21/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: We spoke to the philosopher, author and now filmmaker about his already-acclaimed, free adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 trans text

B Ruby Rich, the legendary US film critic and scholar, said it herself on the Film Comment podcast, and we’d be wise to take heed: that Paul B Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paul B Preciado
film profile] is “the first real trans masterpiece”. But this is a multilayered statement: it’s not just that the film, a loose, autobiographically inflected rendering of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, is directed by a trans filmmaker. To use a very pertinent term in film criticism, its gaze is trans; it’s always polymorphous and multi-voiced, and never linear. We caught up with the newly crowned “filmmaker”, previously known more as a philosopher and academic, in the Palast the day after the movie’s premiere in the Berlinale’s Encounters strand.

Cineuropa: Has there always been an ambition inside you to make films?
Paul B Preciado: Not really, no. For a long time, I never thought that I would make a film. I come from writing, and I've been trained as a philosopher – a classical philosopher, you know. And then, I had been working mainly on the history of sexuality, the body and so on, and also the history of technology.

I have always worked as a philosopher on the history of images, and also on the history of technologies, including the body as a technology. Yet I also do work a lot with images in my books. So yes, the history of images is something that constitutes a modern subject. But I never thought I’d make “new” images as a practitioner. I wouldn't say that it's definitely easier to criticise or decode images, but in a sense, I guess it is; it's much more complicated when you start devising the visual language that you would use to represent, for instance, trans bodies and non-binary bodies, without reproducing the historical violence that has been imposed on us.

There’s already been some critical commentary on the film in this short interval following its premiere. One critic was thinking about the precedent for theorists and philosophers making cinema of their own.
Godard was very important, and his Histoire(s) du cinéma was absolutely crucial. I thought about more of an intervention within the archival history of how trans bodies have been portrayed. As a philosopher, I think there are two traditions: the left-wing tradition, in which basically you think that you can look at images from the outside and, you know, play with them. Guy Debord would be a good example of that. And there is another tradition, which is Pasolini, where there is no difference between words and images – they come together, they make each other and so on. And also, words and images, they are material. They change you; they transform you immediately.

But Orlando and Virginia Woolf gave me the frame of what I could do, and that frame was, for instance, that it had to be a very playful film. It had to be a very childish movie, in a sense.

That leads on well to the next question, which is about the large casting age range you deploy for the people playing Orlando themself. There are 25 Orlandos in total!
Because it was such a long span of time in the novel, 400 years, I knew that there would be many Orlandos. And of course, the idea is that I'm writing this letter to Virginia Woolf, and Orlando is alive. So I did a casting call and 100 people answered, and then I thought the film was starting to become possible. And I knew it wouldn't use, for instance, the idea of going from masculinity into femininity in a single, straight line. Most of the actors are non-binary, with some of them transitioning across the making of the film. Some of the older people recently transitioned.

The challenge was whether they were going to be able to play or to speak with the words of Virginia Woolf. My idea was to displace the normative way of speaking about transitioning and being trans, which, in any case, is about gender and sexuality, itself fully dominated by the language of medicine and psychopathology. This is the underlying message of the film, basically. It’s not just for trans people. It’s like the language that we use to speak about subjectivity, sexuality, desire and gender. Everything is a medical language invented mostly in the 19th century.