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Archive for the ‘films’ Category

The way I see it, there are several connections between Greta Gerwig, her blockbuster film Barbie, and Virginia Woolf. Here we go:

  • One of Gerwig’s all-time favorite books is Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). It is, she notes, “A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose, and it will never be the same again. The metaphysics she presents in the book are enacted in a way that allowed me to begin to understand that corner of philosophy.”
  • In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf writes that “a woman must have a room of her own” in order to write fiction. In Barbie, all of the Barbies have entire dream houses of their own — and they find such ownership essential to their independent, feminist lifestyles.
  • An NPR story on the film includes this quote: “But Barbie could fend for herself. Like Nancy Drew, she drove her own roadster and lived in her own dream house — Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own painted in pastels.”
  • From Second Wind Books comes this Facebook post that lists the similarities between Woolf and Barbie:


From Woolf scholar and novelist Maggie Humm comes this Twitter post:

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Kabe Wilson pays tribute to archives, as well as Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, in a newly launched film based on his creative work with modernist archives this spring.

Wilson explains that “Looking for Virginia: An Artist’s Journey Through 100 Archives” “covers a series of archival quests about my childhood holidays, which then link up with Woolf and Bell’s own holidays, as well as their collaboration on To the Lighthouse itself, before developing into an elegy to all three,” Wilson explains.

The culmination of his residency at the Centre for Modernist Studies, the multi-media presentation centers around the story of the 10 paintings of Brighton and Sussex that Wilson produced during the 2020 lockdown period, and the exciting art history discovery that led to one of them becoming the cover image of a new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Read more about it.

More about Kabe Wilson

For his first Woolf-related project, Wilson rearranged Woolf’s words into his novella titled Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or SoSet 80 years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, it tells the story of a young woman’s radical challenge to literary conservatism in the elitist environment of the University of Cambridge.

He then turned his work into a piece of art, a 4 x 13-ft. sheet of paper displaying the novella’s 145 pages, with each word cut out, individually, from a copy of A Room of One’s Own, and reformed to duplicate the novella.

Learn more about Wilson and his work.

Centre for Modernist Studies from A. T. Kabe on Vimeo.

 

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For anyone who reads and loves Virginia Woolf, St. Ives is a magical place. Take a trip back in time by viewing old footage of that Cornish town.
  • From the BBC iPlayer comes “Cornwall: This Fishing Life,” with series 2, episode 4, focusing on St. Ives. It includes old black and white film footage of the place where Woolf and the Stephen family spent their summers until she was 12.
  • Nineteen seconds of color film footage of St. Ives from Claude Friese-Greene’s The Open Road (1926) a fascinating social record of inter-war Britain. The St. Ives snippet below is available on the British Film Industry‘s YouTube Channel.
  • And just for fun, check out the video below of a model railroad version of St. Ives, circa the 1950s, created by a former St. Ives resident. In this eight-minute video, he adds his own memories, along with details about constructing the layout. Stuart Clarke of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain shared this video and notes that we “may” be able to see Talland House at the 4-minute, 32-second mark.

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Teaching Virginia Woolf online this fall? If so, these YouTube videos focused on her life and her work may help. Take a look.

Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway

This is a nearly one-hour 1987 dramatized documentary on the novel, with an introduction by Woolf biographer Hermione Lee.

The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf

This is an approximately 25-minute triptych featuring (among others) Hermione Lee, Eileen Atkins, Nigel Nicolson and Frances Spalding.



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From the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain comes these resources: links to two short videos of an exchange of letters between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Both were recorded for Amnesty International and LGBTI+.

  • Vita’s letter to Virginia, read by Jodie Comer
  • Virginia letter replying to Vita, read by Nicola Coughlan

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