Wanda (1970) | Q&A with Elena Gorfinkel

My name is Bijan dra July. I'm a film programmer here at the UCLA Film and Television archive. And I want to welcome you tonight to the Billy Wilder for our screening of Wanda. Um yes. And we have an esteemed guest tonight, um Elena Gorfinco, who you may have seen in the lobby selling her wonderful book. Um after the screening, she will sit for a Q&A with our archive research and study center director director, Maya Montañez Smuckler. And so stick around for that. And I'm just going to do a a few housekeeping and announcements and then I'll bring Elena up to formally introduce the film. So tonight's free screening, as well as all of our year-round programming, is made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor. Um and we want to thank them and our partners at the Hammer. We also want to thank the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the Barbara Streisand Center, and also of course the archive staff uh that make all these evenings possible. Let's give all of them a round of applause. And just some uh house announcements, uh you can take photos um or video before, so now, or after the program, but not during the film. Please silence and put away all of your devices that emit light um cuz even if you think we can't see it, we definitely can. Um um And if you want to spread the word about uh your experience tonight, you can tag us at UCLA FT V archive on your preferred social platform, as well as log the screening on Letterboxd. You can also sign up for our newsletter at cinema.ucla.edu and find out about all the good programs we have coming up. And now I'd like to tell you a little bit more about Elina. Elina is a film scholar, critic, and curator whose recent projects include two major Barbara Loden retrospectives, Wanda and Beyond at BFI Southbank just this last past summer in June, and The World of Barbara Loden at Anthology Film Archives also this summer. July and August of 2025, which was organized of course alongside the release of her book for sale out there and probably afterward. Wanda and Beyond, which just came out. She has delivered keynote and invited lectures internationally including at the Crack Hour lecture at Goethe University in Frankfurt, the Cinepoetics Cinepoetics lecture at Frei Universität Berlin, and has spoken at Yale, Chicago, Cambridge, and Vancouver. Her public programs and filmmaker conversations have appeared at BFI, ICA London, Tate Modern, Lux, and Light Industry. She also serves on the editorial boards of journals of cinema, media studies, camera obscura, World Picture, and ASAP Journal. A member of the London London Film Critics Circle, she writes for Sight & Sound, Cinemascope, Art Monthly, and another gaze, and contributes essays and interviews for Criterion and other distributors. Please welcome Elina Gorfinkel. I'm really delighted to be here to introduce this extraordinary film, Barbara Loden's Wanda, which was released a little over 55 years ago in August of 1970 at the Venice Film Festival winning its Pasinetti Critics Prize. It's especially moving to be here at the UCLA Film Archive because of the critical role that the archive has played in the restoration and revival of the film and to be here with members of the audience um who were so essential to the films uh now legendary restoration and re-release. In particular, the film restorationist Ross Lipman who spearheaded the film's preservation from rescued original negatives at the archive and we also have with us Barbara Loden's son Marco um Joachim who has kept her legacy going and was an immense help to me uh in so many ways in my writing of the book about the film uh published with the BFI Film Classics. Yet, the path to Wanda's status as a film classic um was very long uh and not immediate or automatic. It took the work of many decades of devotees and advocates to bring it back into the light. Among them, the archive as well as many critics, writers, filmmakers, restorationists, and scholars who screened the film, talked about it, and tended to its ongoing life as a cinephile lodestone. Film history, Wanda reminds us, is never written just once. Yet, at the heart of all of this is uh something that um at the heart of uh sorry, the film's now mythical and iconic status is the immense talent of actor, writer, director Barbara Loden whose vision this film was from start to finish. Wanda is now considered a landmark work of American independent cinema made by by Loden on the margins of the US film industry with minimal support and entirely independently of existing uh production infrastructures. Marguerite Duras called it a miracle, but I would say it is perhaps also a gift from Loden's own imagination made over the course of 10 weeks with a four-person crew on a little over $100,000 from a single patron, the safari entrepreneur Harry Schuster. The film was shot on location in the ruins of a once thriving anthracite mining area in and around Scranton and Carbondale, as well as in Waterbury, Connecticut. Wanda offers a searing critique of the ineluctable fate of an ordinary working class woman played by Loaden herself who abandons her life as miner's wife and