Feminist Film Manifestos XI

Three Film Reincarnations of Orlando

In 1928, Virginia Woolf published Orlando, a text secretly dedicated to her lover Vita Sackville-West, which became a bestseller among her contemporaries. Orlando tells the story of a young person of changing gender who lives a long life spanning ten decades.
The novel proposes a queer conception of time and bodies: Orlando’s present is a confluence of pasts and futures. The text seems to ask us questions such as: How many lives can fit inside a sole person? How many bodies can a same being inhabit? Orlando’s body is a castle, a frozen river, a bed in which to sleep for a hundred years, or the green summit of a mountain.

Virginia Woolf has been a celebrated author, translated, debated and reinterpreted by various feminist and queer movements. Her work retains something reappropriable, an echo that connects with the experiences of generations she never knew. From Quim/Quima by Maria Aurèlia Capmany in the early 1970s to the most recent theatrical adaptations, it seems that there is always more juice to be extracted from Orlando, a new perspective on her life story. One hundred years after the publication of this novel, we revisit the three film adaptations that have been made. One hundred years after the publication of this novel, we revisit the three film adaptations that have been made. In the eighties, nineties and noughties, three filmmakers brought Orlando to the big screen, and in each version, the character’s transgression takes on its own unexpected form.

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