Used in pathways:

My pathway engages the theme of history in both the novel and the film. The four centuries through which Orlando lives provide an evocative and symbolic background for the story.

Intertextuality in Orlando

Potter says that ‘ in order to keep faith with Virginia Woolf’s use of real time ending the novel, the film had to end when it was completed-1992.’ Potter does this successfully as not only does she take on this idea the ending is not formed until everything else is shot. Although the film ending and the novel endings are different Potter loyally attempts to ‘think myself in Virginia Woolf’s consciousness’ and create a appropriate ending that Woolf herself might have written if she had lived until 1992.

Exploring the intertextual nature of Sally Potter\'s Orlando

Six steps of adaptation

Six steps of adaptation

The intertextual nature of Sally Potter's film adaptation of Orlando (1992)

Creating your own online ‘pathway’, use the SP-ARK multi-media archive to reflect upon and illustrate the intertextual nature of Orlando (1928 and 1992).

The Living Archive The great joy of archives is the way that they allow you to see behind the facade, to bring alive the thinking that resulted in the documents. For this reason, I find notes such as this irresistible. In their immediacy, they help you get into the mind of the artist more than the work itself. The finished painting, book or film is as much a process of hiding as revealing. But if you come across notes such as these in an archive, then you begin to get that wonderful sense of being able to see all.

The intertextual relationship between Woolf and Potter's imagining of Orlando through the location of Hatfield House.

There are several points throughout the film when Orlando takes off running. It occurs several times at several different points in the film which caused me to raise suspicion... is there meaning behind the running scenes? Upon further analysis of each running scene I discovered that each is different; however, they all share similar elements. All of them seemingly occur after Orlando is upset by something, whether it be when the woman he loves rejects him, when the Archduke offends her, or during battle when she runs through the trenches. Orlando only runs when something is amiss in his/her life. The running scenes are also interesting because they are mostly shot with Orlando running away from the camera as if he/she is running away from the audience or his/her present circumstance. Additionally, all the running scenes occur outside, continuing the theme with nature. Finally, the film’s last scene shows Orlando's daughter running; however, she is running towards the camera, happily, rather unlike her mother who runs away from the camera when she is upset.

The central impulse of this pathway is to provide a conduit through which one may explore how the passing of time is expressed within Sally Potter's 1992 film 'Orlando', as a prominent theme of both the original novel and film. Furthermore, in acknowledgement of the disparities between the manner in which a visual medium and a written work respectively convey meaning, one is also drawn to the cinematic techniques utilised to communicate the eponymous hero/ine's inner thoughts, feelings and frustrations. The titular quotation, lifted from another of Woolf's novels, 'The Waves' is appropriated here to reflect upon the process of adaptation, particularly the ever-mutating, palimpsestic nature of a text (Woolf 2005: 86).

Pathway to reflect upon and illustrate the process of adapting Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, to film.