mother, choosing instead to drift. Its origins lie in a Sunday news profile that Loaden read about uh an ill-fated bank robbery and the woman accomplice, Alma Malone, who expressed gratitude for her sentence. What kind of woman, Loaden could Loaden wondered, could be that quote, according to Loaden, passive and numb in her ascent to imprisonment? Here was the seed that bloomed into the irreducible and inassimilable figure of Wanda Goronski, played unforgettably by Loaden herself in a haunting performance. Unusual for its time for its representation of underclass marginalization and of a woman's plight unseen in US cinema, Loaden produces for us a profoundly haunting portrait of an anti-heroine at her limits and on society's margins. Wanda, her her creation, refuses a neat identification or liberal models of empathy, challenging the film viewer to contend with the figure whose passivity is their primary survival mechanism. The film, as you'll see, veers across melodrama, road film, and heist narrative, and then back around. And in this, Loaden subverted many conventions of the cinema both in terms of representation and also in terms of industrial practices in her approach and production process. In being made on the studio's margins, Wanda is very much a proto-feminist indictment of the sex and gender dimensions of capitalist exploitation and immiseration. But, it is also a reproach of a particular industrial mode of film production. Whereas the film is often framed as part of the emergence of the New Hollywood, I would argue that it exists decidedly oppositional to it. Allied and inspired in spirit and practice to the traditions of the underground, the avant-garde, and the new American cinema then flourishing and from which Lodin drew inspiration. Unsentimental and deglamorized, Wanda, the character and Wanda, the figure, was in Lodin's own word words, an anti-Bonnie and Clyde film. In drawing a bridge between Wanda's strike with no name and and her wandering through the film's landscape of coal banks, shopping malls, sweatshops, saloons, and parking lots, we can better situate the radical punch of Lodin's singular intervention and her sadly only feature. Lodin, who had an acting career in film, television, and theater, made two educational shorts after Wanda and struggled in the '70s to secure funding for further features that she was working on from her from her screenplays before her early death of cancer in 1980. Wanda's exploration of women's undervalued labor and experience of stagnant time was set on the very terrain of what, as you'll see, Lodin described as a scene of waste and wasted people. And this very propitious choice of this the locations that she shot in really resonated with histories of extraction and the undervalued lives lived in an afflicted America. So, I want to end with a couple of quotes both about this place that the film describes and a particular position that Wanda Goronski is situated in as well as Lodin's approach to filmmaking. Uh and so Lodin stated about the landscape and about the film. And she said, "A lot of people say, who cares about people like this? But this is my whole point. There's a vast wasteland of people floundering around and have no reason for their existence. See, these people aren't aware of their condition. It's the whole thing that's wrong with America. The whole blight of America in one picture." This larger sense of a social critique also aligned with her emerging aesthetic vision and another kind of de-industrialized uh cinematic practice. And I want to end with this quote that often gets um kind of uh often gets um cited, but I think it's really a very powerful one where she says, "I really hate slick pictures. They're too perfect to be believable. I don't mean just in the look. I mean in the rhythm and the cutting, the music, everything. The slicker the technique is, the slicker the content becomes until everything turns into Formica, including the people." These um uh these words of Lodin's, I think, can um uh accompany us into the space of uh the space of Wanda and resonate with uh our experience of watching it um then as now, as powerful as it was in 1970 as it is in 2025. Thank you. Um distressing in so many ways, but punctuated by humor that feels very natural, but also um just the performances and the way the actors um they know their craft, so they can balance drama, uh violence, um sadness, and humor. Well, you've seen this film a million times, of course. What surprises you? Yeah, I mean, I think yeah, I also noticed the humor, but I think yeah, there's always something slightly different each time I watch it or just in the sense of the rhythm of the film or particular details that could kind of come forward. Um, but I guess to your point about the humor, I think perhaps yeah, on a first watch the poignancy and the sense of the cruelty of like the film or the sense the rawness of it is the first thing that one notices, but I think in terms of the um particular um investment in performance that Loaden brought to the filmmaking, I think it's really clear that one one can even trace in terms of her own career. I mean, she started out um in the '50s also appearing