Title: ACHIEVING A STATE OF LIMITLESSNESS , By: West ...



|Title: ACHIEVING A STATE OF LIMITLESSNESS ,  By: West, Dennis, West, Joan M., Cineaste, 00097004, Jul93, Vol. 20, Issue 1 |

|Database: MAS Ultra - School Edition |

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|ACHIEVING A STATE OF LIMITLESSNESS |

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|An Interview with Tilda Swinton |

|Thirty-one-year-old actress Tilda Swinton, a Cambridge University graduate in Social and Political Science, is best known for her work|

|with British director Derek Jarman, with whom she worked on Caravaggio (1986), The last of England (1987), War Requiem (1988), The |

|Garden (1990), and Edward II (1991), for which Swinton received Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival. In addition to several|

|other film roles in BFI and BBC productions, Swinton has performed on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Travers Theater|

|in Edinburgh. She recently recreated her stage role in Manfred Karge's Man to Man for a forthcoming film by John Maybury. Swinton was |

|interviewed in June by Dennis West and Joan M. West at the Seattle International Film Festival. |

|Cineaste: Do you consider yourself a political person, and, if so, how did your politics affect your accepting this role? |

|Tilda Swinton: I can easily answer that because I did not accept this role, I devised this project with Sally Potter, and so it wasn't|

|a matter of giving an answer but of asking a question. |

|Cineaste: How and when was the project conceived? |

|Swinton: In the beginning of 1988 I was working on the second of now three projects that I've made about, broadly speaking, gender |

|issues. The first piece was Mozart and Salieri, a live performance in which I played Mozart and looked at the androgyny of genius. The|

|second piece was Man to Man, a one woman show which used a monologue text by Manfred Karge, an East German writer, about a woman in |

|Germany in the Thirties. When her husband dies, she takes on his identity because she needs his job, and then lives out the rest of |

|her life as a man. Incidentally, this piece is now being made into a film which I hope will be released after Orlando. While I was |

|performing Man to Man, I began to think again of Orlando, a book that I'd read when I was fifteen. It seemed to provide for me another|

|angle at which to come at the problem of gender specification, which was not to examine an occluded gender--it's a question of sort of|

|sublimated identity--but an idea of limitlessness through the concept of immortality. |

|I was beginning to have these thoughts when Sally Potter came to see my show. She rang me up afterwards, invited me to tea, and over |

|tea asked me, "Have you ever thought of making a film of Orlando?" I said, "Funny you should say so," and she said, "Well, bingo." At |

|the very beginning, for about eighteen months, it was just the two of us, the idea, and the book. There was no script, no money, and |

|no producer. Those things came slowly. It wasn't apparent to us at the beginning in which order they should appear. We started to go |

|after the money first. Because of the scope of the project, we decided that we wanted to make a film with a budget that neither of us |

|had dealt with before, because we'd both been working in a very low budget, experimental area up until that point. We decided that |

|these lush orchids of cash were going to come from America, so we came to the United States on a magical mystery tour looking for |

|money. |

|Cineaste: Did you have any familiarity with Virginia Woolf before making the film apart from having read Orlando when you were |

|fifteen? |

|Swinton: Oh, yes. Orlando was my first experience of Virginia Woolf, but afterwards I became quite devoted to her as a writer because |

|I felt so personally addressed by Orlando, and I read as much of her as I possibly could. I still have particularly great affection |

|for A Room of One's Own, which I read when I was a student at Cambridge and studied in depth. |

|Cineaste: What particular relevance do you think the character and the role have for women in Great Britain and the West today? And |

|why is your daughter used in the motorcycle scene at the end, instead of a boy, as in the novel? |

|Swinton: Well, first of all, that's not my daughter; it's my brother's child, my niece. But I hope that the nature of this character |

|has things to say not only to women but also to men, because the text of the film is crucially not only about the liberation of women |

|but also about the liberation of men. In fact, in that it's about the liberation of humans from inherited wealth, it's absolutely, |

|essentially, about the liberation of men. |

|Cineaste: Does the ending of the film suggest that the end of patriarchal society might be somewhere in foreseeable future, or that |

|women in patriarchal society have to lose everything, like Orlando, when she loses her property?? And does the little girl in the |

|sidecar look to the new woman of the future? |

|Swinton: I must remind us that this is the adaptation of a novel by Virginia Woolf which was written for a specific reason. It was |

|written as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, who'd been born as an aristocrat of female gender and, as such, was not able to |

|inherit the house which she loved and which she considered to be hers. Virginia Woolf's poetic biography was written specifically with|

|the intention of giving back Vita her house, which of course never happened in life. This was something that from the outset both |

