Two little known actresses but with cult like status

Here are two virtually unheard-of actresses that have assumed almost cult status. One is Barbara Loden and her film Wanda (top photo). The second is Laurie Zimmer, best known for her role in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Loden directed the low budget Wanda in 1970. This is a classic film, a kind of American cinema verité or French New Wave, made for about $100,000 yet winning the best foreign film at the Venice International Film Festival. It’s stark, gritty, low key yet charged with underlying tension about a wayward and lost woman in the coal field towns of eastern Pennsylvania. While more than an irresponsible character your heart pours out for this woman who has no life and is human flotsam moving from town to town, man to man, and personal crisis to crisis. Loden, an accomplished Broadway actress - and one time wife of famed

director Elia Kazan - made few films. What she was aiming for in Wanda is stark reality with no artificial Hollywood effects including even a musical soundtrack. “The slicker the technique is the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns into Formica,” she once said. Some might call this film feminist because of the way the character is treated – and discarded – by men. But Loden rejected the claim, partly because the modern feminist movement was just getting underway by the time this film was made. “The picture was not about women's liberation,” she said. “It was really about the oppression of women, of people... Being a woman is unexplored territory, and we're pioneers of a sort, discovering what it means to be a woman.” I liken it to the film version of Sandy Posey’s song Born a Woman (1966), a feminist anthem if ever there was one yet without the feminist imprimatur. Loden not only directs but stars as the main character, an unassertive and uneducated working-class gal who is directionless and manipulated…..The second actress is Laurie Zimmer, a find for me in Carpenter’s Assault film. She plays Leigh, a tough civilian employee at an abandoned police station in LA. Unsmiling throughout you get the impression she’s no one’s fool and you wouldn’t want to mess with her. It’s not a particularly large role but her persona burns, making her indeed memorable. Zimmer had a very brief film career, all the more making her an icon. So cult like has she become that a film abut her was made, Charlotte Szlovak’s 2003 Do You Remember Laurie Zimmer? While Loden died untimely many years ago Zimmer is still alive and has worked at as a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Both these films are available on The Criterion Channel.)

Inaugural Black fest, the personas of PSH and film festival autumn

The inaugural Windsor International Black Film Festival gets underway Friday and runs through Sunday at the Windsor Armouries. Opening night is free with a panel discussion and short film The Cool and The Strong by Sheldyn Sam Moore. On Saturday films screen beginning 3 pm and the last one at 9.15 pm - $10 per person at the door. 11 films are on tap that day ranging from shorts to feature length and from Canada, the US, Caribbean and Africa. Closing night has a red carpet at 6 pm and awards presentation.

Watching a retrospective of the films of Philip Seymour Hoffman on the Criterion Channel I’m struck by the variety of different roles, personas and ages of the characters he plays. The best of the three I’ve so far watched is The Savages (Tamara Jenkins), a 2007-character study of two siblings (Hoffman and Laura Linney, photo) as they come to terms with the old age decline and death of their father (Philip Bosco). It’s a story that a lot of us have been through, dealing with a somewhat incorrigible parent and the depressing decision to take him to a nursing home. Rather pedestrian but the movie is saved by Hoffman and Linney's great acting. The second was David Mamet’s 2000 State and Main, with a great cast but incredibly stilted acting as if this was a stage play. It’s about a movie crew setting up a shoot in a small Vermont town with all the clichéd characters, from an obnoxious director played by William H. Macy and equally unsavory stars Alec Baldwin (channeling real life?) and Sarah Jessica Parker, fresh from her Sex and The City days. Julia Stiles is always great and Rebecca Pidgeon as PSH’s love interest a rediscovery. While PSH plays a gruff and arrogant professor in The Savages he’s a timid and baby-faced writer here. In Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002) Hoffman is a slam dunk villain, a detestable character in a film (along with Adam Sandler and Emily Watson) that’s as absurd as it is boring. I’ll be tuning into more PSH films this week.

Autumn (unfortunately?) is just around the corner. But it’s also film festival time. And I’ll be in Montreal for 10 days in October for the always cutting-edge Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (festival symbol left), as I have been for many years. Then I’ll be back in Windsor for the 20th anniversary of the Windsor International Film Festival Oct. 24 – Nov 3 - the entire festival this time as it befits the anniversary (I'm usually travelling). I can remember when this one-time small fest started out, with screenings on an inflatable screen in the drill hall of the downtown Armouries and at the lamented Palace Cinemas. No Toronto festival? I never do, having gone twice and found it cumbersome and extremely hard to get tickets. And why bother, since many of the films will be in Windsor two months later? And, this year, a bonus, Media City, the region's experimental fest, has shifted its dates to immediately after WIFF, so that will be three-three-three festivals running next to one another!