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Film is a bully It wants to make its viewers feel, and it has the tools to do so It deploys the visual, musical, dramatic and verbal all at once, in a barrage, and there is something about this multi-sensory overload that gives the viewer little critical room for manoeuvre Reading, by contrast, is very much a halfway house The reader and book need each other to complete the circuit of signification; as Rebecca Solnit has it, ‘The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed’ The book and the reader hold each other at arm’s length Film pins the viewer in her comfy chair and batters her with impressions   Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (tr Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon; Les Fugitives, 2015) is a book that puts the ambiguity back into film, and restores a productive critical distance between viewer and screen Léger’s book is an account of a film, Wanda, written and directed by, and starring, the little-remembered American stage and screen actor Barbara Loden, who died of cancer in 1980, aged 48 Wanda was her only film I’ve never seen it – not many people have, in recent times, although it won the International Critics Prize at Venice in 1970 and was shown at Cannes Here’s how the book opens:   Seen from a distance, a woman, etched against the darkness Whether it is a woman, in fact, is hard to tell, we’re so far away Framed by mountains of rubble, a tiny white figure, barely more than a dot against the dark expanse, slowly and steadily picks its way through this huge mass of debris: a vast, towering slagheap, intersected with great mounds of excavated rock, stony depressions, muddy tracks waiting to be ploughed up by the lorries In a wide-angle shot, we follow this minute ethereal figure as it makes its way intently along the forbidding horizon   The book, then, is in part an extended ekphrasis, ‘a verbal representation of a visual representation’ in the definition of James W Heffernan, a telling of a