcissistically present in his work (in A Russian Novel and Yoga) and his celebrity rests on the naked revelations of his prose, no matter if aspects may be mildly fictionalised along the way. As Robert McCrum says, “throughout his work, Carrere has pushed personal candour to the limit, exposing his worst self to public scrutiny.” (Guardian) The same wouldn’t be said of Leger, who half hides behind the presence of the subjects she is writing on, as if through a combination of candour and discretion she finds herself discussing aspects of her life through the context of the lives of others. It may have been Carrere who wrote a novel called Other Lives But Mine, yet it sums it up well Leger’s project thus far. 

      Katia da Cunha Lewin wonders: “Is this the subject in search of a form, like a crab looking for a shell, or a writer in search of her true subject constantly sidelined by detours?” (The White Review) Auto-fiction knows its subject (itself) and film criticism knows its subject: the film, actor, director, etc under discussion. However, Leger wonders in Suite for Barbara Loden what it is that fascinates her about Wanda, as if extending far further De Lillo’s take on the film that can just about absorb details less likely to be offered in a typical review (how regularly he would see films; what others were doing in the cinema before the lights went down). But De Lillo sees the subject of the film and he as a subject watching it as distinct entities. Such a claim might be deemed central to good criticism: the critic doesn’t confuse subject with object — doesn’t assume the film is about them, nor especially about the personal existence of the person making the film: hence De Lillo’s sly nod to the rudiments of good film criticism when he says he will say nothing about Loden’s life. But Leger insistently wants to practice both intentional and affective fallacies, speaking at length about Loden’s purpose behind the work and also what the film means to Leger herself. There is little talk about camera angles, sound design and editing, nor about how Wanda can be seen within the context of Direct Cinema in the sixties, with fiction films absorbing some of the freedoms apparent in this documentary movement. 

    Wanda’s cameraman Nicholas Proferes worked with Richard Leacock and DA Pennebaker, and when Leger does talk about Direct Cinema she brings in its most dedicated practitioner, Frederick Wiseman — but as a fictional addition who contradicts entirely his own practice by telling her to make it up, “all you have to do is make it up.” Leger does indeed — Wiseman reckons she should go and interview the baseball player Mickey Mantle, who knew Barbara Loden early in her career. That the actual Mantle has been dead for more than twenty years doesn’t seem to hamper her research as she talks with this baseball player about Proust and the difficulties involved in writing. Mantle seeks the sort of precision in prose he found easy to find as a baseball player with bat and ball. Wiseman may still be alive but that didn’t mean Leger spoke to him, though perhaps he serves as a stand-in for Proferes, who has always been reluctant to talk about the film. According to ex-student and filmmaker Christine Choe: “For years, I’ve begged Proferes to tell me more about Loden, about their collaboration, about the scripts they worked on after Wanda that nobody wanted to finance. He didn’t want to be interviewed for this article, saying only, “It’s Barbara’s film and she is your inspiration.”  (‘A Love Letter to Wanda’). It sounds like advice he could have given to Leger, and isn’t too far removed from what Wiseman says to Leger here. 

