Looking at Sally Potter\'s film version of Virginia Woolf\'s novel, \'Orlando,\' specifically regarding it\'s intertextual nature. When Tilda Swinton and Sally Potter were being interviewed at the BFI, they both talked about how passionate they were about creating Orlando the film, and they hoped that they could replicate the way the novel made them feel and succesfully represent this on film. As discussed in a seminar, one person's 'feelings' about a novel can vastly differentiate from another's (usually hindering the audience's enjoyment because they did not feel the same), so, when translating a medium from novel to film, which idea will resonate with all? Potter has chosen the ideas 'death' and 're-birth.' What is also interesting, is that a screenwriter will usually begin a script perhaps not totally aware of their controlling idea. Therefore, is the key to succesfully adapting a novel to film finding the 'controlling idea' of a novel and reproducing it cinematically?
This pathway will explore, primarily through images of Swinton as Orlando (although the accompanying essay will recognise this casting to be about more than appearance), aspects of star intertextuality in Potter\'s 1992 film of Woolf\'s 1928 \'biography\'; that is, what the actress adds to the eponymous character in the process of adaptation, as a result of her star persona.
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