|myself, particularly, and Sally Potter were determined to overturn. It was very important to us that Orlando be divested of her wealth|

|because it seems to both of us that the true way to human liberation is through liberation from occluded wealth. |

|It also seems to me, incidentally, that the Vita Sackville-West subtext is a hindrance to the novel and to Virginia, did she but know |

|it, and that the writer in Virginia is occasionally interrupted and earthbound by the lover in Virginia. The great scope that Virginia|

|takes on and enjoys so much in drawing this character and in exploring this limitlessness is actually confined by her attention, |

|occasionally and sometimes abruptly in midflight, to actual biographical details. When Orlando marries a man, for example, we know in |

|fact that it is because Vita Sackville-West married Harold Nicholson. And when Orlando has a child--which is an extremely sort of |

|amorphous area in the novel which very few people remember--I can only believe in the way that the section is constructed that this |

|was Virginia doing her duty by the facts of the case. Also, of course, it was essential that Vita have a son, coincidentally as she |

|did, in order for her to inherit the house, and so Orlando inherits the house through her male child. |

|Now because we had decided to divest Orlando of the house she could not have a son, but since from the beginning we wished to place at|

|the center of the film the great thrust of the novel through the past into the present moment, we knew that we were going to have to |

|update the film, as it were, to update the novel anyway, because Virginia and Vita's present moment was 1928, and our present |

|moment...well, originally it was 1988, and now it's a bit later. So we knew we had to update it. |

|In what I actually see to be a very faithful adaptation of the narrative of the novel, there was a momentum growing around the point |

|of the birth of the son in the book. For all sorts of reasons that I couldn't possibly remember, let alone go into over four years of |

|putting this adaptation together, we decided that we would retain the birth but change the gender because we had set up that Orlando |

|could inherit the house through a son and so it seemed absolutely natural to make the child a female. |

|Cineaste: Does the film suggest that there may be an end in sight for patriarchal society? |

|Swinton: I wouldn't say precisely that it's suggesting that, except that I would hope that it's perceivable that the spirit of the |

|film is optimistic. It takes very much as its center the idea that we must all live not dependent either on the past or on the future,|

|but in the present, and so it tries not to make a projection into the future. What I think we do want to say, and what I hope we have |

|made clear, is that we believe human liberation and the possibility for mortals to truly live a centered and limitless existence |

|depends on the giving up of inherited wealth. |

|Cineaste: The film starts with a writer under a tree and more or less ends in a publisher's office, and with a daughter with a |

|camcorder. Is this a reference to a new type of writing now available to new men and women? |

|Swinton: Orlando is crucially a novel about writing, and this was one of the really thorny problems that we had in attempting this |

|adaptation because it's so crucially about the development of a writer's voice and a writer's consciousness, and we tackled it |

|repeatedly. We became aware that we could not make this a film about film making in the same way that this is a novel about writing. |

|Relatively late on, actually, we made the decision to retain the central theme of Orlando as an artist. That may sound surprising |

|because it's so centrally about the development of an artist's sensibility, but during those four years of adaptation one tries |

|everything, and it was quite a stretch when we were trying to fight free of it. |

|As anyone who's ever attempted an adaptation of a classic text of any kind knows--and I've now tackled this situation several times |

|because Edward II, the film I made with Derek Jarman, is an adaptation of a play by Marlowe, and Man to Man is a film taken from a |

|text meant to be spoken from the stage--the first rule of adaptation is to be as ruthless as one possibly can because one needs to |

|test one's own sense of what the heart, the spirit, of the original piece of work is, and one can only find that out by chopping off |

|its limbs to see which organs it cannot live without. By experimenting over these four years, we began to notice what we felt were |

|essential organs for the survival of the spirit. |

|Cineaste: Why was the nationality of the Shelmerdine character changed to an American in the film? Does this have to do with America's|

|rising economic power in the twentieth century? Also, what does the angel--which is not present in the novel--at the end of the film |

|represent? |

|Swinton: Both of these things, as is everything in the film and in every other film, are exactly what you choose to make of them. I |

|can make some suggestions, however. For example, there was something that appealed to us about Orlando, as a symbol of an English |

|sensibility and an English history, having a love affair both with a Russian and with an American. That tickled us. The angel I would |

|be even more loath to comment upon simply because I think it is the kind of image that is so subjective that it is really up to |

|viewers what they make of it. One thing I would suggest, for my own purposes, is that the angel can be read as being present in |

|moments of mortality, moments of death. The angel is seen at the beginning around the Queen and at the end around Orlando who has now |

|been divested of her house. |

|In the novel, the immortality question is, in my opinion, very vague and amorphous and seems arbitrary. There is no specific reason |

