Orlando

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