Harry Shuster

"With her first and only feature film--a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in--Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loder), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and...