(Book: 1928; Film: British release 1992; U.S. release 1993; 93 minutes)

Writer/Director: Sally Potter (1949 - ) latest film, The Tango Lesson (1997), in which she is writer, director, and one of two actors. Other films include the feminist experimental film, Thriller (1979), London Story (1980), and Gold Diggers (1983), with Julie Christie, Potter’s first feature . Potter is married to Zachariah Lake and has one child, a son. Orlando was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction.

1. Reviewing Orlando for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert writes: "it is not about a story or a plot, but about a vision of human existence." Describe that vision in this film and compare it to the vision of existence you find in the Woolf novels we have read.

2. In the book, Orlando’s sexual adventures begin (most explicitly) in the 18^th century, when she begins cross-dressing, becomes friends with the prostitute Nell, and "enjoyed the love of both sexes equally" (220). In the film, Orlando appears to be celibate until the 19^th century, when s/he meets Shelmerdine in the sequence headlined "SEX." Would you conclude that the film is thus equating sex with love in a way that the book does not? Is this necessary to maintain what Sally Potter calls "Orlando’s essential innocence"? Would a more overtly bi-sexual (hence transgressive) Orlando have been less sympathetic? Does this therefore sidestep the issue of homosexuality in a way that the book does not? Note that the only sex scene is between actors known to be male and female. There is one kiss between Sasha and Orlando, but it is interrupted. Potter leaves out the scenes in which Sir Harry appears as "Lady Harriet," later revealed to have been courting the male Orlando in drag. Is Potter attempting to deal with androgyny and gender issues outside of the question of sexual orientation?

3. The film emphasizes the bad quality of Orlando’s writing far more than the book does, particularly in the scene in which Nick Greene quotes some of it before writing his poem satirizing Orlando (a poem that in the book is more focused on satirizing the dilettantish aristocrat than the bad poet, see p. 95). The book emphasizes Orlando’s love of literature and compulsion to write ("some forty-seven plays, histories, romances poems" [77] before the age of 25) and rewards her with a prize for her poem "The Oak Tree." Obviously, Woolf would not have offended her friend Vita by portraying her as such a bad poet, but Potter doesn’t have that constraint. Do you think Potter is writing within the spirit of Woolf’s text in making Orlando a bad poet, or that in so doing she alters Woolf’s meaning? Consider how Woolf’s poet Orlando might relate to other Woolfian characters who are artists, e.g., Lily Briscoe, Mr. Carmichael, or Rachel Vinrace.

You might also consider the following comments by Sally Potter: "[The novel Orlando] is more broadly about history, identity, reading, writing and remembering. Although Woolf works in a lot of literary jokes, we are not making a film about literature. What interests me is how the book explores the way the English place themselves in the world in relation to their past. There is an addiction in English culture to mythologies of the past, which is not the same thing as having a sense of history. And many of these mythologies are rooted in the reign of Elizabeth I, which provides the origin for a particular understanding of national identity. It is a familiar accusation that the English are unable to let go of the past. In the film, Orlando gradually achieves this: she loses everything, but gains herself in the process." –

Sally Potter quoted in "Fire and Ice" by Verina Glaessner, Sight and Sound, August 1992

4. The most striking difference between the book and the film (apart from Orlando’s physical appearance) is the ending. In the book, Orlando marries Shelmerdine, has a son, and gets her estate back. In the final scene, Orlando cries out Shelmerdine’s name and he returns heroically in an aeroplane, drawn by her pearls burning "like a phosphorescent flare in the darkness" (329). In the film, Orlando does not marry Shelmerdine, loses the estate, has a daughter (by whom is not clear), and ends the movie back at the oak tree with her small daughter videotaping her and, in the sky above, an androgynous angel singing "I am coming . . . at last I am free." (Potter describes this scene as "between heaven and earth in a place of ecstatic communion with the present moment.") Compare the significance of these endings; how do they change the meaning of the story? Consider how Woolf ends her other novels? Is the book (or the film) like any of those? Has Orlando (or Woolf) "had her vision"? Or could we say "there she was" fully present?