in small television roles. So, that that element of like the using physicality towards this friction um between these characters that are so finely wrought between her and Michael Higgins's Mr. Dennis. I think that we see this way that that really finely wrought friction between them is also something that is bound up in rhythm and a con- contrasting tempos, but also um the sense that they're this fundamentally odd couple. And and this so that I think when you watch it over and over, there are like elements of the sl- like kind of subtle slapstick come through. I mean, there's this um a really interesting um critic uh Belgian critic uh Dirk Lauwert who talks about this kind of trace the slight trace of uh you know, an element of slapstick that is kind of there um in in the way that Loaden embodies kind of her performance, but also in relationship to Higgins, particularly when when they meet. And you know, I also I tend to laugh just at the like the way that the the performances are sort of timed. I mean, this film has an incredible sense of timing that's both connected to the flow of filmic reality, but also the way that it's punctuated and edited, which is also a credit to Nick Proferes as both cinematographer and editor. >> Yes, absolutely. Um interesting about slapstick, mhm, makes me think about the use of props. Of course, the pocketbook, the enormous pocketbook where she keeps saying, "I don't even have anything in this purse, you know." But, she still always carries it, she loses it, she's robbed, he goes through it, and and then in that final scene even when she's running away from the man who's attacked her, she's still got that purse. Um so, those attention that attention to detail, um is is throughout the film. Tell us you've spent so much time on this film and and studying um the Loden's approach and the making the production history. Tell us a little bit about about the production history, the um where she filmed, her use of actors and non-actors. Give us a sense of of how this beautiful film was made. Sure. Um well, I think the process of um the making of the film really took close to a decade from the moment of its sort of conception and her carrying around this news story and trying to build a narrative out of it. And from uh the first script version that she wrote in 1961, which was called The Gray World, to different iterations of the script to the shooting of the film because she was looking for funding for some time for it, particularly from the mid-50s onwards. And so, it took some time to develop. And so, what I was interested in in um in the book and also in my research was trying to trace that process, but also the way that the idea of Wanda kind of metabolized and grew and kind of snowballed into what we see on screen. And um in terms of Loden's process, I think she you know, she initially thought that someone else would direct and then eventually came to understand that this was something that she needed to make herself. And that presented a number of challenges. Certainly in terms of both being the director and the star of the film, but that tension between being in front of the camera and behind the camera, I think is also what makes it, as someone exclaimed, a masterpiece. Um in that it in that this kind of sense of both being very attuned to um what she wanted to get out of um both location and and man and and managing and also managing this cast of non-professionals um was rather um significant and I think it really shows in the film in the sense that she's not only creating this fictional reality, she's also stepping into this almost like documentary scene and that tension between this documentary space and a fabulated space is what is super interesting in the film. In terms of Loden's production, I co- she spent um some time once she got funding for the film from um Harry Shuster, she spent um several weeks um just location scouting before um uh uh actually deciding on the locations and then when shooting began in the summer of 1969, another thing I find really fascinating about the film is that it was shot in the summer of Woodstock. And so to me, there's a lot of things in my process of research of the production of the film, I was really interested in all the things that were not in the film. Were things that got cut away, whether it was through her own kind of process of um cutting out things, but also contextual, you know, the moment of the film's making relative to what's in the film. Um, but to come back to the point, I can go on for a long time about this. But to go back to the the process of production, um, the script had a set, you know, had a set of uh uh scenes and kind of locations that had to shift relative to the locations she found and some of the contingencies of working with non-professionals. And so, I think one of the things that I learned in doing research and also, um, you know, which was really generously, um, aided and abetted by Marco Joachim's, um, willingness to show me the kind of the documentation of the film as well as the scripts, was that, um, uh Loden was thinking uh was was trying to, um, both kind of she was both I would say, like, in terms of the