Introduction:
The cinematic text of Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) is one that places its viewers in a tactfully contrived and theatrically constructed domain: a domain that only becomes comprehensible to us through Orlando’s instances of self-reflexive narration, through the omniscient narrator that privileges Orlando’s narrative perspective, and through a camera lens that constructs and emphasizes Orlando’s body as the starting and focal point of that narrative. From this highly self-reflexive narrative, we learn that Orlando recounts the story of an individual who experiences the world, as both an embodied male and an embodied female; he is the former for the span of three centuries (15th-18th), she is the latter for two centuries (18th-20th). …show more content…
One can argue here, thus, that an analysis of Potter’s Orlando requires that one understand it as a cultural text that lies under the purview of a paradigm first proposed by Helene Cixous; the paradigm she dubs “writing the body” (Cixous 340). Indeed, under the purview of this paradigm, Orlando’s text can be understood as one that roguishly and playfully evades the reproduction of the discursive and dichotomous regimes of identity that have long informed western ontology, by paradoxically renegotiating their meaning and bringing into view the weight they cast on the gender queer body, that is rendered incoherent by such …show more content…
Orlando is stationed as a soldier in the English colonies located somewhere in North Africa. Correspondingly, we witness a shift in narrative space and time; we are now in North Africa, during the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th. After the intertitles indicating these shift have disappeared from view, we witness a masculine Orlando making to what he claims are the “masculine virtues [of] courage and loyalty” (Orlando). We later witness, however, an Orlando who is unable to live up to these virtues once a surprise battle begins. It is important to not here that, after his literal failure to enact and/or perform these masculine virtue –i.e. after the authenticity of his ‘he’- is questioned by his behavior, Orlando sleeps and wakes up to find himself a woman, gazes at her nude self in the mirror, shifts her gaze directly to the audience, and says “same person, just a different sex”
The cinematic text of Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) is one that places its viewers in a tactfully contrived and theatrically constructed domain: a domain that only becomes comprehensible to us through Orlando’s instances of self-reflexive narration, through the omniscient narrator that privileges Orlando’s narrative perspective, and through a camera lens that constructs and emphasizes Orlando’s body as the starting and focal point of that narrative. From this highly self-reflexive narrative, we learn that Orlando recounts the story of an individual who experiences the world, as both an embodied male and an embodied female; he is the former for the span of three centuries (15th-18th), she is the latter for two centuries (18th-20th). …show more content…
One can argue here, thus, that an analysis of Potter’s Orlando requires that one understand it as a cultural text that lies under the purview of a paradigm first proposed by Helene Cixous; the paradigm she dubs “writing the body” (Cixous 340). Indeed, under the purview of this paradigm, Orlando’s text can be understood as one that roguishly and playfully evades the reproduction of the discursive and dichotomous regimes of identity that have long informed western ontology, by paradoxically renegotiating their meaning and bringing into view the weight they cast on the gender queer body, that is rendered incoherent by such …show more content…
Orlando is stationed as a soldier in the English colonies located somewhere in North Africa. Correspondingly, we witness a shift in narrative space and time; we are now in North Africa, during the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th. After the intertitles indicating these shift have disappeared from view, we witness a masculine Orlando making to what he claims are the “masculine virtues [of] courage and loyalty” (Orlando). We later witness, however, an Orlando who is unable to live up to these virtues once a surprise battle begins. It is important to not here that, after his literal failure to enact and/or perform these masculine virtue –i.e. after the authenticity of his ‘he’- is questioned by his behavior, Orlando sleeps and wakes up to find himself a woman, gazes at her nude self in the mirror, shifts her gaze directly to the audience, and says “same person, just a different sex”