A Different Potter Onscreen

For many reasons, Orlando is director Sally Potter’s best film. An adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel by the same name about a man who changes his sex by force of will because he desires a change, the film version of Orlando is being re-released theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics later this month. It’s the sharpest expression of Potter’s fascination with role-playing and performing for others, and was a breakout role for the bewitching Tilda Swinton.

Potter’s films are haunted by characters that need to re-appropriate his/her images, and many of them are currently screening at MoMA as part of a two-week retrospective. Beginning with early short films like “Jerk” (1969) and “Play” (1970), Potter deconstructed methods of seeing dance and performance by intercutting and overlaying still images and film footage of figures in motion and at rest. Potter would later film and direct a production of Bizet’s Carmen for the English National Opera in 2007 shot from multiple camera angles, and presented via a split-screen that breaks up action onstage and off into various different points-of-view that compete simultaneously for the viewer’s attention.

Encouraging the viewer from their traditional role as passive spectators towards active participants is Potter’s constant goal. In her 1997 romantic drama The Tango Lesson, she literally inserts herself into her fictive world by playing Sally, a creatively blocked filmmaker that uses the tango as a means of expressing her frustration. During one of the film’s most sweeping tango sequence, the camera whirls about Potter and her partner in such a frenzy that it seems to almost embrace them like a third dancer that’s dying to cut in.

Rage, Potter’s most recent film (and the film the character of Sally is working on in The Tango Lesson), is her most experimental work, a drama released both in theaters and in serialized installments for cell phones. A blogger named Michelangelo, who is never seen or heard throughout the movie, interviews various personalities—from Eddie Izzard’s Donald Trump-quoting entrepreneur to Jude Law’s transvestite fashion model—in front of a bluescreen at a fashion show that turns deadly. The camera bobs up and down with a life of its own, hovering as if to prove just how unfettered it is.

While formally intriguing, these confessional scenes just serve to remind viewers that Potter has never quite matched the dazzling promise she showed in Orlando. That earlier film defied convention at every turn, casting flamboyant English raconteur Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth and daring to lose its viewers by plowing ahead without explaining too much of Orlando’s fickle, time-jumping plot. It remains Potter’s most exciting story of performative transformation and the one that best speaks to her consummate willingness to experiment. [Simon Abrams]

A retrospective of the Sally Potter’s films [screen through July 21 at MoMA], 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400. Orlando re-releases July 23 and screens at [Lincoln Plaza Cinema](http://www.lincolnplazacinema.com/).