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Orlando Meets My Twentieth Centuryt - Camera Obscura 18:3 Camera Obscura 18.2 (2003) 176-211


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Twin Pleasures of Feminism:
Orlando Meets My Twentieth Century

Anikó Imre


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Orlando (dir. Sally Potter, UK/Russia/France/Italy/Netherlands, 1992)

[End Page 176]

Spectatorship

Perhaps it is forgivable to begin an investigation of female pleasure and agency by reflecting on my own first encounter with Orlando (dir. Sally Potter, UK/Russia/France/Italy/Netherlands, 1992) as a spectator, which happened in the early 1990s, in a Hungarian art-house theater. My intention is not to conjure up an automatic bridge between myself and other spectators, although it is to take a step toward the very consideration of spectatorship in studies of Eastern European films. The experience seems useful to analyze—as I have returned to it over and over again—because it cuts to the heart of the issue that I want to discuss in this essay, that of the "translatability" of feminism in general and feminist film theory in particular into Eastern European terms. It is becoming increasingly obvious that feminism is not going to permeate postsocialist cultures naturally, despite the processes of economic and cultural opening that have characterized the postsocialist era. At the most fundamental level, mutual communication [End Page 177] between Western feminists and Eastern European women is hindered by the very lack of common vocabulary: for instance, "gender" is entirely collapsed into "sex" in most Eastern European languages, and "feminism" itself is associated with unwomanliness, man-hating propaganda, and lesbianism.1

Rather than liberal-feminist catchwords such as inequality, oppression, and consciousness-raising, which are still all too familiar to Eastern Europeans from the evolutionary rhetoric of socialism, what made me able to understand "gender" even in the lack of native vocabulary was Orlando. In my retrospective analysis, watching Orlando turned me into a "woman spectator" in a way that collided with my previous, nationally confined experience of womanhood. It allowed me "to see difference differently, to look at women with eyes I have never had before and yet my own." 2 Teresa de Lauretis writes this about the effect of Lizzy Borden's Born in Flames (US, 1983), a film with a different aesthetic character and a more explicit feminist political agenda. However, Orlando made such a lasting impression on me precisely because its "female address" was exempt from any sort of apparent didacticism.

When the unmistakably female Tilda Swinton, dressed in a man's Renaissance attire, sitting under a tree that seems to be right out of a painting, turned to us/me and said, "That is, I," as if she had heard the voice-over that had introduced her as "Orlando," I felt seduced by the ambiguity for which I had no words in Hungarian, and by the intellectual confidence with which this ambiguity was presented. When the voice-over said, "for there can be no doubt about his sex," I felt invited to a joke. The joke, I found out only somewhat later, was about gender. When Orlando's miraculous sex-transformation occurred later in the film, in a similarly stylized manner, things fell into place. I was sure I was interpellated to participate in the spectacle as a woman—but not simply as a Hungarian woman, a category I had always, inescapably, been locked in. The womanhood Orlando seemed to offer was liberating; it was self-aware, consciously chosen, and extremely attractive. It dared to be playful and beautiful [End Page 178] in ways that made the endless images of abused wives and nymphomaniac lovers, which I had come to expect from Eastern European films, stifling. Orlando visualized gender, which I have come to see as a category that offers the potential of at least partial liberation from the constraints of nationalized, essentialized sex.

Since 1989, much attention has been lavished on the situation of Eastern European women. 3 The liberal feminist principles on which most such descriptions are grounded are, of course, useful to the extent that they challenge the masculinist assumptions of individual rights within the new democracies. However, their concern with sexual equality concurs...

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