We of the Madison Women’s Media Collective travelled to Milwaukee to meet with Ms. Loden in conjunction with the showing of her feature film Wanda[.] Though a little shy and nervous, Loden answered our questions for hours in the afternoon prior to the screening and continued the interview late into the night. Loden: “I know a lot of women are insulted by Wanda because they think it shows women in a bad way. To me it’s valid; it’s like showing myself and a way that I was. People say, ‘We don’t want to see anybody like that.’ Those are the people who wouldn’t want me to exist, and they would say that I was not valid or that I shouldn’t be heard.”

Loden’s prescience rests in focalizing pressing considerations of labor, gender, and survival, made in advance of two key films of women’s refusal and drift: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985). The gestural specificity of Loden’s performance, her habitation within the exhausted lifetime of rural Appalachia, its aesthetics of passivity and failure, resonate deeply with tendencies afoot in contemporary cinemas of duration and observation.