script, she there what the the dialogue itself was rather scripted, um, the dialogue between her and Mr. Higgins, but she had to often try to negotiate, um, like the difficulties of of non-professionals, of working with non-professionals and coaxing performances from them. And so, um, the film is often talked about as though it's entirely improvised, when in fact, it was this a really interesting combination of both scripted elements that needed to be, um, accommodated to the conditions of shooting on location with a very, very small crew and with, you know, things that wouldn't necess- that didn't work or that scenes that she couldn't kind of reproduce from the script. And so, um, so there's both an element of the script that's there, but there's also these moments of um, very ingenious, um, im- you know, improvisations that happen. Um, and I mean, for example, on one scene um that uh is really at the crux of the film, it's right at the center. It's that really um amazing conversation, you know, when they're in the clearing um what that uh Mr. Dennis and Wanda have about um, you know, her hair that leads into this whole excursus, philosophical excursus about the disagreements between them about um about uh you know, you know, wanting anything or not having anything and who has the right to want and desire um and who doesn't. And um she says, "I might as well be dead then." Well, that scene was very much in the script, that dialogue, but then the scene the the the thing that follows, which was Mr. Dennis chasing the plane, was something that Lodin prompted Michael Higgins to to do because when they were shooting um when they were shooting that scene, they they were working in this clearing where there were these um uh toy plane enthusiasts that would show up every day. And so uh Lodin asked Higgins, "Do you want to work with this and try to incorporate this?" So, this element of this kind of performed play that is is a beautiful bookend to this like conversation that they have that is directly from the script is this really extraordinary conjunction of both the scripted and the contingent that I think is really um incredible in the film. And it's also really this one place in the film where there's a sense of lightness and play or a sense of possibility where there where uh Mr. Dennis is I mean, Lodin herself said like, "I hope that was not too much of a Don Quixote kind of image where he's like chasing windmills." But um I think it is it has this um allegorical force um you know, where they're where they kind of it's all sky and no no dead deadening ground. Um, and so that's an example of something that I found rather interesting in the production process. But, there's a lot more to say about Yeah, I mean, I interviewed some of the non-professional actors, particularly the husband, um and Miss Godek, who was um Jerome and Mary Ann Tier, who were a couple and there was their children. So, for them it was a home movie. For their for for them they recounted the the their involvement in and in in being directed by Loeden. Um for them they they fondly remember it because their family treats it as a home movie. And so, this was something really interesting to me because I knew that scene back to front and had memorized it. But, then talking to someone who was kind of had just was me was in a film for the first time. Jerome Tier was describing being really overtaken by Barbara Loeden's um capacity as an actor. Um you know, the the the point at which she moved from being a performer from being a director, sorry, and kind of working kind of and trying to coax everyone in the courthouse to suddenly she he said a light bulb uh went on it when he saw her just switched it into her role when before she was just sort of you know you know, moving around the room and and trying to direct everyone. So, these kinds of things really um opened up for me an understanding of the film both the kind of material that Marco allowed me to uh to see of Loeden's own papers and her documentation of the production as well as things like in you know, interviews with people that hadn't really been talked to. Do you what kind of sense do you have of how she cast the film and especially with the folks who were non-actors? Was she doing casting calls as she moved through locations? How much did she rehearse? I mean, of course, at the time that she makes this film, she's an incredibly accomplished actress both on stage, had already run uh won a Tony Award, and um and also in films, and and is she already working some as an acting coach at this time, or does that >> No, that comes later. Yeah. >> But um so she knows how to work with actors having already been such an accomplished actor. Um so yeah, what kind of understanding do you have of her casting process? Well, for the she hired 33 non-professionals from the area of Scranton Carbondale, and mostly they did calls on the radio, and um in interviews she recounts that um often um parents would bring their children, whereas and so there would be these kind of, you know, acres of children that would come that um that uh these parents would bring, so then she began to sort of gather the parents that were um and so