|why Orlando lives for 400 years. He/she just does. The same, of course, is true of the sex change. Both of these questions we decided |

|to make quite specifically motivated. The question of immortality, of course, is motivated, practically, by Orlando's inheritance of |

|the house, or rather Orlando being given the house by Queen Elizabeth, as she says, "for you and for your heirs." So this ties Orlando|

|to the future, practically, the Queen says, on one condition--"Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old." Orlando, having at the |

|end of the film given up the house, or rather the house having given her up, is now in a sense free of her immortality, free of her |

|practical or fleshly immortality, as it were, so maybe this is why the angel appears. The words of the song, which may be indistinct, |

|include the phrase, "I am born and I am dying," so the idea may be that in this moment Orlando is truly mortal, that not only is she |

|able to live for the first time but also that she's able to die. |

|Cineaste: Shifting sexual identity appears to be a key theme in contemporary world cinema. Do you think this theme i particularly |

|relevant now? |

|Swinton: To be brutally frank, I think it's a distraction. I'm beginning to think that gender politics in principle have become a |

|distraction. What I mean by that--a contentious statement--is that what we're really concerned with now, whether we know i or not, are|

|more pressing questions of mortality. You speak of kind of global consciousness and recent films about gender identity, but I perceive|

|that trend to be quite old now. I remember when I started to make work around these matter and mainstream Hollywood--which is as good |

|a barometer a any, it seems to me, in measuring some kind of globe sensibibility--was bringing out all those `convincing man' an |

|`convincing woman' films. You know, "Could you be considered a convincing woman if you had a baby?" or "Could you considered a |

|convincing man if you liked a baby?" And, yes, have had some of what the tabloid press loves to call `gender bending'--it's |

|interesting that they call them `gender bending' and not `gender blending'--roles. |

|But it seems to me that we're now in the middle of a are rash of films of all shapes and sizes dealing with immortality and the search|

|for eternal life. We've had Dracula, Death Becomes Her, Forever Young, and there's also Groundhog Day, which think is a very |

|interesting film and which is probably the close kin to Orlando in that it's about living in the present and making choices about your|

|life. |

|I don't mean to be be dismissive of the gender question, but I think we can do better than that. I think we can do better than looking|

|at our differences and look at our similarities, and the greatest similarity we share is that we're all going to die, and most of us |

|are dying sooner than we need at the moment. This Western bit of civilization we live in is entirely death-phobic. We have a great |

|opportunity at the moment, because we are under siege, to face this question and to really wonder what it would be like for people of |

|my generation to have known only a couple of people who had died--you know, our grandparents and maybe a college friend in a car |

|crash. This is not a scenario anymore. My mother remarked to me in an unguarded moment not long ago that I'm at more funerals these |

|days than she is. |

|Cineaste: At one point in the film, Orlando says that he/she is "the same person, just a different sex." In your characterization, did|

|you attempt to distinguish the two incarnations of Orlando by gender? |

|Swinton: Actually not. If anything, my attention was on laying down something constant because so much changes in the film that it |

|seemed to me the center would have to be this close-up, and the dose-up, although it alter and develops, would have to be recognizably|

|the same human nature. Besides, as I've said, I don't believe in `convincing men' or `convincing women,' so I was really happy not to |

|worry about that at all. |

|Even if you do know about the Vita Sackville-West subtext, the novel is about a young man who becomes a woman, while our film is about|

|a young man played by a woman who becomes, in essence, a woman played by a man. For example, when Orlando goes to the tea party and |

|experiences misogyny for the first time, this is a shock the likes of which no woman who'd reached the age of thirty could ever feel. |

|This is a male sensibility that experiences this shock. So we are dealing with a state of grace, a state of...I'm trying to fight free|

|of using the word androgyny because I think it's beginning to be misunderstood, so I'd rather look for another term. It's just a state|

|of limitlessness, so that Orlando at every moment is both, and neither. |

|Cineaste: The character of Orlando seems rather cold and distant, rather impenetrable, as he/she moves through the different |

|historical vignettes. Are viewers to interpret Orlando primarily as a symbol rather than a realistic character, and, if so, as a |

|symbol of what? |

|Swinton: First of all, I would repeat that viewers are to make of the film and the character whatever they wish to, and I'm chary of |

|implying that anything is intended because, of course, everything is intended and nothing is intended. It always distresses me when |

|people come up after a film and say, "I saw this, was I right?" I was once present when I heard a filmmaker I say, "No, you're not, |

|you're wrong." I felt this was really a sacrilege and so I wouldn't wish to imply that I'm interested in doing that. |

|Orlando is in a state of isolation and is looking for company and, as such, throughout the course of the film has a series of rather |

