Looking at the presence of Virginia Woolf\'s novel Orlando in Potter\'s cinematic adaptation, thinking particularly about ideas of haunting and ghosting.
For Potter, Woolf's Orlando is associated with: 1/ making her first film (and her interest in cinema) 2/ love/passion for creative work 3/ travel, and particularly travel to the USSR
Two crucial notes. On Orlando: "The only narrative act is that Orlando finally writes" after Shelmerdine leaves; the house as "vehicle for contemplation." On Room of One's Own: "the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down." Incredibly haunting image of the female writer as inhabiting a series of bodies ("laid down" for uses other than writing, like a pen "laid down") -- Orlando inhabits a cinematic body -- cf. interview with Sande Zeig where Potter describes enfleshing the "bones" of the novel. Like Frankenstein, this presents writing as an alternate form of (pro)creation, one that is equally -- although uncannily -- embodied.
Present moment as "haunted" and "haunting" in its transitoriness -- time as (ghostly) presence as well as present in Orlando. Woolf writes that "human beings... show the light through" -- humans in time AS cinema(tic).
Potter's original screenplay began where the finished film ends: in The Present, in the Great House as National Trust property. Orlando's voice-over is taken straight from Woolf's narratorial voice in the novel, concerning the "terrifying revelation" of the "present moment." Orlando is like a ghost in (what was) her own house.
"how film can work in the same way as the greatest music - to manifest in images the unseeable world of the spirit."
Orlando metaphorises the Turkish scenery to Rustum: this is Potter's adaptation of Orlando's "vision" of Turkey-as-England in the novel -- Woolf's use of a cinematic trope to present Orlando's nostalgia is not present in the final film for several reasons: Orlando is not "haunted" by England and privilege in the film; the trope is about literature mimicking film, in which things are like something else through medium-specific forms such as graphic matches
Sheets = death/suspended time: Orlando in stasis as female in eighteenth century. The WHITE sheets as shrouds contrast with her black abaya that allowed movement, unhindered and without class/national identity, through the desert. Sheets also draw attention to structure: narrative and/or gender difference.
The film began visually as a series of portraits of Tilda Swinton in costume (Tudor male and Victorian female), echoing the family portraits and significance of portraiture as history of the House in the novel
Significance of the face and portraiture for Potter's interest in film -- Orlando as portrait replete with lived experience and ghostliness > Barthes on the portrait's ghostliness.
Deconstructing the sheets: why has this shot become so famous/popular/iconic -- used on the cover of the Penguin C20th classics edition of the novel. The body reappearing from beneath the shroud of sheets.
Khiva: subliminal effect of "twinning" -- all extras in Khiva scenes were twins. A parallel for the relationship between the novel and film?