Bird's Eye View

The Look of Love: Introducing the BFI Southbank Sally Potter Retrospective

Sally Potter: the First British Female Director to Have a Full Career Retrospective at the BFI

At the end of Orlando, Sally Potter’s celebrated adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando (Tilda Swinton) finds herself in The Present. She revisits the Great House in which she grew up as a young (male) Tudor courtier and which she lost when she changed sex to female in the eighteenth century. The house is now a National Trust property and Orlando, suited and booted in androgynous chocolate brown biking leathers, is surrounded by Japanese tourists as she regards a portrait of herself as a young man.

That scene signals the film’s closing scene, but in many of the drafts of the screenplay (you can read them online in SP-ARK, Potter’s interactive archive), it’s the opening shot: a teasing concatenation of past, present and future, male and female, and – in Tilda Swinton’s level yet fierce gaze to the camera – the meeting of cinema and live performance. BFISouthbank’s Sally Potter season, the first full-career retrospective ever given to a female British director, offers something similar. As well as the opportunity to catch up with Potter’s rarely-screened early works, there are several events where you can catch the filmmaker reflecting on her younger self, in conversation with performers Swinton and Julie Christie, and in a masterclass for Shooting People.

The retrospective, which crowns a year in which Potter became the first director to release a film – her sixth feature, Rage – simultaneously online, on phones and on DVD, looks forward by looking back. Rage, set backstage at a fashion show, resonates with Thriller, the 1979 short that made Potter’s name, which re-imagines the life of Mimi, the poor seamstress from Puccini’s opera La bohème (in casting Colette Laffont, Potter gave the world the first black Mimi and the first black female lead of a British film). Made on a shoestring budget – or what Potter calls ‘barefoot filmmaking’ – Rage also found Potter operating the camera for the first time since Thriller.

Sally at Work

In aesthetic terms, though, the rest of the retrospective offers a stunning illustration of the movement from Thriller’s austere but sensual black-and-white photography to the eye-popping digitally-graded colours and fluent camerawork of Rage. Thriller took its cues from Potter’s earlier short films, screened as part of the Expanded Cinema movement, where experimental film and live performance met on stage to redefine cinema. Potter’s shorts – Jerk, Play, Hors d’Oeuvres – are particularly interested in the construction of gender and the framing of the human body, interests that persists throughout her work.

Potter’s first feature, The Gold Diggers, took up where Thriller left off, with a woman attempting to understand her place in the world, and specifically the patriarchal economy. Bolstered by Thriller’s success at marrying her training in dance and performance art to the austere counter-cinema pioneered by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman, Potter conceived the ultimate feminist film: a musical about the circulation of women and gold that would combine fabulous frocks, Icelandic landscapes, Marxism and the Marx brothers in a swooningly romantic lesbian love story, starring Julie Christie. Collaboratively written and entirely crewed by women, the film had the largest budget then ever given to a British woman filmmaker. Shot in black-and-white by Akerman’s cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who made Christie look more luminous than ever, The Gold Diggers met a harsh reception in a changing world when it entered the festival circuit in 1983, the ascendancy of Thatcher and Reagan.

The reception was so harsh, in fact, that it was ten years before Potter returned to the festival circuit with Orlando. In between, she made two television documentaries that offer an education in cinema (and in 1980s politics and culture): Tears, Laughter, Fear and Rage, which sounded out interviewees from Michael Powell to Barbara Windsor on the role of emotions, and I am an Ox, I am a Horse, I am a Man, I am a Woman: Women in Russian Cinema, which is both a treasure trove of previously unseen film clips and an astonishing portrait of the complex gender politics of the USSR. The nuances of emotion, and of gender, would come to colour Orlando’s less black-and-white take on women’s place in cinema.

Tilda Swinton in Orlando

From the very first shot, Swinton as Orlando challenges, teases, engages and throws open everything that viewers thought they knew about the gendered gaze in film. The film’s intelligent seductions and witty subversions – such as all the high-voiced male singers who make us question the association of pitch and gender – were both revelatory and liberatory. Here was a film that revelled in the power and beauty of its female-authored source text, its female filmmaker’s vision and its gorgeous lead performer. Swinton appeared on magazine covers from Sight & Sound to Rolling Stone and a cult hit was born. The film took first Venice then Toronto by storm, then scooped up awards around the world.

