One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
Through the mystery of faith, death becomes life. And what is faith, but an act of submission; a letting go of the self and all its accumulated associations? Such is the journey of Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name. By the time we’ve reached our destination—the end of the film, uncoincidentally titled “BIRTH”—Orlando (Tilda Swinton) has lived four centuries of life, changing sex but barely aging a day. Now a woman, Orlando gazes directly at the camera with all the wisdom gained from over 400 years of traversing their current cultural topography.
“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another,” says our eponymous hero in Woolf’s novel. This embodies both an ending and a beginning; with startling clarity, Swinton’s Orlando finally delineates essence from artifice with a single glance. Just as a hermit crab outgrows its shell and moves on, Orlando has shed 400 years of identities and associations. Gone are the wry glances and withering looks to the camera that have, until this point, carried us through this odyssey. Gone, too, are the self-conscious adornments; the powdered curls of various wigs, and the necklaces, earrings, ruffs, and other decorative frippery our protagonist wears according to the current century’s fashion. The pressures of gendered identities, of class, of immortalizing ecstatic emotions in writing, and of being a guide and confidante have similarly evaporated as the epic sweep of time clears away all but the present.
As Woolf used stream-of-consciousness narration to move away from the confines of literary monologue, director Sally Potter dispenses with dialogue and relies solely on the human face. Everything else falls away. Orlando’s final, 20-second-long gaze is as much about transmitting emotion as it is about us, the viewer, having our own existence validated. If we suspend disbelief and faithfully submit to the spectacle of the picture, something extraordinary happens: we escape the confines of our own physical and cultural moment and are reborn, just for a moment, through the eyes of another. Orlando’s eyes seem to say: “I’m here right now, and so are you. I see you. You exist.”