Sally Potter - Auteur by Work, Team Player by Word

Sally Potter is a UK born film director and screenwriter, who is thought of as one of the most successful in her field. She won numerous awards and was nominated for an Academy Award. Some of her more recent works are Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Man Who Cried, Yes, and Rage.

Starting her movie career as a young director in 1970s, Potter was inevitably influenced by feminist theory. The role of gender often shows up in her works. Kristi McKim, from Senses of Cinema, wrote: “Through sophisticated film style, Potter explores the capacity of aesthetic and human intimacy to transcend categories (of gender, sexuality, religion, culture, politics, etc.) that both limit and define experience.” Thus, Potter does not necessarily challenge just the female gender role; she challenges the role of gender itself. In Vogue, she said: “I’m trying to restore to people that sense of themselves which has nothing to do with gender, time, or circumstance.”

In an interview with Kristy Widdicombe for British Film Institute, she is questioned about her work strategies and her role as an auteur. Potter reveals that her work usually begins with a small thing like an image or a line from a poem, which is then evolved. She also emphasizes that all writing is done in solitude. To the questions and statements regarding being an auteur Potter both agrees and disagrees. In comparison to the statement from Author/Auteur: “… it was the director who authored the film,” – Potter fits the description, and admits that she has a lot of influence on the work. However, she sees the process of making a movie as a collaborative experience of everybody on the movie set. At the same time when the interviewer said: “The way that you manage to incorporate the processes of film-making into your films, I think, points you out as an auteur in that you are using film as a means of investigating the methods of film-making,” – Potter agrees. Thus, she can be seen as auteur that allows for a certain degree of outside influence as a necessary part of the film making process.

Sally Potter’s Orlando is one of the examples of her being an auteur. The movie is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Potter presents her understanding and view of the book instead of following the narrative view of the book. According to the article in Style, she created broad changes that involved adjustments in plot and narration. For example scenes in the beginning and the end are completely different from the novel, in addition main character Orlando gives birth to a daughter rather than a son. Also Potter chose to cast a woman for both male and female roles of Orlando. Thus we get the picture of how Sally Potter put her own touch on the work and created a movie that follows her grasp of the novel’s ideas and can be seen as her story.

Works Cited

• Hollinger, Karen, and Teresa Winterhalter. "Orlando's Sister, Or Sally Potter Does Virginia Woolf In A Voice Of Her Own." Style 35.2 (2001): 237. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 Nov. 2011
  http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5541824&site=ehost-live
• Widdicombe, Kristy. "The Contemporary Auteur: An Interview with Sally Potter." British Film Institute. Web. 18 Nov. 2011
  http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/publications/16+/potter.html
• McKim, Kristi. "Sally Potter." Senses of Cinima. Web 18 Nov. 2011
  http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/great-directors/potter
• Humm, Maggie. Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997. 96. Print