|difficult encounters with other human beings. It's only when she meets the adventurer, Shelmerdine, that there is a meeting of souls, |

|if you like, and also a meeting of minds. The film is, as I see it, crucially about performance. This is delicate for me to talk about|

|because I'm loath to even articulate it to myself, but in that it's about a human spirit looking for peace and not finding it until, |

|at the end of the film, she finds herself the film is about the limitations of human communication. Orlando in communication with |

|other characters throughout most of the film is always at odds in some way. |

|What I should also talk about are the moments when Orlando speaks to the camera, or looks into the camera, because this is something |

|that I've been developing for a while. In fact, I've always had a predilection for addressing the camera, at least to make eye contact|

|with the audience. I don't know what this is due to--probably too much Brecht when at school--but it's also something to do with a |

|feeling of subverting the idea of being gazed upon--as a woman, I think, but it's hard for me to know. The fact is that I've looked |

|into the camera in pretty well every film I've ever made. Even Man to Man is a monologue addressed entirely to the audience, and this |

|was made just before Orlando. So when Sally Potter and I were juggling the issue of how to make the central character |

|identifiable--given that the quest is a lonely quest, and a quest for company--we asked ourselves, how can we identify with this |

|historical character, this aristocrat moving through time, how can we make the character modern, and how can we make the film as funny|

|as we possibly can? It seemed absolutely obvious from the very beginning that this was a serious justification for me doing what I've |

|been doing for a while [laughs], which was to make contact. That look into the camera is a look of complicity, a look of safety; it's |

|that moment when one really addresses oneself and comes to one's own defense. It's like looking into the mirror, only without judgment|

|but with love. The last shot of the film, looking into the camera at the very end, was something that both Sally and I knew from the |

|outset was the end image. So we felt that the best way to build up to it was to look into the camera throughout the film, but at |

|different moments. |

|Cineaste: I take it you're English. |

|Swinton: I'm actually Scottish. I have an English voice because I was unfortunately brought up much like Orlando in a big house in |

|Scotland. The children of people who own big houses in Scotland are sent to be educated in England so that they can come back to |

|Scotland and not understand the people they're oppressing. |

|Cineaste: Would you care to say anything specifically about the role of British aristocracy in society? |

|Swinton: Happily, I'd love to, it's my subject. This is a very personal film for me. I hope it's perceivable as the story of a very |

|ordinary life that anyone can identify with. There's nothing that Orlando experiences that everyone doesn't experience--big houses and|

|400 years and portraits on the Walls and costumes and changing sex notwithstanding--everything that Orlando experiences we all |

|experience, especially when we're young and growing up. We all have an early experience of death, of falling in love, of rejection in |

|love, of writing poetry and being made a fool of through the poetry, and we all have an early experience of going abroad and treading |

|on toes and realizing that somehow we've managed to ingest some kind of racist habits. And all of these things, it seems to me, have |

|to do with growing up and anyone can see their own lives in the film. |

|Having said that, one of the things that drew me back to the book was not only the gender question but also the political question of |

|how to survive an owning class childhood. Even though Orlando in Virginia Woolf's novel does not survive, as I would see it, because |

|she inherits her house. As far as I'm concerned, this is not survival, this is illusion, and another sidestepping of the issue. |

|Having been in a privileged position of being born female, questions of inheritance have never been a problem for me, but I have grown|

|up witnessing in my three brothers the disparate sense of confusion about how to live in the world for oneself and not for the sake of|

|people who have been or people who are coming. I also experience it in witnessing my father's life. It's something that matters a |

|great deal to me but, as far as I can see, it's hardly ever spoken about, simply because owning class artists are almost a |

|contradiction in terms. They're the only people who can genuinely and, in my opinion, should really address these questions of people |

|who have experienced the way this whole atmosphere operates. There are so few owning class artists because there are so few owning |

|class people who survive. I consider myself to be privileged beyond all worth in that I've been, with this film, given an opportunity |

|to say something about it, to begin to address the issues, and certainly to gain courage for myself in doing so. |

|PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Tilda Swinton |

|PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Tilda Swinton as the young English nobleman Orlando. |

|PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Orlando (Tilda Swinton) strolls on her family estate with Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp) in this scene from |

|Sally Potter's Orlando. |

|PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Orlando (Tilda Swinton), as a young woman in the eighteenth century, learns that she must marry and have male |

|heirs or lose her family estate. |

|~~~~~~~~ |

|by Dennis West and Joan M. West |

| | |

|[pic] |

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|Source: Cineaste, Jul93, Vol. 20 Issue 1, p18, 4p |

|Item: 9709061315 |

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