Dr Elena Gorfinkel will be giving a lecture and facilitating a workshop on Barbara Loden in Madison, Wisconsin in November 2023. Hosted by the Center for Visual Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the event is titled “Not Only: Barbara Loden’s Poetics of Fatigue”. The lecture will take place on November 9th and the workshop – on November 10th. Find more info about timings, location, and registration on the centre’s website.
Lecture Abstract:
“Not Only: Barbara Loden’s Poetics of Fatigue”
Discussions of the work of actor, director and writer Barbara Loden begin and end with her singular and single feature film Wanda (1970). Loden’s only feature before she passed away of cancer in 1980, Wanda is a landmark work of American film history, a bracing tale of an exhausted working-class woman’s drift and rejection of the ordinances of social reproduction, as she casts off her role as wife and mother to meander through Pennsylvania mining country, attaching herself to several terrible men. Due to the difficulties Loden faced in producing another feature despite the critical success of her first, in cinephile cultures Wanda and Loden’s legacy have become fused, an acute emblem of all the unknown, unmade, and unfinished works that constitute the wide span of women’s film practices. Drawing linkages across Wanda’s themes of fatigue and suspension, to the details of Loden’s unfinished, unproduced film projects and creative life in the 1970s – including her work as acting teacher and theater director – this talk aims to revise the narrative of Loden as site of lack and loss. Rather it takes up the premise of abundance, piecing together an aesthetic dispensation towards worn out, fed up feminist subjects and a seeking of new approaches to performing weary subjectivity. To do so it contests an understanding of women’s cinematic authorship as bounded by medium, prolific production, and scale. Contending with an expansive archive of materials and looking at the weft between life and work this talk aims to illuminate some of the animating fantasies, blind spots and imperatives of feminist film history when confronted with the creative labours of a putatively “minor” subject.
Workshop Abstract:
“Film Writing & Forms of Description”
Taking account of histories of film writing and approaches to observation, thick description, microhistorical case studies, uses of ekphrasis, and ways of describing archival ephemera and drawing on my own practices of film writing in public venues, this workshop will look to the humble practice of description to ask: what is at stake in the work of description for the film writer and visual culture scholar? How might an ethics of description be used to attend to works that fall out of conventional legibility, due to form, medium, or mode of production? How can description be used to excavate archival materials? We will also touch on questions of the poetic or speculative turn in the humanities and the pressures of public facing scholarship and its reification of “impact” as measure of research instrumentality.
Reading excerpts from Mark Strand, Lesley Stern, Erika Balsom, Elena Gorfinkel
Biography:
Elena Gorfinkel is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s, and co-editor of Global Cinema Networks (2018), and Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011). Forthcoming in 2024 are two books, The Prop (with John David Rhodes) and Wanda (BFI Film Classics.) She was the recipient of an Andy Warhol Arts Writer Grant (2018) for her current book project on cinemas of exhaustion. Her film criticism appears in Criterion, Sight & Sound, Artforum and other venues.