The New Woman's Film by Hilary Radner

The New Woman's Film by Hilary Radner

Author:Hilary Radner [Radner, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781138186811
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-02-06T00:00:00+00:00


Androgyny

Variety concluded an extended interview with Swinton by saying: “Indeed, Swinton takes neither her personal nor her professional life too seriously.” Swinton responded: “I’m playful at heart…. And myth-making is always fun.”65 A significant dimension of the Swinton myth is her androgyny. In a public lecture, noted feminist scholar Sneja Gunew announced, perhaps ironically, snorting derisively: “We are post-woman. Get over it.”66 Swinton’s loudly proclaimed androgyny both supports and undermines this pronouncement. Rather than confirming androgyny as a desirable state, her persona gives expression to a marked anxiety about gender, which suggests that women are far from “over it.”

Her androgyny was formally inscribed in what is still probably her most famous role, that of “Orlando” in the eponymous film based on the novel Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf67 and directed by Sally Potter and released in 1992. In this film, Swinton plays a long-lived (or perhaps immortal) aristocrat who at a certain point in his life (depicted as traversing several centuries) changes from a man into a woman. The Sunday Times describes it as “a gender-bending role … in which the main character changes sex after a male identity crisis.” Swinton, however, confided to the London Times that “talking about androgyny worries me.”68 She explains, “What interests me is the common ground, the similarities rather than the disparities.”69 Elsewhere she also comments: “I am trying to fight off the term androgyny…. [I]t’s just a state of limitlessness, so that Orlando at every stage is both and neither.”70

In contrast with the novel and Swinton’s understanding of her role, the film is, paradoxically, an exploration of gender as a fluid and historically defined category, but also a celebration of an essential and embodied femininity literalized through maternity. The director, Sally Potter, made significant changes to the novel, notably giving Orlando a daughter rather than a son, but also stripping her of her hereditary privileges. Thus, by the film’s conclusion in 1992 (another of Potter’s innovations—the novel ended in 1928), “Orlando” is portrayed as a happily and sensuously fulfilled woman, playing with her daughter in an idyllic scene frequently noted by feminist scholars.71 Martine Beugnet describes the sequence in an interview with veteran feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey:

[A]t the end of the film, divested of her title and her attendant material possessions, Orlando sits in a field while her small daughter, armed with a video camera, runs about, laughing and filming at random. The result, a sequence of dynamic, motion-blurred images of tall grass, trees, and sky, forms a lively evocation of the little girl’s empathetic and joyful relationship with her surroundings.72

For Beugnet, this “concluding sequence … neatly summed up the film’s complex exploration of politics,” in particular with regard to “the construction of the gaze.”73 In the course of the film, the protagonist as played by Swinton goes from portraying a codified and visually distant femininity that represents “by the book ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’”74 to this moment in which what Beugnet calls “optical modes of vision”75 are replaced by an emphasis on the



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