      If film criticism is generally predicated on accurate detail (a biography will go to the archives; offer reliable quotations from magazines and journals that interviewed the actor or filmmaker; describe scenes from the film with care, precisely relating camera movements and lines of dialogue) does a work of fiction based on a film have the same obligation? This depends. In Leger’s case, if we respond to the book we accept, at the same time as accuracy and fabrication, an inverse responsibility perhaps from a typical critical biography — where one would allow the odd erroneous detail but be unforgiving towards anything made up. By predicating her work on the fictional, Leger has no such obligation, but there is more pressure perhaps on her to get other things right, to offer a perceptual precision a biographer can pass over more generally. Much of Leger’s short book is made up of describing with alert consideration Wanda’s life within the film as if she were describing a fictional character within a novelist’s own. “Wanda is standing in the parking lot of the courthouse, arms folded, handbag hanging off the crook of one elbow, held tight against her body, her face anxious beneath hair curlers.” “Wanda is asleep in a hotel room. In broad daylight, curled up naked under a sheet. Her empty, oversized vinyl handbag hangs from a hook like a piece of armour. She’s fast asleep; the man from the bar is moving about quietly; he tiptoes past the bed, furtively picks up his shoes; bends down then stands up again with theatrical quick movements: the silent, nimble ballet of the betrayer.”  Another example: “And suddenly from the depths, she cries out, it sounds at first like a distant murmur, then it’s a cry, a shout of refusal, an explosion of rage and stress, she’s kicking the man to get him away from her, she’s screaming and hitting, she won’t give in to him, she finds the strength and finally she manages to escape. Her bag, she doesn’t forget her bag.” There are numerous descriptions like these throughout the book, and these passages in a critical appraisal would likely be reduced to their component importance. In the first, Wanda turns up to the courthouse late and the judge gives custody to the father, which Wanda accepts. In the second, she has little money, no job and no place to go, and a man picks her up at a bar and after sleeping with him he wishes to take off without her. In the third, it comes after another man she becomes involved with makes a hash of robbing a bank, gets killed partly through Wanda’s incompetence, and Wanda ends up with another man, but doesn’t respond to his advances. Describing the scenes thus allows us to stay chiefly on the level of plot rather than offering up the descriptive qualities of the fictional. Leger insists it is the latter that chiefly interests her, and describes the events usually with accuracy (though she calls an ice cream a milkshake), all the better to speculate around them and to meditate upon the film more broadly. 

       When she talks of the scene where Wanda’s face is anxious behind hair curlers, Leger also notes that the people would ask Loden why she played the role, having to “negotiate the exhausting back and forth from one side of the camera to the other…Barbara would answer almost contritely, as if she were apologising, that only she could do it. ‘I was the best for it.’” Here Loden asserts herself over a character who is as unassertive, all the better to announce her own unassertiveness that she has moved beyond by creating a character only she could play (who better to capture that passivity?). Yet she simultaneously escapes this passivity by making a film indirectly about what she saw as her inertia. Leger says near the end of the book, “when Wanda came out in 1970 feminists hated it. Barbara Loden came in for a great deal of severe criticism. Many clearly reviled her." But as Leger describes it, and as critics have increasingly taken to seeing it, Loden’s insistence on showing a character so apparently docile was a type of obdurateness that was, if you like, symptomatically rather than radically feminist. It might have been Chantal Akerman several years later who combined both these qualites in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, about a passive, widowed, housewife who turns murderous, but Loden finds in Wanda a quality that captures well a woman caught between two feminist revolutions — the sexual and the social — and becoming a victim of both. In describing the scene where Wanda is in bed as the man tries to leave stealthily, Leger notes the nimble ballet of the betrayer, finding in the details of his movements the advantages he can take in elements of the feminist movement. This unattractive man can benefit from the sexual without being beholden to the socially respectful — as he tries to take off without even a polite goodbye. It isn’t dissimilar to an earlier moment when the boss who lays her off speaks to her in patronising endearments: he doesn’t screw her but surely screws her over as she leaves with less than half her earnings. The post-68 sexual revolution shows women now with potential control over their bodies, only for men to treat them with various forms of disrespect. 

       A critic may offer such observations within social critique, as just enough of the scene would be described to capture the events and allow for analysis. But when Leger zooms in so specifically it is partly so she can zoom out so revealingly — as the writer starts to draw links with her mother who was of Loden and Wanda’s generation, and also a little a few comparisons with Leger’s own, as though even, as a woman who has passed through various waves of feminism, has a curatorial career and is writing books, still might feel like she hasn’t quite escaped the expectations of men. Leger confesses that “once upon a time a man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men….he told me that he was afraid of that habit particular to women in general and me in particular…of being unable or unwilling to resist uninvited male desire, of the madness of giving in to whatever they asked of us.” Leger adds, “how could he not understand the sometimes overwhelming necessity of yielding to the other’s desire to give yourself a better chance of escaping it?”  