um this was a kind of process uh that was also connected to the the location shooting, but it was mostly through the radio. And I think with in some cases um certain actors would get cold feet, and then or the kind of non-professionals um would get cold feet, so she'd have to find someone else. For example, the father of Mr. Dennis in that incredible oniric um City of God sequence, um apparently they they had someone, and then they found had to find someone else. Um uh Charles Durning, who does, I think, he's a really incredible um performer, but I think Loden was very aware of the fact that she had to uh I mean, the thing with non-professionals or kind of amateur actors is that you can't rehearse because they don't have the they don't have the the training to to rehearse. It's that she had to just kind of keep the camera running and talk to them as though they were themselves and but give them some guidance about the scene or who they were supposed to be in the scene, but to keep it rolling and then try to get usable footage from that. And so it was really like this process of coaxing and negotiating um in in in shooting the scenes with non-professionals. And some kind of Jerome Fear, for example, was more familiar with uh or had perhaps been in like kind of high school theater um and so had a little bit of a sense um but I think many people he described other people being somewhat nervous having never really been uh you know, in a in the context of like a movie set of however small scale it was. Um in other instances, yeah, I think um that you really see that she kind of editing choices that are made. For example, the guy named Tony who is not her father, but is just a friend. Just Some people think it's the her father, but it's um uh in the script, it's just someone I know you know, an older man who's Tony who's yeah, he's he's in the coal bank and he's gathering the coal, I think. Um the way that the scene is cut is because of the fact that she wasn't really able to get um good footage of him speaking um and so that often she would get the sound of his kind of of good dialogue and then the cut back to her to her face, but actually produces this really beautiful sense of reverberation where he's talking about, you know, having a nice day after he picks coal and we have this sense of her own inner turmoil and the doldrums of this thing that we don't yet know um that's uh that we'll see that she's about to go to the courthouse. So there are these really interesting ways that she was able to take the the you know, the non-professionals on their own terms, but it was particularly I think she was more familiar with the context and with a kind of working-class um experience that she was able to really respect that and respect that space. I mean, the courthouse scene is also incredible because you see it's a room full of non-professionals and she's like literally walking into it and has to really modulate to their their terms in some ways rather than um the other way around even though she's the one that's kind of directing and shaping this whole fiction. >> so quiet in that scene, so she really lets those first-time performers shine. And I mean, of course, that's part of the character of Wanda, but she could have also as an experienced actor, you know, felt like she had to uh maybe take up more of the energy just to compensate for um performers who were a little more shaky in their inexperience, but she doesn't at all do that. What um you had access to um her archives and in your book, which is wonderful, um you have many images that we've never seen of the production of Barbara Loden work working of um with her crew. Tell us a little bit about some of those images and what they meant to you in the process of of studying this film and her work. Yeah. Um yeah, thank you to Marco again for um yeah, allowing kind of his generosity and allowing me to use the images in the book and also to be able to just look at just all of this documentation and I think I was really happy and delighted to find how much she had documented um the production process and particularly the things that um some of the images that are in the book are both um look kind of the kind of documentation of the film being shot, kind of photographs, um snapshots of the film being shot as well as to me these incredibly poetic images that to me feel like is what I something I call in the book like images between the images of her preparatory um materials particularly um in um costume tests um in which she's sort of testing out particular um you know, clothing that she's wearing and also particular costumes that end up becoming very critical in the film like her very kind of quasi bridal quasi communion dress that when she's fully subsumed in Mr. Dennis's image of her, you know, where she kind of is wearing the proper clothing and is like in the fully white um costume and these um these images for me were really um telling even because they really spoke to Lodens creative process and also the way she was thinking about character and even things that were left out like there was um uh um it's not in the book but there was one set of um contact sheets of her trying