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Posts Tagged ‘films’

The connections between Barbie and Virginia Woolf

Posted in 21st century Woolf, A Room of One's Own, feminism, films, tagged , , , , on Sunday 30 July 2023| 2 Comments »

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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New film pays tribute to photo archives, Virginia Woolf

Posted in films, To the Lighthouse, tagged , , , on Monday 10 July 2023| Leave a Comment »

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 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.

Learn more about Wilson and his work.

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

 

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Music and movie news for Virginia Woolf fans

Posted in films, music, tagged , , , , , on Thursday 26 September 2019| Leave a Comment »

Here is a roundup of music and movie news of interest to followers of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

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Vita and Virginia: the film is out

Posted in films, Vita and Virginia, Vita Sackville-West, tagged , , , on Monday 10 September 2018| Leave a Comment »

From the release of details about the film in 2015 to cast selection in the winter of 2017 to additional preparations made later that year, Blogging Woolf has kept readers informed about Vita and Virginia, the new film telling the love story of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

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.

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Films on outsider women include Woolf

Posted in films, tagged , , , on Friday 20 November 2015| Leave a Comment »

A series of short films that shine a spotlight on 20th-century women writers who can be considered outsiders includes one on Virginia Woolf, who thought of herself as an outsider in terms of education and writing.

Being “locked out” provided her with more freedom, according to narrator Sue Asbee. She adds that Woolf’s achievements lie in her willingness to take risks and to experiment with form and subject matter.

Other writers in the new English literature module at The Open University include Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys and Jeanette Winterson.

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