     Wanda’s complications might not be quite the same but they would be no less complex. The scene with the man in the bar jumps to the morning after, so we have no idea how much resistance or acquiescence there was in the deed, but what is unequivocal is that Wanda is lost, and the man determined to be of no help at all. It would seem that she wanted comfort and he wished for sexual gratification. A liberation that gives women freedom isn’t worth much if all that results is a man’s needs being met more easily  — and a woman is left with yet more manifold forms of dissatisfaction. Leger describes the moment of his gingerish attempt to leave as if well aware that far more delicacy has gone into his need to depart over his need to seduce. In liberated times and with a woman in desperate circumstances, Loden doesn’t bother with the details of seduction. She is more interested in the details of abandonment, and so it continues when Wanda does manage to persuade him to take her with him — only to ditch her at the first chance he gets at an out-of-town ice cream parlour.    

      In the third scene above, Loden does show the seduction attempt that turns into an attempted rape as Wanda resists the man’s advances, even if he might seem the nicest of the men she has encountered. Leger describes him as “a sweet guy, probably not too confident, obviously very happy to have found a girl who’s so easy, even if she does look perfectly dead.” But after they drive out to a quarry and he starts making out, Wanda is determined to take off, as though she has at last found the wherewithal to say no to something in her life. She has accepted the removal of her children, slept with a man out of indifference, and with another out of potential hope, and agreed to become involved in a robbery because she wants to please the man responsible for it, even if she is so scared in advance that she vomits. But here she is making a decision, and she manages to push the man away and leave. 

      What Leger does in describing all three quoted scenes (and many more), is give to cinema its reflective dimension over its projective demand: she says a film isn’t only a narrative projected onto a screen that we follow; it is also a series of audio-visual images that we can extract meaning from on terms that needn’t be met by the pace of a film, even a relatively slow one. The slowest films still move at 24 frames per second, still contain enormous amounts of information, and yet most reviews offer the same handful of plot points, character descriptions (heroes; villains, love interest) and nods towards dialogue and music. They understandably summarise a work that cannot otherwise be contained, but Leger’s book proposes that perhaps it needn’t be: there is space for works of literature on works of cinema. This isn’t so much about turning cinema criticism into an art form (James Agee, David Thomson, Pauline Kael and others have been credited with doing that), it is about turning an art form into another art form, a sort of high-end, personalised version of what has been on offer for many decades: the novelisation. Books have been adapted from hits like Jaws, Alien and The Spy Who Loved Me. It may seem odd in the latter instance to have a film based on a novel that in turn gets novelised, but irony often gets lost when money can be made. What can be less novel, so to speak, than a film from a novel that is turned once again into a book?

         There have also been very useful specific accounts of classic films in short-book form, more or less novella length. These include the many in the BFI series: Thomson on The Big Sleep, Laura Mulvey on Citizen Kane,  Marina Warner on L’atalante. Yet these are still critical works, slowing the film down to bring out the finer points of film analysis; they aren’t there to create the sort of autobiographical thoughts that link the film to the most personal of emotions. The novelisation and the extended analytic essay are pertinent works; Leger’s is an impertinent one. Yet this shouldn’t be cause for condemnation but closer to exhortation — to seeing that out of many thousands of films that have been made, very few have been given the sort of fictional factuality that writers like Leger insist upon when thinking of their own life, or the life of an actual subject. Why hasn’t this been happening for decades? Very few viewers go to see films because of camera technique or even directorial vision. Some will be going to see stars and others because they want to follow a story, and so it makes sense there will be film books on info behind making a film, why there will be many actors’ biographies and an increasing number of books telling you how scripts work. But what if most viewers are going to have a surrogate experience? Should we consequently have more surrogate biographies, books that tell us how someone feels while watching a film? Some books move in this direction, from Adam Mars-Jones’ account of Late Spring, Noriko’s Smiling, to Marc Auge’s account of Casablanca. These aren’t quite the surrogate biographies that allow a film to illuminate the writer’s life, but they are much more personalised accounts than the typical BFI analysis of a classic. The BFI’s purpose is, of course, to preserve the memory of film, not to preserve someone’s memory of a film. But there is surely a place for the latter, and Leger has found it writing about someone who could say in an interview Leger quotes, “It’s like showing myself in a way that I was.”  (New York Review of Books)

