The Time Travelers

Tilda Swinton, in her foreword to a 2012 edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, writes that the book “is, perhaps, the most transgressive experiment [Woolf] ever made: the merging of a double-exposure portrait, in the vernacular of her paternal inheritance, as a kind of talisman of hopefulness and carefree abandon toward something better than a brightening future—rather a glorious, trustworthy present.”

At first glance, there would seem to be scant reason to link together the lives, works, or aesthetic sensibilities of Woolf and filmmaker Derek Jarman, respectively the consummate modernist and the fearless postmodernist. None, that is, apart from this issue’s majordomo Swinton as the central figure in both of their works. She is the definitive embodiment of the storied protagonist in Sally Potter’s film and the essential co-conspirator (1986), at the beginning of their intoxicating collaboration, followed by the doomsday visions of (1987) and (1989), and as the deliciously murderous Queen Isabella in Jarman’s (1991), made in his trademark baroque and overwrought style. It is her voice, with others, that drives Jarman’s (1993), his last fully realized feature work—an azure screen with no images to interrupt the flow of words, voices, and ideas—one so dense with language that he effectively joined Woolf as a chronicler of words.