SUITE FOR BABARA LODEN
Léger was commissioned to write a short entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopedia. To the frustration of her editor, Léger could not stop researching and simply write him a paragraph; instead, she traveled to the United States for further research. Her slim book brings the reader on a journey in which Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald, and a handful of ordinary people take part. For Léger, they all illuminate an homage to Loden and her only (and often overlooked) film, Wanda.
What’s remarkable is the way the book becomes a self-portrait. At the same time, the lives of the important characters involved—Alma Malone, Barbara Loden, Wanda Goronski, Nathalie Léger—become refracted onto one another. In this way, Léger contemplates what it is, exactly, when one woman recognizes herself in another. The story becomes one of recognition, a virtuosic pursuit of the scalable distance that exists between each other. The book shows us we can get close, we can look and consider; yet there’s always opacity, the other will always remain, in some part, in mystery. In the words of the book’s beloved publisher, Dorothy Books: “As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.”
