Nov 25, 2009 | No Comments | BySophie Mayer
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. Read the full story
Sep 10, 2009 | 2 Comments | BySophie Mayer
Sally Potter
Rage (2009) is the sixth feature film in Sally Potter’s long and varied career. Having burst onto the scene with her short film Thriller in 1979, she broke new ground for women in film with her first feature The Gold Diggers (1982), with its all-female crew. A brilliant adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “unadaptable” classic, Orlando (1993) thrilled critics and audiences alike with its zeitgeist-tapping androgynous cool, and led to offers from Hollywood. But Potter has stayed resolutely true to her indie roots – which stretch back to mid-1970s performance art “happenings” in evening wear with the Limited Dance Company. Like her film-in-verse Yes (2005), Rage was made swiftly on a shoestring budget with a small cast of dynamic actors. It’s the most immediate of Potter’s films, resonating with our current focus on consumption, whether it’s the credit crunch and bankers’ kickbacks, obesity and anorexia, carbon footprints and wars for oil. What Potter calls her “barefoot cinema” is the perfect response to excess – set in the fashion world, the film strips away labels and hysteria to reveal beauty.
BEV asked Sophie Mayer, author of The Cinema of Sally Potter to interview Sally about Rage. Read on for the full interview. Read the full story
