In her combination of the conversational and the incantatory, the fragmentary and the infinite, Léger captures something of Duras’s own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of “Wanda” are entirely her own.” Richard Brody, the new yorker “Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything-biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front. Let Brad at Diesel, A Bookstore tell you why you should read Léger’s book, and/or check out this video essay on Wanda over at vimeo. Read an excerpt of the book in the September 2016 issue of The Paris Review. Suite for Barbara Loden is one part of a triptych of books by Nathalie Léger that includes Exposition and The White Dress. Moving contrapuntally between biography and autofiction, film criticism and anecdote, fact and speculation, Suite for Barbara Loden is a stunning meditation on knowledge and self-knowledge, on the surfaces of life and art, and how we come to truth-a kind of truth-not through facts alone but through acts of the imagination. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker.
Here that distance is completely eradicated.” It is perhaps this “miracle”-the seeming collapse of fiction and fact-that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. “Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action.
“I believe there is a miracle in Wanda,” wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed.
0 kommentar(er)