out different costumes and there was this kind of like floppy stripy hat and she ended up not using it but it was really interesting to see her sort of figuring out ideas because she was so good at the character that isn't demonstrative there's not a lot of psychological exposition so a lot of the um a lot of the details um are really focused on the very kind of materiality of the presence of the character um it was also really interesting to see how the production like and location scouting of plant polaroids to just understand um how she was approaching the sense of space and uh location. And this also gave me more insight into what piece and together um a big like a larger sense of that process and also kind of where her ideas were and how they transformed to the finished product. This is such a beloved film. I mean, of course, here at the UCLA Film and Television Archive um Ross Lipman who's here in the audience. Yes. Beautiful. The film is so beautiful. Um has just a a wonderful like truly heroic story about um of saving the elements and doing the restoration. And um and but as you said in your intro, there have been many scholars, curators, audiences who have you know, found this film, have championed this film, have celebrated this film. Um but it's and it's also described as you know, kind of a a lost film and you reflect on that in the book. And so I always kind of debate that with myself as I'm really interested in you know, films that maybe didn't get the reception that they I think they deserved at the time of their release and so they but but that they're never entirely lost because maybe there's a print out there or VHS tape or the filmmaker you know, loved that film maybe even is still around willing to talk about it. So, how do you how do you work with that idea of of a lost film that is so beloved and that you know, thankfully in 2025 we're we're here enjoying it I mean, it's been very I mean, I've like thought about this film. I I first encountered the film on a very crappy bootleg that I bought off the internet on like a sub eBay website. And this was the film I used to >> that when you bought it? >> 2005. Um and I um I still have it. I managed to recover it, but it was this like and it must have been from um there was a VHS and a It was either taped from television or it was from like there was a circulating um there was circulating copies of it in the '90s and early I mean it was must have been post MK is a French distributor that released it in 2003, I believe. So, it might have been from that version. Um but so, I'm very interested in the many generations of um revivals and and the tending to the film and this tending to the legacy of the film. And I think I I have I guess I I'm more cautious about claiming that something is lost. I I'm interested in the romance of loss around this film and in particular around Barbara Loden because of course like her her life was too short and there were many things that she wanted to accomplish and achieve and she had many other ideas and projects and so um so, the film represents that kind of these many layers of loss in a way and that is I mean in some sense produces a kind of mythos, produces a kind of romance, but I want it to be a little bit more even though I said I comment to that as well and that's also a way of attending to the injustice of history for women like Loden who had difficulty making work. But I wanted to um actually look at also like who was tending to this film because I came when I when I first saw the film in 2005, it was because Berenice Reynaud had also wrote wrote this beautiful essay who are you know who I know is an important figure in LA for film culture in LA recently passed away and she you know, she was one of the first scholars to really redeem the film and she wrote an essay in 1995 and it was translated in English into English in 2003 and so there were many generations of kind of feminist writing kind of you know, cinephiles and kind of critics and writing about this film or like really um showing it or trying to keep the flame alive and I was really interested in being a bit more attentive to the all of those voices and all of those efforts rather than saying like oh I'm I'm finding it for the first time but it's not true. It's not and and I think that is also a way of attending to the way that Loden herself was also she she she kept it alive during the time during the 70s because she would travel with the film to women's film festivals. She would um you know, she you know, she was someone who um was also trying to leave her mark and um and so I think that it's it's much more complicated than just is it a lost you know, is it a lost film? Of course I think there's a pleasure there's a cinephile pleasure in um re-finding something or feeling you found it but it's like we all have that experience. Part of cinephilia is that you you you find it and it's yours and it's like you you feel really strongly attached to it but I think there is also something very particular about Wanda that is this it's our like you know, it's our Wanda in the sense that it's our collective um inheritance um but it also stands for many I think what's so