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 […]
The Art of (Feminist Film) Work in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Some time in your life you will have occasion to say “What is this thing called time? What is that?” There’s the clock: you go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock, you get your coffee by the clock, you have to get on a plane at […]