   Yet though we have talked of four women in the book, we should add a fifth: if Loden shows Wanda as the woman she once was, then who might that woman have been? This is where the book becomes in its later stages, almost a detective story, with Leger fascinated almost as much with the woman on whom Loden had based the film as with Loden. How to find out more about this woman? Leger hired a researcher and finally found the story in a paper from March 1960 called “The Go-For Broke Bank Robber. Her name was Alma Malone, with an incestuous, metal-worker father. Malone left school at fourteen, married and divorced twice, then took up with a recidivist and, after a bank robbery went wrong, ended up in jail herself — sentenced to twenty years even though she, like Wanda, never made it to the bank. She is released a decade later, around the same time as Loden’s film, which she probably never saw: Wanda was hardly, commercially, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Bonnie and Clyde. She is a woman we might say society very much touched, taking into account a remark Marguerite Duras made when speaking to Kazan after Loden’s death. “I think there is always some trace of something in yourself that society can’t touch, something inviolable, impenetrable, determining.” Leger quotes the passage, and also notes Duras saying, “there is an immediate and definite coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda.” (Comparative Cinema) But when some have few inner resources and fewer opportunities, society will touch them, often painfully. 

      If Duras can say that “there is an immediate and definite coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda” it lies partly in Loden’s ability to show, by both playing the character and directing the film, and doing so with a far greater interest in the socio-economic circumstances of her character over the narratively driven excitement of the crime, that society impacts on the inviolable and yet leaves the mystery intact. Leger, like Loden, is haunted by a remark Alma made where she thanks the judge and says, “I’m glad it’s all over.” A life must be a desperate one for a person to thank the judge for sentencing them to twenty years, and one in complete contrast to Leger’s as she muses over what so attracts her to Wanda. “I have never been homeless, I have never abandoned my children, I have never given over my existence or even my financial affairs to any man, I don’t think I have ever entrusted even the most banal area of my life to anyone.” Wanda looks like she is trying to put her life into anybody’s hands who will take her, and Alma Malone goes so far as to put herself into the judge’s hands as if he is just another man telling her what she should do. If Duras is correct to say there is something in oneself that society cannot touch, perhaps Alma expresses this in her remark that she is pleased it is all over, while also revealing just how little of herself society has finally managed to commandeer, no matter if she will have little freedom to be herself during a jail sentence.  

    It is this surplus aspect, the self that society cannot touch, even if its fingerprints are all over Wanda, that Loden manages paradoxically to reveal and that Leger, like Duras before her, wants to discuss. Duras says to Kazan, “have you ever made a film about somebody? When I say somebody, I mean someone you have singled out, whom you can see for who they are…?” There is in the query an accusation, even if Kazan may have tried more than most American filmmakers to do just that. It is the sort of question a writer would take for granted but a filmmaker perhaps not — even if both were writers and filmmakers, with Kazan a director who went on to write fiction (including a novel based loosely on his relationship with Loden, The Arrangement), and Duras was a writer who went on to become a director. In her question resides the sort of query a novelist may take for granted, and a filmmaker feels that they must resist — that a film is a much broader endeavour than a novel. This might be true, and if so proposes there is a space for the sort of work that singles out character and turns this into semi-fictional accounts of films that have nothing to do with BFI analytic classics, nor a novelisation of a box-office hit. Such a work can extract from all the filmic elements, a novelistic singularity. A Suite for Barbara Loden is a good example of this approach, and successful enough for us to wonder why there are so few of them.


© Tony McKibbin