powerful about the film is that much like Wanda herself who's a very specific character but it was also refract many other women's stories and also refracts onto other cinema other women's cinemas made 5 years before Jeanne Dielman, and I find that really like an an incredible thing. Um dealing with some of the same questions. Um Uh I think Yeah, there's something about coming into a collective understanding of the films thrall upon us. Um yeah. I wonder if Yeah, I don't know if we should open it. And also And if people have questions for Ross or for Marco, Barbara Loden's son, that would be I'd be happy to cede the floor. >> And it seemed like there were a lot of folks who were seeing it for the first time tonight, which is super wonderful. There's um in the back, and if you can wait for the microphone. Oh, sorry, Lauren. Are you the only person with the microphone? Oh, okay. Yeah, right here in the almost at the very top. Uh yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for bringing your work to the Billy Wilder Theater. I have a I have two questions. Mhm. Um considering the very indie nature of this film, I'm curious what do you think present-day independent filmmakers can learn from the methodology of how Barbara Loden brought this film to the world? And my second question is I have never seen the movie before, actually, but I'm struck by parallels that I kind of notice with Nights of Cabiria. I don't know if you also Yeah. kind of like, you know, and I'm curious if Mhm. if you think she was um a fan of Fellini, or it just happened to be serendipitous that she, you know, that this kind of is similar to Cabiria. Thank you. Um so, the first question was Remind me again. Sorry. I I can answer for second. You'll go to tell me what the first one was again? All right, the lessons for independent. I think a very simple way of um of saying what the lesson is is less is more. Um uh to the extent that it's there's uh I think the modesty of scale of the film is actually rather is like one of the many gifts of the film. Is that um I I don't think Loden was unafraid of I mean both at the level of content as well as form. She was unafraid of um taking something small and magnifying it. Um and this works at many levels in the film, but I think also you know, after she made Wanda she was like, "I'd like to make a film on even less than this." Um but she was very committed to the small scale and that I think allies her much more with um uh much scrappier practices in American cinema in the '60s and early '70s. Um and with respect to Nights of Cabiria actually it's very interesting that you bring that up because she was a big fan of what I found also rather interesting in the research was I wanted to take seriously every reference she made and every to really give tribute to her voice and also which is a very acute and very powerful and poetic voice as well in the way that she described her practice particularly in the quotes I read in the opening. But she also talked about filmmakers she loved and I took I took seriously every single mention and I followed those through and that came out in the kind of programs that I did at the BFI and Anthology Film Archives because I wanted to trace this. But actually Nights of Cabiria she did mention Fellini as one of her favorite filmmakers. But Nights of Cabiria is an interesting one because there was a critic who unfavorably compared Wanda to Nights of Cabiria saying that Wanda the character was too stupid according to him, whereas there was something dignifying about Cabiria or something more kind of um um mythical or somehow more uh kind of you know, there's some kind of metaphysics of kind of or something existential about about Cabiria and I found that actually rather interesting because um you know, they are in in many ways very similar characters who are sort of thrust into um uh thrust into a kind of a kind of drifting um mode. And so, all of these elements to me are I think yeah, following the strands was really really instructive for me and um um in thinking through like what to take seriously, like what she said her influences were, what she said um you know, any stray reference I would follow um Other questions? Uh the question about the location. >> Mhm. Um the city of God Mhm. Yeah. the when Mr. Dennis told her that she's not a citizen can you refer something about that dialogue? Um the well, the city of God is a separate scene, but the the the line where she says she's not a citizen of the United States. I mean, it I think I've maybe perhaps already said a little bit about it, but it seems to me that there's this contrast between the two characters there in that Mr. Dennis has an idea of like that you kind of claim the thing you want and there's this kind of possessive individualism that Mr. Dennis represents um and he's sort of saying like you're nothing if you don't want anything. Right? Like you have to have like a desire for possessions. You have to want to get a hat. Um and if you don't, you're you don't exist. Whereas uh Wanda's character is one who is so ingrained and so kind of anesthetized in Lodin's own terms by her experience that she kind of echoes what he's