Orlando (Queer Film Classics) (Volume 3) - Softcover

Sheaffer, Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0228014603 ISBN 13: 9780228014607

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022

Synopsis

A film that transcends time, Sally Potter’s Orlando follows its titular character through nearly four hundred years of British history. Orlando starts life as a young man in the 1600s and then, mid-film, becomes a woman in the 1800s. Plot, production, and performance have all contributed to the film becoming a touchstone for Tilda Swinton’s ethereal and gender-bending mode.

A Russian-French-Dutch-American-Italian-British co-production, Orlando was hailed as a monumental work of international art house cinema upon its release in 1992. Some understood Potter’s film, a work of ruthless and ingenious adaptation, as moving away from the lesbian content of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Russell Sheaffer uses a detailed analysis of screenplay drafts and more than three decades of reception to argue that while the film moves away from a direct investment in same-sex relationships, Orlando’s articulations of embodiment, desire, and time have made the film continually more queer in the years since its release.

Taking cues from adaptation theory and gender studies, this book meticulously charts the distinct shift from lesbian feminist text to queer film classic, arguing that the film is as much an adaptation of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as it is of its eponymous novel.

About this title

About the Author

Russell Sheaffer is an experimental filmmaker and producer. He lives in San Diego.

From the Back Cover

Series Editors: Matthew Hays and Thomas Waugh

The enduring commercial success of LGBTQ2I films over recent generations offers proof of widespread interest in queer film within both pop culture and academia. Not only are recent works riding the wave of the new maturity of queer film culture, but a century of queer and proto-queer classics are in busy circulation thanks to a burgeoning online queer cinephile culture and have been brought back to life by omnipresent festivals and revivals. Meditations on individual films from queer perspectives are particularly urgent, unlocking new understandings of political as well as aesthetic and personal concerns.

Queer Film Classics at McGill-Queen's University Press emphasizes good writing, rigorous but accessible scholarship, and personal, reflective thinking about the significance of each film - writing that is true to the film, original, and enlightening and enjoyable for film buffs, scholars, and students alike. Books in the series are short - roughly 40,000 words - but well illustrated and allow for considerable depth. Exploring historical, authorial, and production contexts and drawing on filmic analysis, these open-ended essays also develop the author's personal interests or a subjective reading of the work's sexual identity discourses or reception. The series aims to meet the diversity, quality, and originality of classics in the queer film canon, broadly conceived, with equally compelling writing and critical insight. Books in the series have much to teach us, not only about the art of film but about the queer ways in which films can transmit our meanings, our stories, and our dreams.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0228014603
• ISBN 13: 9780228014607
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 160