Orlando, My Political Biography: philosopher Paul B. Preciado turns Woolf’s novel into a playful punk essay film

Orlando, where are you? Paul B. Preciado’s first film opens with the director pasting Parisian streets with posters that invite trans and non-binary people to a casting call for his new film. The work in question is to be a liberal adaptation of Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf’s century-hopping feminist novel about an aristocratic poet who changes sex in their sleep. But Preciado’s film approaches Orlando’s whereabouts more speculatively, searching for figures that Western history has systematically erased. Orlando, it turns out, is everywhere, and is changing the world long after Woolf’s death.

Preciado’s playful, punk essay film begins in the form of a letter to Woolf but soon morphs like its protagonist, into autobiography, queer musical, period drama and political manifesto, offering a group portrait of trans and non-binary people. Preciado himself has been through many metamorphoses: assigned female at birth, the renowned Spanish philosopher and activist has been a lesbian, non-binary and, now, a trans man. The film encapsulates, but never centres, his autobiography into its mosaic of trans and non-binary life and blends personal experience with philosophical inquiry, much as Preciado has done in his own writing, such as his celebrated book of ‘auto-theory’ about taking testosterone, Testo Junkie (2008). At one point in the film, Preciado makes a thrilling discovery in the archive: Woolf at one point intended to place herself in the novel as Volumnia Fox, though that idea was ultimately scrapped. In a manner reminiscent of the fox, an animal symbolising cunning and wit, Orlando: A Political Biography takes mischievous, cross-disciplinary jumps into literature, gender theory, colonial history, trans activism and the media, while never losing sight of its subject(s). 

Arte, the European public culture television channel, first approached Preciado to narrate the story of his life for a documentary. But how was Preciado to do this, he wondered, when Woolf had already got there first? Preciado became the director rather than simply its subject, jettisoning the stale mode of the biopic for a collective trans biography that dissects Woolf’s novel then scatters its trans-utopian seeds out into the world. Rather than let an individual speak for the universality of trans and non-binary experience (as if such a thing is even possible, though that hasn’t stopped filmmakers from trying), Preciado lets the many Orlandos speak for themselves: 25 of them, to be precise! The film hums to a joyous polyphony of voices, blurring the borders between the source text and personal testimony in ways that are pleasingly hard to discern. 

Through Woolf’s prose and their own life stories, Preciado’s cast of Orlandos speak about love, poetry, nature and transitioning. We see Orlandos reposing in parks, framed in beautiful tableaux that naturalise people whom society has sought to denaturalise. For these ‘gender poets’, fiction provides a salve for the ills they have faced and an all-consuming obsession; one of the Orlandos claims to suffer from ‘literature sickness’. Bubbling from the film’s cauldron of ideas about gender, sex and power is a manifesto for reading as cure: for the power of poetry to provide a home for the marginal, while also impacting the world that lies outside of the book. 

It would be a mistake in writing about this film to make it sound poker-faced, because Orlando resolutely is not. It is a political work that wears its seriousness very lightly, and its lightness very seriously indeed. A celebration of freedom from the constraints of gender normativity, the film explores new ways of representing trans and non-binary stories by upending the ways these stories have typically been framed: that is, within the discourses of psychiatry, medicine and the law. A scene in a doctor’s waiting room, where the Orlandos await their hormone prescriptions, transforms into an anarchic punk musical heralding a new era of ‘pharmacoliberation’, soundtracked by an earworm of a club groove that has now been released as a single.

More seriously, the administrative horrors many trans people face acquiring passports and other legal documents is rerouted into a ritual of collective healing, as a courtroom of Orlandos, including trans activist Jenny Bel’Air, is granted planetary citizenship in a hearing overseen by the feminist writer and director of Baise-moi (2000) Virginie Despentes, Preciado’s ex-partner and a critical collaborator. Among this epic choir of heavenly Orlandos (flanked by the goddesses of hormones, gender-fucking and insurrection), the presence of figureheads of French feminist and trans activism links two worlds that are often portrayed as being in opposition: a reminder of the value of the common fight over the ugly confrontation.

Speaking to critic Devika Girish on the Film Comment podcast, Preciado described his traumatic relationship to cinema history when starting to adapt Orlando. Cinematic representations of trans experience have often dwelt in violence, persecution and tragedy. One of the challenges Preciado faced was how to work with images while still questioning their regimes of oppression. One of the ways in which he approaches this is by recognising the artifice of filmmaking, making nimble links between the cinematic apparatus, trans experience and the artifice of socially inscribed gender roles. To be trans, Preciado observes in the film, “is to understand that a society is a collectively constructed set, and that masculinity and femininity are political fictions”. 

As such, the film itself is hybrid, unstable and often under construction. Film sets are constantly being built or transformed in the background of a scene, leaving the technologies of cinema resolutely on show. Characters introduce themselves to camera and explain the role they are playing. And costumes are DIY and sparse: an Elizabethan ruff and a chainmail headpiece stand in for a century. In this, the film shares a sensibility with Derek Jarman’s punk queering of Shakespeare and Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981), as well as the scrappiness of early Pedro Almodóvar films. Though the Ottinger and Sally Potter’s 1992 Orlando adaptation are both great films in their own right, what Preciado presents here is a much wilder and more creative interpretation of Woolf’s text.

A rallying cry for the diversity of trans and non-binary stories that ultimately rejects the narrow liberal individualism of identity politics, Orlando: A Political Biography might well be, as queer film theorist B. Ruby Rich called it, “the first trans masterpiece”. Orlando, are you reading this, is this you? 

 ► Orlando, My Political Biography is in UK cinemas from 5 July.