Poetry and Orlando

In 1992, Sally Potter directed a then mostly-unknown young actress named Tilda Swinton in a singular adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando. The film became a feminist and literary touchstone, and now, 18 years, later it's being re-released for a new generation of curious watchers. Fitting for a film about time, resurrection, and artistic longevity. Potter took time to talk with the Wall Street Journal about Orlando's particular relation to poetry:

The film focuses on poetry and writing. Usually poetry outlives the person and is supposed to function as legacy, but in this case, Orlando is very much alive, and doesn’t age alongside her poetry.

The role of poetry in the film is interesting, because Orlando him/herself tries to write poems and they’re not very good. By the end of the story, 400 years later, he’s produced a manuscript that is worth publishing. [The poet in the novel] Nick Green was drawn by Virginia Woolf as a portrait of the artist within the story. It’s more like of an echo of her story – how an artist earns a living, and the paranoia of the poet about publishing enough and whether people are buying his book. When Orlando reads Shakespeare or reads a poet whose language has sustained millions of people and expressed the inexpressible things in their lives, it’s a running thread about how literature and poetry are distilled, saturated forms . . .