A book about American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden
Suite for Barbara Loden, by Nathalie Léger, translated by by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon from Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden. Shall I get the book?
American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden in Wikipedia.
Here’s what David Collard says in his brief review on page 27 of the May, 2015, edition of the Times Literary Supplement:
“Barbara Loden (1932–80) is today remembered chiefly for her tumultuous marriage to Elia Kazan. She directed only one film, WANDA (1970), an understated masterpiece of American cinéma vérité. She appeared in the title role but had an otherwise low-key Hollywood career. Cinephiles keen to learn more about Loden should look elsewhere because this is not a biography but, rather, a hybrid monograph and memoir, a partial self-portrait and an often amusing account of the author’s travails when researching and writing the book. For film buffs familiar with the writings of Pauline Kael, Raymond Durgnat, and Gilbert Adair, this will seem thin stuff, but the author’s priorities and interest lie elsewhere. Leger has written books on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett, and in this volume she draws on a host of authors and auteurs, including Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, Herman Melville, Georges Perec, Sylvia Plath, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a peculiar little volume, both highly personal and impersonally erudite. . . . Nathalie Léger’s presence in the text is obtrusive and insistent but ill defined, and this can test the reader’s patience. The book’s real achievement—and a valuable one, it transpires—is to make you want to see the film again.”
