The Cinema of Sally Potter

November - December 2009

To celebrate the BFI’s Sally Potter retrospective (running December 2nd – 28th) we will be playing the filmmaker’s new film RAGE for audiences in the UK for the week of November 25th – December 3rd.

Sally Potter is one of the UK’s most innovative and original filmmakers. Bringing the anarchic, joyous experiments of avant-garde cinema to feature films with Hollywood stars, Potter constantly reinvents herself. Transformation itself is her films’ most constant theme, starting with a reversal of genre convention in THRILLER (1979), through the magical gender-blending of ORLANDO (1993), to RAGE (2009), which brings anti-globalisation protests and citizen journalism into fashion.

RAGE takes the formalism of Potter’s last film, YES (2004), further, using talking heads to showcase striking cinematography and performances. Using a radical narrative structure, RAGE consists of a dynamic series of interviews with characters played by Judi Dench, Jude Law, Eddie Izzard, Steve Buscemi and more, all shot as if by a schoolboy on his mobile phone. He goes behind the scenes at a New York fashion show during a week in which a catwalk accident turns into a murder investigation. Potter’s close-up take on haute couture rediscovers the deeper meanings of ‘fashion’ and ‘style’, bringing the viewer face-to-face— as all of her films do—with the ways in which we invent ourselves through art, and through each other.

Sally Potter has a blog and forum at www.sallypotter.com.

- Sally Potter