ABSTRACT
‘I am coming across the divide to you’, sings an angel, towards the end of Sally Potter's film of Orlando. The angel is poised above Orlando and her daughter, resplendent and androgynous, pealing out the ecstasy of being ‘neither a woman nor a man’, its (only slightly mournful) exuberance inviting the audience to celebrate the eradication of chronology, distance and gendered characteristics. The mind opens out to consider not only Orlando's previous incarnations within the film, but also the previous incarnation of the film itself, in the form of Virginia Woolf's novel. But the angel croons on: ‘I am born and I am dying.’ Are we catching echoes of the death knell of the printed book? Do the formalities of literature have to be expunged so that cinema can live? Or can we see a much more fruitful relationship between these two texts, and one in which we can grant Woolf a degree of prescience with which she is rarely credited: that of glimpsing the potential of the cinema, and of developing its formal possibilities in the context of her own work?