And with success, Hollywood and fame came knocking, offering Potter scripts, ads, music videos – everything but the freedom to pursue her own vision. It was a paradoxical situation that inspired her subsequent film, The Tango Lesson, about a filmmaker named Sally (played, with dazzling footwork and understated charm, by Potter herself) whose courtship by Hollywood drives her away from film to learning the tango, until she is able to unite her passions for dance and cinema in her new film, which is the film we’re watching. As a portrait of the artist at work, on her art and on herself, it’s an endlessly inspiring film where you come out humming the luscious cinematography and dancing mentally through the arguments about love, looking, memory and loss that hum in the story as much as in the classic tangos on the soundtrack.

Potter trained as a dancer in the early 1970s and performed as an improvisatory singer with several avant-jazz bands in the 1980s, so her films are particularly complete artworks, attentive to every layer and detail, not least when she comes to take on the all-singing, all-dancing world of opera in her fourth feature, The Man Who Cried. Returning to the vivid historical world of costume drama that she executed so stylishly in Orlando, Potter unfolds the story of Suzie (Christina Ricci), born Fegele in a shtetl in Russia and renamed Susan on her arrival in England. Suzie has one aim: travel to America and find her father, but her voice and ambition first take her to Paris in the late 1930s and a travelling opera company. Suzie’s sensitive ear leads her into a friendship with the scorned Roma horse wrangler Cesar (Johnny Depp) and warns her that Italian tenor Dante (John Turturro) can’t be trusted. The film is as gloriously, richly melodramatic as it sounds, with a Dietrich-worthy performance from Cate Blanchett as a White Russian émigré dancer, Depp smouldering with love and anger as the Nazis draw near.

The conjunction of passion and politics is at the heart of Yes, Potter’s fifth feature and a film that travelled the festival circuit to collect plaudits in both Turkey and Armenia as an unusually sympathetic and rigorous portrait, by white female artist, of a Middle Eastern male character. He (Simon Abkarian) is an exile from Lebanon, a former surgeon working as a chef in London; he meets She (Joan Allen), an Irish-American scientist, at a banquet he’s catering, and they begin an affair that explodes off the screen in rhymed couplets that remind us love is never innocent, on the one hand, and that the world is made up of people in conversation, on the other. Shot through with grief, rage and despair, the film is suffused with the power of love.

For Potter, as a filmmaker, love resides in sight: not the desire to be famous for fifteen seconds, but the desire behind that, to be seen and recognised for who we are. Her gift as a filmmaker is to see the world in this way, to hold the surface with her gaze until it begins to reveal its depths. Rage takes this to its limit, as the unseen schoolboy protagonist, Michelangelo, points his cellphone camera at fashion world interviewee after interviewee, until he (and we, as the audience) becomes their confessional, their refuge, their sounding board, their listening ear, their open heart. All we seen on screen is an individual face, speaking directly to us. It’s the electrifying extension of Orlando’s gaze to the camera, this absolute trust that is the spellbinding thread running throughout Potter’s work: that the audience is essential, is there, hanging on every finely-turned word and resonant expression. At BFISouthbank this December, you can see for yourself.

Sophie Mayer is a UK-based writer, editor, blogger and educator with a passionate commitment to arts and social justice. She works with non-profit organisation English PEN, publishes with independent presses Salt, Shearsman and Wallflower, and queer literary magazine Chroma. As a film journalist for Sight & Sound, Vertigo, Little White Lies and Venuszine, she focuses on independent, experimental and world films and film culture.

In her academic work, she explores the political potential of experimental literature and cinema, with an emphasis on feminist artists like Sally Potter, who is the subject of her first academic book The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love. As well as teaching university courses on topics ranging from transgender cinema to Anne Carson, she has facilitated creative writing workshops for youth organisations like Leave Out Violence.

Click here to see Sophie’s interview with Sally Potter for the BEV blog.

Sophie has also written a new book, There She Goes-lots of info on BEV friendly filmmakers.

Check out these links too-

BFI Programme: The full programme of the Sally Potter retrospective at the BFI.

SP-ARK: Sally Potter’s archive.

RAGE: The official movie site.