HOLY TILDA SWINTON!

“Holy Tilda Swinton!” These three words—proclaimed in the sci-fi series Orphan Black (2014-) to describe the arrival of a transmasculine clone—articulate the cinematic gift that is our most mercurial, protean actor: Katherine Matilda Swinton. At home in the sci-fi genre, Swinton’s grace is in her transformations, especially those of gender. Whether she is narrating Björk […]

Powdering Her Face: Queen Elizabeth I and Camp Iconography From Quentin Crisp to Beyoncé

At the end of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1997), Cate Blanchett’s face finally transforms into the portraiture that we firmly associate with this famous Queen of England. The face that is adorned with an ivory mask of white make-up and framed by the waves of her majesty’s hair, pinned up by pearls. At this moment in […]

“Sharing something closer to paradise”: An Interview with Sally Potter

Sally Potter arrived at filmmaking after a full decade spent working as a dancer, musician, and choreographer; a background that can be detected—hidden in plain sight—in almost all of her films. The change in career path was motivated by a feeling that cinema was the best instrument available for questioning some of the prevalent social […]