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Sally Potter's film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando engages not only with costume drama and modernist fiction, but with equally elaborate trappings of contemporary popular genre (science fiction and/or horror) film. Questions of bodily identity and representation unite the cinematic genres of costume drama and science fiction, and Potter's film insistently refers to the novel as the body that her film is clothing/experimenting upon. The novel has a tendentious relationship with the popular-on publication, it was the most commercially successful of Woolf's novels, and Woolf, in considering her novel a popular "entertainment," relegated it to the critical bottom drawer. In doing so, she associated the literary romance with film as a popular form, and many critics since have pointed out the cinematicity of Orlando's historical and geographic sweep, such as in the scene where Orlando, transformed from a man to a woman and traveling with a group of gypsies, sees a cinematic projection of her English gardens on the hills of western Turkey.1 As a woman, Orlando sees rather than feels time's movement, and she is both the cinematic spectator and the camera-a point beautifully encapsulated by the conclusion to Potter's film, where Orlando's daughter lifts a video camera to observe her mother. Specularity is gendered female in the novel, and this femininity is linked to what Catherine Craft-Fairchild reads correctly as the cinematic. However, she concentrates on cinematic techniques such as dissolves, close-ups, and establishing shots, and thus omits important ekphrases of visions in pools, screens, smoke, and mirrors, which arise in relation to Orlando's questions of gender/sexual identity.
Smoke and mirrors are, wittily, central to the abrupt shifts of time that take place in the novel and film: for example, Potter's visual shorthand conjures the smoke of a steam engine to be heralded as "The future!" by Shelmerdine (Billy Zane). In this paper, I consider how Virginia Woolf's Orlando solicits its future cinematic adaptation, and how that adaptation engages with similar literary questions of genre and gender as the novel it adapts. By placing Sally Potter's Orlando in the context of gender/genre-bending adaptations contemporary to it, an instructive theorizing of adaptation as cinematic New Flesh on literary bones can be developed. Orlando romances not only the popular, but the speculative: with its time-traveling,...