Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Mark on the Wall,” published in 1917, was one of the first two stories printed and published by Virginia and her husband Leonard when they started the Hogarth Press. A new experimental short film, now available online, brings her first published story to life.
Anderson Wright’s evocative and experimental short film is described as capturing the essence of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative, in which a seemingly insignificant mark on the wall triggers the exploration of memory, identity, and the passage of time.
I watched it and found it hauntingly beautiful, with the final words of the film echoing Woolf’s own, minus her words about war.
If you have three minutes and forty-four seconds at your disposal, you can watch it, too.
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:
Obligatory Barbie photo. Loved the artifice (like Asteroid City my last movie outing) pic.twitter.com/yzETjzw79J
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.
For his first Woolf-related project, Wilson rearranged Woolf’s words into his novella titled Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So. Set 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.
Here is a roundup of music and movie news of interest to followers of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.
Pianist Lana Bode has just released her debut album “I and Silence: Women’s Voices inAmerican Song” with mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons. The album includes a performance of Dominick Argento’s song-cycle “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf,” which some may remember them performing at the 26th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf at The Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall in Leeds in June 2016.
“Jigsaw,” a 1962 film and Jack Warner’s last, includes some locations of interest to Woolfians — from Brighton to Lewes to Rodmell, along with a 10-second scene of Fr
ank Dean’s garage with the Abergavenny Arms in the background at 1 hr., 10 min., 9 sec. The film is available on DVD.
“Inside Out South West” on BBC iplayer, 16 September 2019, has many shots of Godrevy Lighthouse in the background.
Now that Chanya Button’s UK-Ireland feature film is about to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival tomorrow, we have an update that includes the brief official trailer and a review link.
I imagine that most readers of Woolf are eager to see the film, which stars Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf and Gemma Arterton as Sackville-West. Arterton also served as the movie’s executive producer. And although I don’t know when it will be available in theaters, I am already enjoying this quote from the trailer:
Independence has no sex.
The Toronto Review wrote a negative review, stating that the film “attempts to manufacture chemistry by regurgitating chunks of the letters that Vita and Virginia wrote to each other.”
I guess we’ll have to wait until we see it ourselves before we can decide whether the film does more than that. I, for one, am hopeful that it does justice to both women.
