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Learn about Sally Potter's life, career, and works, from her experimental short films to her acclaimed adaptations of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. Find out how she became a dancer, a singer, a composer, and a feminist artist.
Sally Potter is a British filmmaker who has made seven feature films, including Orlando, The Tango Lesson and The Party. She is known for her innovative form, risk-taking subject matter and working with notable actors.
- January 1, 1
- 4 min
- London, England, UK
Sep 7, 2020 · Explore the unbounded cinema of Sally Potter, Britain's most prolific woman writer-director, with her new film The Roads Not Taken. Discover her themes, styles and influences, from Orlando to Yes, and why she matters.
- Biography and Training
- Film Overview
- Themes and Reception
- Cinematic Bodies
- Yes as Stylistic and Thematic Exemplar of Potter’s Oeuvre
- Potter’s Charmed Spaces
- Potter’s Aesthetic Conviction
- Closures
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A modern renaissance woman, Potter writes, directs, composes for and – in The Tango Lesson – acts in her films. Born 19 September 1949 in London to an artistic family (her father was a poet; her mother, a musician; her grandmothers, actresses), Charlotte Sally Potter left school at 16 to study filmmaking. After an apprenticeship at the London Filmm...
Moving toward her more recent lyrical engagement with spectatorial expectation and visual pleasure, Potter’s early films interrogate form and subject through experimental and feminist modes and themes. In 1971, poet Adrienne Rich writes that “Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes…is for women more than a chapter in cultural...
Potter’s curious and complex protagonists struggle for genuine expression and uncompromised harmony within macrocosmic realms. Invested in the meanings within and existence beyond value-ascribing identity labels, Potter describes her authorial process and signature: “I always work under the illusion that I’m starting from scratch…But the questions ...
While Thriller “feels ill at ease engaging [the body’s] visual representation in more overt or direct ways,” Elena del Rio points out that this film’s “most poignant and haunting moments are those that restore to analysis the force of affect through sensual and bodily elements.” (32) Aesthetically balancing subjectivity and embodiment, Potter incre...
Foreshadowing scenes of conflict and intimacy in Yes, in an early scene in The Tango Lesson, Sally and Pablo shed a tear together, revealed in quiet and matching close-ups, upon mutually understanding their shared Jewish heritage, which overwhelms their differences. Importantly, a later scene reveals her description of this sequence to Pablo: “And ...
Critics of her verbose formality and cool distance miss the redemption that this final sequence offers. Reminiscent of Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, in which the pressured close-ups give way to a resplendent ending, Yes‘ verbose and rhythmic script gives way to a sunlit silence within which the lovers reunite in the moments immediately following he...
The featurette “Finding Scene 54” (Adventure Pictures, 2005, available on the Yes DVD) includes a sequence of black and white digital video: Potter sits with Allen and Abkarian at a table in front of a window. Intertitles explain that America and Britain have just occupied Iraq and “This is the last opportunity to rehearse the scene”; Potter respon...
Despite her difficult films, Potter somehow manages to create sequences of closure that – if not narratively “happy” – at least feel stylistically complete: in Orlando‘s fantastical closure in the meadow, Orlando’s daughter (Jessica Swinton) wields the digital video camera while a flying angel (Jimmy Somerville) sings from the sky in falsetto “we a...
Learn about the life and work of Sally Potter, a modern renaissance woman who directs, writes, composes and acts in her films. Explore her experimental and feminist beginnings, her lyrical and transformative style, and her themes of gender, sexuality, culture and politics.
- Kristi Mckim
Oct 7, 2022 · The legendary filmmaker reflects on her groundbreaking adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel, her relationship to the author, and her experimental style. Read the interview ahead of a retrospective at the Metrograph.
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Jun 8, 2022 · Sally Potter was a controversial figure in British independent cinema, making films that blended narrative invention with theoretical and formalist concerns. Her 1979 short Thriller has long been a staple on film courses for its deconstruction of opera’s sexual politics through a re-reading of La Boheme.
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