Orlando - BA034

Seán thought he wouldn't like ORLANDO... until he saw it. Shame he didn't do the reading. Brian, of course, did. Based on Virginia Woolf, it's no frou-frou drawing room drama, but a time-traveling, gender-bending history of sexuality, Foucaudian avant la lettre. Alien androgyne Tilda Swinton is a man who becomes a woman somewhere over the course of his/her 400 years of life. Lush, funny, philosophical and featuring plenty of wigs, Sally Potter's 1992 masterpiece turns the wacky weirdness of the original text into a piece of filmmaking unlike any other. This is one costume drama where the drama is really in the costumes: doublets, farthingales, corsets, breeches and perruques, all designed by the ever-resourceful Sandy Powell and prompting us to ask whether clothes really do make the (wo)man? Social constructivists, ahoy! It's time to take down gender essentialism & have a blast doing it. Clips from the film presented according to fair use policy. Podcast Theme: "Pipeline" by CyberSDF (https://soundcloud.com/cybersdf/tracks).