In 1993, Sally Potter created a motion picture adaptation of Orlando, starring Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I and Tilda Swinton as Orlando, which won critical acclaim. There is much about the film that miraculously transforms the phantasmagoric work of twentieth-century fiction onto film while staying true to the book's fantastic premise. Potter follows the hero/ine through the various centuries, but Orlando remains unchanged by passing time except in the case of his/her wisdom which involves, in this case, a change of sex. The film can be read, like the book, as a meditation on the implications of gender relations, cultural inheritance, historical consciousness, and sexual identity.

Various compressions occur in Potter's translation of the book into the medium of film: Virginia Woolf depicts gender as a quality that is subject to sudden change or reversal, not only in Orlando but mirrored in every character with which Orlando...