I PICKED THIS up because I liked Léger's Exposition, the first installment of a trilogy of which this book is the second. I had not at that time seen Wanda, the 1970 film Loden wrote and directed, nor even heard of Loden, though I had seen pictures of her as Maggie, the Marilyn Monroe-like character in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. Once I read the book, though, I got hold of Wanda as soon as I could, and it is as remarkable as Léger says it is.
The book's French title, Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden, does a somewhat better job of suggesting its nature than the English one does. Like Exposition, it orbits a scholarly/curatorial project, the writing of a film encyclopedia article on Loden; the book comes on like the article's more lyrical, more reckless twin, airborne and kaleidoscopic. This is not a biography of Loden, but a swirl of imagery and speculation that coalesces around that biography like a halo.
Also like Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden answers the old question "why are there no great women artists?" by pointing out that we tend not to look in the right places. Wanda got scant attention in 1970, and Loden died in 1980, at the relatively young age of 48, without having finished another film. Seeing it will convince you that Loden was a great woman artist, however, and Suite for Barbara Loden convinced me that Léger is no slouch herself.
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