“Please, just write me an entry for the encyclopedia, not a self-portrait,” an exasperated editor says at one point. This premise becomes increasingly absurd, part of the levity that balances the book’s gravity, as Léger throws herself into her subject. Early in the book, convinced that she must know more, rather than less, in order to keep the entry brief, Léger embarks on an ambitious regimen of research. The genesis of “Suite for Barbara Loden” was a request that Léger received to write a brief entry on “Wanda” for a film encyclopedia. The film is “ Wanda,” the director is Barbara Loden, and the author is Nathalie Léger, the French writer and curator, whose book “ Suite for Barbara Loden,” translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon, has all the ingenuity of the mechanism inside a camera that allows a mirror to fold away so that light may pass through a focussed lens. Watching this film, a generation after it was made, another woman writes a book about the director of the film and the woman she plays, in whom the author recognizes both her mother and herself. A woman plays a role she wrote herself, in a film she directed, a film that is based on the life of a woman she does not know, in whom she recognizes herself.
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