A novel spanning four hundred years of British history, Virginia Woolf does not explain the specific time and latitude in the book. But the director Sally Potter ingeniously used the drama-style seven acts to show each period.
From Victorian England in 1600 to contemporary England in 1990. Novels, or movies, don't tell Orlando's story in terms of historical progression. In the film, Sally Potter uses seven chapters to describe the joys and sorrows of Orlando over four hundred years. This is a movie that tells the history of the people. Avoiding shooting in historical time periods weakens the dominance of men in history. History, to a certain extent, is the history of men, the history of patriarchal society. People, involuntarily, are divided into males and females, endowed with different missions and statuses. In the past, people, when they were born, needed to distinguish between genders. The gender distinction also defines the different life courses of men and women. Man, the role of man is weakened.
Orlando, who went from male to female, grew through different experiences, and ended up with a neutral figure. This is what feminists such as author Virginia Woolf and director Sally Porter want to break the social constraints on gender, the inherent concept of discrimination and weakening of women.
Orlando's life combines the seven stages of "death", "love", "poetry", "politics", "socialization", "sex", and "new life". He keeps growing, not aging.
"die"
Orlando, a handsome young man, snuggled under an oak tree, holding a pen and paper, meditating on his poetry. Whether in the novel or in the movie, the first scene at the beginning is Orlando in nature. Orlando, with a sensitive and melancholy temperament, loves nature, loves poetry and writing, and hopes to break away from a rational society and return to the mother body, which is carried out throughout the film and is clearly reflected in several chapters. Compared with Orlando, who was panic-stricken and overwhelmed in front of Queen Victoria, Orlando, who was leaning on the oak tree and lying on the grass, was more confident and comfortable. When Orlando looked directly at the camera and said "that is, I", calm and confidence were revealed in his eyes. In the "Death" chapter, Orlando is a young man who is young, beautiful and youthful compared to the old and exhausted Queen Elizabeth. The Queen also fervently hoped that he would "not fade, not haggard, and not grow old". The end of human life is still a difficult question for young Orlando. At the funeral, Orlando was in a trance. Facing the inheritance of the castle mansion and the title, and the death of the queen, Orlando felt more confused.
The death of the "Love"
queen means Orlando's succession, and the successor Orlando needs a wife. In the first act of the "Love" chapter, when Orlando and the English princess turn to face the camera, Orlando's eyes show more responsibility than human emotion. "Spouse", before the Russian princess Sasha did not appear, for Orlando, it was just a social convention. When Orlando met the Russian princess Sasha, his indifferent eyes turned into the burning eyes of a man who was thinking of spring, and "love" came from the bottom of his heart. He went after the Russian princess desperately, including abandoning his fiancée. When his fiancée threw the ring at him, Orlando looked straight into the camera and said "Man is following his heart." For Orlando, following love is natural and unstoppable by social conventions. In the face of social vision and human nature, Virginia Woolf chose human nature. Orlando's pursuit of love is very simple. When the Russian princess came home, Orlando wanted her to stay and told her "You're mine." The Russian princess asked him "why?" Orlando thought "Because I adore you." Orlando didn't have much society during this time Common sense, actions are all thoughts from the heart.
"Poetry"
At the beginning of the poetry chapter, Orlando sat in front of the bookshelf, reading poetry with emotion. Compared with the way he read poetry in front of Queen Elizabeth, Orlando at this time already had a mature and stable temperament. Orlando's enthusiasm for poetry and writing can be found from the first act, and the director took out "poetry" as a chapter, which shows that in the original text, virginia woolf's paranoia about Orlando's love of poetry is vigorously exaggerated. Orlando asked a poet to teach him the technique of writing poetry. Unexpectedly, the poor poet also clings to the image of the powerful. The sanctity and beauty of art have become worthless in the established social system. Orlando also gave up this innocent dream.
"Politics"
Orlando, who failed to devote himself to art, quickly turned his attention to politics. I came to Orlando, Turkey with the good wishes of drinking in the desert, listening to songs under the moon, world harmony, and human republic, but was shaken by the reality of war. Once the foreign enemy invaded, Orlando plunged into the war but immediately found desperately the cruelty of the war's random strangulation and annihilation of living individuals. And this is also a typical manifestation of bloody history in a patriarchal society. Orlando fled the battlefield, and finally fell asleep again after being completely disappointed by all the missions that history had given a "man". When he woke up, he had turned into a daughter. Orlando wasn't surprised when she found out that she was a woman, she said "Same person, no difference at all, just different sex." She didn't feel any different until she went back home and into society.
"social contact"
She returned to England and changed into women's clothes, troubled by the inconvenience caused by the bloated and cumbersome women's clothes, but the short corridor took time because of the inconvenience of clothes, expressing the author and director's feminist perspective on the ancient times for women. Restrained grievances and accusations. When Orlando entered the social circle as a woman, her beauty attracted the attention of many men. But when she talks to men, she finds that men just keep talking about how attractive women are in their minds, and that women who are told to argue with men are going to lose themselves. Orlando looks directly into the camera as a woman again, this time with anger and doubt in her eyes. And when Henry proposes to Orlando, the same goes for what Orlando said to Shasa as a man. He said "you're mine. I adore you." At this moment, this sentence is no longer the pursuit of love, but the order that women have always been used as accessories by men. Orlando rejected his marriage proposal, ran hard in the labyrinth, and came to a meadow, she ran out of the labyrinth and ran back into the embrace of nature, she found her own place, she was going to be the bride of nature, Orlando The identification of her female self-identity has finally been established.
"Sex" in the
blink of an eye, earth-shaking changes take place in the outside world. The British Industrial Revolution, the big machine age of human society; the American Civil War, human beings began to explore freedom and equality, Shelmerdine came to the world as a new messenger of an open-minded era with freedom and equality. His appearance completely liberated Orlando's heart, and only a man like him, who is completely non-sexist and completely different from Henry and his like, can fulfill the freedom, equality and joy that Orlando, as a woman, should naturally enjoy. Sexual life feminism is finally able to create a new lens language from the body, a non-patriarchal female discourse, and Orlando does not stick with Schmidy. After 400 years, she has slowly found herself and understood the pursuit in her heart. A young boy has become a mature woman. It's not about gender, it's about human growth. She said goodbye to Shelmerdine, went to a new life in the war, had a daughter, became a mother, had a career, was financially independent, and rode a motorcycle to run freely in modern society, and no longer needed to be attached to anyone.
Orlando has finally completed the exploration of "self" in his life and gained a new life.
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