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Hi, this is Dana Steeves' movie critic, and we are here with the second episode of Flashback, Slate's new podcast about older films and discoveries from film history.

Joining me in the Slate studio is Kay Austin Collins of Vanity Fair.

Hey, Dan.

Hi, good to have you back.

Good to see you again.

And for our second show, we talked about gas light last time, which our introductory episode was my choice. But then we passed the baton over to you. And I believe I'm not mistaken that you came up with this idea during the course of our recording last time. Is that right? That it just popped into your mind as we were talking? I did because for a while it's changed to Beyonce now. but for a while, the background of my phone was of Barbara Loden, a screenshot from this movie. And I just looked at my phone. I got a text or something and looked at my phone and said, we should do this movie, actually. It was a good. It was a good act of chance because this I think fits really well with what I'm hoping to do with this podcast,

which is talk about old movies, but not just randomly dig them up from the archive, but

hopefully find movies that speak in some way to something that's going on in the culture right now.

And this movie has such a strange modernity to it, which we will get into.

So the film we're discussing this time is Wanda, a 1970 indie film that was written and directed by and starring Barbara Loden, and was the only film full-length feature film she ever made, has achieved something of a cult status as a film that was not lost exactly, but that was way under the radar for a very long time, although

it was quite recognized when it came out. It hardly had any distribution. It was shown mainly at

festivals. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1970, and it won Best Foreign Film

there that year. But then it spent a long time, essentially four or five decades, really

unnoticed and unavailable to film scholars. It was restored by the UCLA Film Archive, I believe, about a decade ago, and now has just been released on Criterion as a Disc and Blu-ray. It's also available on the exciting new Criterion Streaming channel. In fact, my first time exploring this channel, which just launched last week, was to watch Wanda and all the great related content they have to Wanda, which we'll talk about.

But since this movie was your choice, do you want to talk a little bit about Barbara Loden,

who she was, how this movie came to be?

Sure. So I think an important thing to know about this movie and her inspiration for it was that

she found an article,

a newspaper clipping about a woman who I believe was involved in a bank robbery. But the thing

that was really striking to her was that the woman thanked the judge for the jail time

that she was assigned. I think what struck her was that like her, this woman came from a

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