The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Poetics of Love

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Internationally renowned as a filmmaker, writer and composer, Sally Potter has always been a provocateur: as a feminist filmmaker and performer, a leading light of the BFI Production Board generation, a British filmmaker Oscar-nominated for a low-budget costume drama, and a pioneer of digital cinema. Drawing on exclusive access to archival materials and in-depth interviews with Britain's most independent director, "The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love" opens up vivid historical, political, and cultural vistas to give the first full account of this extraordinary career.Potter's award-winning films "Thriller" , "Orlando" , "The Tango Lesson" , "The Man Who Cried" , and "Yes" , are valued by cinephiles and theorists alike for their evocative sensuality, incisive wit and explosive refusal of cinematic clich?s, qualities famously crystallized in Orlando's generously and exactingly reciprocal gaze to-camera. That gaze is the dynamic core of Potter's formally and politically radical reconception of cinema in her most recent film "Rage" , told entirely through talking-heads shot against greenscreen.While "Rage" looks ahead to a new economy, both financial and visual, it draws deeply on Potter's committed refashioning of cinematic looking and listening through her attention to what dominant culture neglects and suppresses: labor, performance, beauty, poetry, listening, and the spirit of place. Putting the unseen on screen, Potter's films fill the viewer with wonder and desire, enacting the possibilities of cinema as love.