boy in a blue track jacket and Victorian collar sits on a stepladder, surrounded by production equipment. While a stage tech drags a snowy backdrop behind him, the actor reads from the book in his lap. It is by Virginia Woolf—the knotty, daring story of an Elizabethan nobleman who one day wakes to find he has inexplicably changed into a woman. As the set is transformed in plain sight, the meta elements dissolving into a concentrated fantasy, the filmmaker’s own voice replaces the actor’s. Unseen, Paul B. Preciado asserts that, in Woolf but perhaps in general, “the first revolutionary metamorphosis is poetry,” which he defines as “the possibility of changing the names of all things.” Preciado, a lexicographer in his own right, makes the case for poetic documentary—which refuses narrative expectations of chronology and relies on playful resignification—as the most suitable mode for a queer
