suite for barbara loden by nathalie léger

But to assume a character mirrors the artist in specific experience, emotion, personality, character or history is niave, at best. True artists do draw from their personal experience, heart and soul to create, along with observations of collective human experiences. Nor is this a biography of a simpleton, downtrodden fictional character, Wanda, that Barbara created. This is not a biography of Barbara, a very complex, exceptionally intelligent, worldly, courageous, beautiful, once-living woman. Beyond that, there is an inordinate quantity of BS fantasy and opinion. Leger offers unattributed and apparently plagerized material that has not been fact checked and or lifted from a novel. All you have to do is make it up.'Īs a journalist and Barbara Loden's sister, Susan Loden, I am offended and repulsed that this recommendation was apparently followed in what should be presented as a work of fiction.

In 'Suite for Barbara Loden,' Leger claims filmmaker Frederick Wiseman 'quite calmly' advised when she couldn't get facts, 'Make it up. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman. New insights into Loden's sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer's evocative powers are put to the test. Loden's 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinema verite, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook.How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden.

Suite for barbara loden by nathalie léger