saying but almost in an ironic light. I find her sort of way of repeating what he's saying as um almost like a rebuke or a you know, this kind of strange like a fact of like in in restating it, there's something of um that uh an undermining at that in in just the way that she performs that line, I guess I'm dead then. Like um Lodin and also Lodin also used this notion of the undead in her talk about waste and wasted people or she described the character of Wanda as like an undead. And so the sense of uh someone who is um not you know, not not fully alive or like the the terms through which and so maybe this is also Hopefully that's helpful. But if you want to know about City of God, it was a real place. And it was a um it was in Waterbury, Connecticut. Uh I think in Waterbury, Connecticut and um it um is it was actually running well into the '70s or '80s. I actually did find some really interesting articles about it. But it Sorry? Yeah. '84 is when it closed. Yeah, so Holy Land was also it was kind of created as this sort of um reproduction of Bethlehem um and as a but amusement park actually. And so it's like religious amusement park. Um so it has this very strange status relative to the other spaces in the film because it's very odd. But um it does also kind of there is a through line in the film that is very much about these the glimmers of religion and the ways that religion is one kind of opiate um for um for people working people and um we see that you know from the beginning when the grandmother with the rosary beads um So Holy Land it was I think was a very inspired location choice. Um and you know where we have Wanda wandering through the actual tour in the catacombs where we have these crazy um like scenes of like sinners being mauled by lions and tigers in these caves, right? And at the same time Mr. Dennis is sort of being cut down to size by his very um concerned and um disdain disdaining father. Um so there's this really interesting work that that scene does um uh that moves it much more into something quite you know some into a kind of very different zone and that that's that location. Well and the timing of Mr. Dennis having that conversation with his dad before his his big his big crime of course is feels very um it's just very heavy that it's happening in that setting. And that's like the real job like he's going to get a real job and there's this kind of echoing between like Wanda and you know like I'm no good and being a good boy and like these there's a kind of like poetic rhythmic rhyming of the of the language is very simple language but it's also very full um in in these scenes. There's someone right here. If you can if you can just wait for the microphone. Wait for the microphone. >> Can you Can we wait for the mic? Yeah. I can There's a mic You want to grab the mic? I'll repeat it. The film was not in black and white. The film was not in black and white. Did you watch this film or He's asking about the question uh the Sorry, asking about the film's color or black and white, but the film is in color. >> The film is in color. The entire film is in color. But you perceived it as being in black and white. Is that what you're saying? No, it was it was all in color. Did she >> in color, but I will say this that she intended to She initially wanted to make it in black and white. But um everyone told her that um or this is what she said in interviews, but that she chose to make it in color because people encouraged her because that would allow it to be shown on television. But there's a whole other thing that the film did show on television in the '70s and the '80s, which I found also rather interesting in terms of its exhibition and reception because it was one of these things that kind of challenges the idea of its lostness because it it did actually, you know, people saw it. I wonder how it was edited for television. I mean, if it was for time and what was taken out. >> Yeah, I'm I'm not sure that much was I mean, yeah, they but it did show throughout the '70s and '80s, but to the question of I mean, I think earlier prints and maybe Ross could speak to this, but earlier prints the initial kind of print run of the film, the color was much more faded um and wasn't to Lodin's liking. And so when Ross Lipman um found the original camera negatives, and he writes about this in this essay called Defogging Wanda, that's on Criterion um .com, you can go look it up. Um uh what Ross found was that the images were much the kind of the color was much brighter than what those original release prints were. And so that um uh what some critics described as kind of watching it through a snowstorm or um that was a consequence of these poor release prints that were created in um 1970-71 um where in fact what where what what we're watching is a much more vibrant um color in the restored version. And so the version that I saw on bootleg was likely one of those release prints that was like reproduced a million times um through like bootlegging um was even more yeah, maybe approximated more of like a brown and white film or something. Um I guess we should yeah, wrap it up. >> you so much Elena. Thank you everyone for coming.