Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992): To Never Grow Old
One of the defining features of being human is the finality of life, and confronting bodily mortality prompts one to entertain the idea of transcending one’s time allotted. Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), screened at the Whitney Humanities Center last Sunday, September 8, 2019, deals with this very idea. The film, introduced by Archer Nielson (Yale Film Study Center), opened the sixth season of Treasures From the Yale Film Archive, a series of classic and contemporary films from around the world shown in their original 35mm format. As part of Yale’s 50WomenAtYale150 coeducation anniversary celebrations, the 2019–2020 season of The Treasures is devoted to films by women directors.
Orlando is a story of a young British aristocrat, played by Tilda Swinton, who inherits a castle from Elizabeth I on one condition: he cannot “fade,” “wither,” or “grow old.” For several centuries, the eternally young Orlando lives in the isolation of his castle, occasionally dabbling in poetry and receiving foreign guests until he accepts an ambassadorial position in the Far East. Orlando returns home to the native “green and pleasant land,” changed not only in terms of his character but also in his physicality: Orlando turns into a woman.
The internationally co-produced film is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same name. Woolf’s narrative captivates its audience by creating the possibility of understanding generations of history by living through them. Orlando finds that the British Empire crumbles because its leadership has continued to make the same mistakes generation after generation. Both the book and the film are a narrative of an individual and a narrative of a country’s past. The central issues in the film remain universal and contemporary: nationalism, political boundaries, and populations losing and finding own identities.
Orlando’s world is filled with childlike curiosity and wonder despite the unimaginable length of their life. Instead of dragging their past around like a rock on their back, as so many adults do, Orlando uses their past to find novel solutions for recurrent problems. The lesson to take from the film is that people and countries ought to acknowledge the past, no matter how painful, and learn from it — or else spend centuries repeating the same mistakes.
Orlando casts a delicate balance of masculinity and femininity. Midway through his adventure, Orlando magically becomes a young woman and effortlessly adopts the new identity. After the screening, Merritt Barnwell, SY ’21, remarked that she’s never seen “a female character so powerful” on screen before. The film is an opportunity to consider history from both sides of the gender binary. Swinton’s subtle yet compelling performance dismantles notions of what it means to “be” either man or woman. The film shifts the focal point from the differences between men and women to that which they share. Orlando as both man and woman gracefully deals with the challenges of gender prejudice. Sally Potter invites viewers to celebrate the dissemblance of gender, not use the binary as an excuse for a divide. After glancing at their newly acquired female body in the mirror, Orlando addresses the viewer: “You see? Absolutely no difference!” highlighting how natural it is to understand a person as an individual instead of as a man or woman.
Orlando illustrates a humanist approach to questions of gender, fitting seamlessly with this year’s season of screenings, which opens up the conversation about the roles and paths of women in filmmaking. Though misogyny and the mistreatment of women have blemished the history of film for decades, Potter urges us to take agency over the course of our histories. Perhaps we should judge an artist’s work and legacy as a person instead of a man or a woman.
The Treasures from the Yale Film Archive series is presented with generous support from Paul L. Joskow, GRD ’70, ’72, and in partnership with Films at the Whitney. You can find out more about the upcoming screenings here on the Treasures From the Yale Film Archive’s website.
