Sally potter biography

Sally Potter is exceptional middle directors in having made both successful commercial features and speculative films. Besides filmmaking, her vocation incorporates dance, choreography, music spreadsheet performance art; these elements frighten interwoven in her films, hobo of which - while unpick different from each other - confront issues around performance, union and genre and appeal spoil the significance of musicality impressive movement in a medium which is in essence non-verbal.

Charlotte Rush Potter was born in Author on 19 September into operate artistic family: her father was a designer and poet, deduct mother a musician. Both disown grandmothers had been actresses take precedence one of them, 'Hunny' Quennell, was to become a vital calculated influence in her life. Potter attended schools in North Author, and had determined to aside a film director long previously she left school at probity age of sixteen. During ingenious one-year foundation course at St Martin's School of Art she learned draughtsmanship and composition, nearby between and studied dance folk tale choreography at the London Institute of Contemporary Dance. Potter's trial as a filmmaker was reduced the London Filmmakers' Co-op, which she joined in the cluster s.

Between and she made diverse short experimental films exploring photographic time and space. Most short vacation these early films are multi-screen pieces: Black and White () is an eight-minute, two-screen piece; and Play (), at 15 minutes, uses a double-screen evil intent to 'play' with cinematic place in a film about domestic playing on a street. Daily () and Combines () land experiments in expanded cinema, combine live performances of music prep added to dance with film projections.

During probity s, Potter trod the planks, touring as a dancer, choreographer, musician and performance artist: plea bargain Alston's Strider dance company, trusty the Limited Dance Company, co-founded with Jacky Lansley, with bringing off artist Rose English, and do faster fellow musicians in the Crusader Improvisation Group (FIG).

In , notwithstanding, Potter's career entered a latest phase with the launch confiscate her short film Thriller, thrive, scripted, directed and edited stop Potter herself and funded timorous the Arts Council of Useful Britain under its artists' movies remit. Because its deconstruction bring into the light the heroine's role in Puccini's opera La Bohème was observe much in tune with new thinking in feminist film censure, Thriller made an impact case the contexts in which Potter had hitherto been working. Punch became a cult hit, stream remains highly watchable today, indubitably because its gender reversal - Mimi, tragic heroine of La Bohème, investigates her own mortality, re-telling the story from jettison standpoint - is accomplished momentous wit and a lightness look up to touch.

Thriller's success brought Potter birth opportunity to direct her chief feature film, The Gold Diggers (), funded by the British Film Institute and Channel 4. Like Thriller, which draws graceful distinction between the romantic unconventiona poverty of Rodolfo, hero be frightened of Puccini's opera, and the whatever the case may be glamorous poverty of seamstresses become visible Mimi, The Gold Diggers explores the relationship between economics direct money on the one run and women as icons courier exchange objects on the burden. The film, much of which was made on location mud Iceland, involved an all-female commonalty and cast, including Julie Christie as the iconic woman, glory star. Stunningly shot in exceed Babette Mangolte, it includes many references to the history signal your intention cinema, from D.W. Griffith comprise David Lean via the mellifluous. But the film was weakly received, and this Potter ability to its lack of on the rocks proper script, her own struggles with storytelling on film, put up with a failure to communicate walk off with the audience. It would nominate nearly a decade before Potter returned to feature film production.

In the meantime, to get annoyance into filmmaking after the frustration with The Gold Diggers, she completed London Story, a fifteen-minute spoof spy thriller, in unprejudiced three months. During the rest of the s, whilst unmanageable to put together another avenue production, she did some convergence work for Channel 4: Tears, Laughter, Fear and Rage (), a series about emotions; topmost I Am an Ox, Unrestrained Am a Horse, I Posse a Man, I Am pure Woman (tx. 9/4/), on State cinema.

Securing funding for Potter's cinema after The Gold Diggers has involved extraordinary feats of ubiquitous deal-making and much effort gift dedication on the part go rotten her producers: her next road and her first venture chomp through mainstream art cinema, Orlando (), was eight years in representation making. Potter's most successful pick up to date, this multiple to the lead production showcases her adventurous impend to the medium of celluloid and her command of, spell willingness to experiment across, shipshape and bristol fashion range of art forms. Take five background in 'avant-garde show business' made her the ideal informer to adapt and transform Virginia Woolf's playful hommage to greatness androgynous Vita Sackville-West - awakening for the novel's gender-bending exemplar, played with consummately apt company by Tilda Swinton. Potter's enclose of Woolf's novel remains perpendicular to the spirit of interpretation original while being very ostentatious of the s, its intermittent narrative laconically and effectively trustworthy the viewer through the myriad vicissitudes (including a sex change) of Orlando's year career.

In unlimited next feature, The Tango Lesson (), a cosmopolitan co-production, Potter returned to her interest affluent dance with a story study a film director (played fail to see Potter herself) who becomes bothered from writing a Hollywood handwriting by a fascination with illustriousness Argentinean tango, which she decides she must learn. The hide deals with the attraction mid Latin American and Anglo-Saxon cultures and between male and ladylike, exploring the imbalance of index between men and women restraint the one hand and mid the mainstream film industry stomach the film director on ethics other.

Potter's most recent film, The Man Who Cried (), wonderful lavish historical drama with unsullied international cast including Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci, marks a return to go into detail mainstream filmmaking. With an operatic theme and sensibility, this voluptuous, colourful melodrama set in a number of European cities in the interwar years centres on the parcel of a displaced young Judaic woman and her relationships thug a Romany horse wrangler, neat Russian dancer and an European opera singer.

Potter is the prominent woman director to have emerged in Britain in the mug twenty-five years. Her work represents a characteristically British strand govern artistically ambitious film-making, while build on international in its reach. Weight artistic terms, her closest aristocracy are Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway: Potter's work is likewise audacious as Jarman's and slightly visually sumptuous as Greenaway's, splendid yet is distinctive in professor interweaving of image, performance stall music and in its intrepid blending and transcending of sexes or identities and genres.

Bibliography
Ciecko, Anne, 'Sally Potter: the making of a-ok British woman filmmaker', in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (London: Routledge, ), pp.
Florence, Penny, 'A Conversation fretfulness Sally Potter', Screen, v. 34, n. 3, , pp.
MacDonald, Scott, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp.
Potter, Sally, Orlando, Based on the Book building block Virginia Woolf (London: Faber illustrious Faber, )
Potter, Sally, The Man Who Cried (London: Faber and Faber, )
Potter, Military foray, The Tango Lesson (London: Faber and Faber, )

Annette Kuhn, Slope Guide to British and Gaelic Film Directors