Cinematic adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’ by Sally Potter: A Review

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando was one of her more special novels because of its eccentric plot, story and narrative. It was regarded as the “The longest and most charming love letter in literature” written by Woolf for her close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. But besides its personal charm and eccentricity, the book has also been regarded in high esteem for the unusual themes and issues it covered with an unusual narrative. A character transcends centuries, countries and even gender in this book in the most peculiar fashion and meets different people throughout this journey gaining fascinating experiences. Along the years the “longest…love letter” has also come to be acknowledged for its potential to initiate conversations on issues of sexuality, gender, history, time, narratives, modernity and so much more.

64 years later Sally Potter, an English filmmaker adapted the novel into a film with Tilda Swinton playing the title role of Orlando. While filmic adaptations of literature are not unique, mostly realist or sci-fi narratives make it to the silver screen from books. To adapt this unusual narrative which was both realist and yet phantasmagorical (full of images; dreamlike), was an interesting attempt which certainly yielded an interesting film to say the least. The film won many accolades and awards including “Audience prize for Best Film” at the Venice Film Festival. Translating transitions between centuries and genders for film could not have been easy. Following is an account of the techniques and processes that Potter used to achieve the same.

The movie with a slightly different ending from the novel, more or less keeps the spirit of the original work alive. The most important aspects of the depiction of the flow of the story through the ages in the film are the editing and the cinematography. Change in the centuries that might be easy to read about on an abstract level in a novel, may become very difficult to depict on screen but an effective screenplay in the film allows one to fall in line with a visual representation of this progression.

Potter in her various interviews has given accounts of how was she able to pull off the seemingly impossible task of depicting three ages- the Elizabethan, the Victorian and the modern and what techniques did she use to build up the transitions between each. Sally relates that she derived the iconography of respective ages in terms of the colour palettes, the structure of the characters etc. from the paintings of the time. For the Elizabethan era she says she looked at the miniature works by Nicolas Hilliard, the famous court painter of Queen Elizabeth I. The intentional use of shades of red, orange etc. and reduction to a bare minimum of shades of green and blue was a technique that she employed in the film.

Similarly, for the icy mis-en-scene of the film, she stated in the post screening Q&A session at the San Francisco Film Festival (SFF) that she drew inspiration from the Dutch paintings with their use of the whites and the dark shades. The Victorian era and the romantic age have been depicted through the use of natural colours to bring in a sense of the tragic, romantic and melodramatic themes of the time.
There are two very important moments in the film which mark the brilliant use of the choreography and the editing. The first is when Orlando discovers that she is no longer a man. Being a very important theme of the film i.e., the transcending of sexuality, it has been treated with equal significance by emulating in the scene, the famous painting by Botticelli- The Birth of Venus. There is a remarkable resemblance between the two images and has a lasting impression in the mind of the viewer, the significance of which is also not lost because both the images signify the birth of a new identity.

The second moment signifies the other important theme of the film which is transcending of time i.e., when Lady Orlando exits from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century. The imagery of this transition is very precarious. Through the introduction of a labyrinth, absent in the original work, editing has been employed through the use of sharp and frequent cuts, rendering a transition in the ages through a change in the colour and complete persona of Orlando as she runs through the maze and transcends an entire century.
As for the interior monologues from the novel, Sally admits that they were quite detailed and explicit to be incorporated in the movie. It is through the subtle gaze of Tilda Swinton into the camera every now and then, seemingly in a direct connection with the audience, that it conveys the essence of these monologues.

The entire film is about ambiguity. Potter says that the film is about the essence of the novel which is the force of Zeitgeist. Orlando is constantly struggling against it, sometimes yielding to it and at other times conquering it. But even so the film is also a narrative of a nation and simultaneously that of a human, coming to terms with their respective identities.

By being outside history, Orlando is able to live in different eras and see what each age holds for its men and women. Potter says that the film is dealing with many issues of ‘larger political value’, such as coming to the end of Russian and British empires, the story of England losing and finding itself and at the same time dealing with the ‘true’ universal question- the difference between men and women.
In an interview, when critiqued on her approach to the issue of emancipation of women as being deliverable only through men, Potter replied that it is precisely this idea that the film is set out to refute and added that the emancipation of human is only possible through being a human. She says that the difference between the sexes is an illusion and the reality is the commonness between them and although differences in the society must be respected, they must not be sought to create boundaries and walls between people. The essence of the film she suggests is to not to be determined by one’s past but moving on continuously.

The film at many moments with its tongue in cheek humour makes great political comments on the civil, political and property rights of women. An instance of Orlando’s ability to make a strong feminist critique of Britain in its three eras-
‘First Official: One, you are legally dead and therefore cannot hold any property whatsoever.
Orlando: Ah. Fine.
First Official: Two, you are now a female.
Second Official: Which amounts to much the same thing.’
Orlando is a thorough critique of power not only in an administrative sense but also in a philosophical sense which relates to the power of defining identities. Thus, it is a text which is a powerful political critique on many levels.

Orlando has been widely acclaimed as an extremely relevant gendered critique of society and politics. But at the same time its cinematic excellence has not passed unnoticed. Max Hoffman in his review of the film writes “Sally Potter has affirmed my hope that we need not always look to the past for enduring cinema. That films as great as the German silents of the 20s, as great as the works of Orson Welles are still being created.” Film critic, David N. Butterworth, comments “Orlando cleverly judges issues of identity and sexual ambiguity in an enchanting story that is totally preposterous yet, “because this is England, no one tends to notice””. Thus, in terms of critical acclaim Orlando manages to fare well and Potter is able to successfully present a gendered historiography of England.

Unfortunately, Virginia Woolf herself was not too keen on the medium of movies, especially their reliance on literature for inspirations. But more on that later.