Orlando: My Political Biography

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is the template for this many-layered exploration of nonbinary and transgender experience.

Paul B. Preciado is a Spanish author, philosopher, and transgender man, whose work includes studies of identity, sexuality, and feminism. But when a small French film company suggested he participate in a movie about his own complicated history as a nonbinary and trans person, he decided that it wasn’t enough to tell his story, as interesting as it might be. Something greater was needed, something evoking the variety and difference within trans lives. He thought of his favorite novel, “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf, from 1928, which tells of a man, his life spanning over a few centuries, who wakes up in the middle of the story as a woman. The English novelist was exploring the fluidity of gender before there were even proper terms for it. Preciado, who has never made a film before, wrote and directed a cinematic essay and manifesto called Orlando: My Political Biography.

Transgender people have been much in the news lately, unfortunately because opportunists have used fear and hostility to scapegoat and persecute them in order to enforce their notions of gender and sex. A regular documentary would study and investigate the subject, stating facts, evaluating conditions, and so on. And there probably are useful films out there that perform that service. But Precadio wants to give us the view from the inside, communicate as much as possible the thoughts and experiences of nonbinary and trans people. To that end he uses costumes, music, poetry, monologue, and scenes of struggles that many face.

Over twenty different transgender people, most of them non-professional actors, play different versions of Orlando, the novel’s main character. The plot is only roughly sketched. The film, mostly in French, offers many kinds of talk: personal, historical, philosophical of course, and political, centered on the awareness of a nonbinary self-nature. We hear Preciado talking in voice-over about his experience, sometimes directly addressing Woolf herself, while the actors read passages from the book and also talk about their lives. The director believes that Woolf was realizing a non-binary point of view, but there are better possibilities to explore than she was able to do a hundred years ago.

Social barriers are confronted and satirized. We witness the inevitable encounter of young trans people with psychiatrists, whose general incomprehension is set off by the self-aware comments of their patients. Some people who underwent surgical transition talk about that process. Preciado plays with period costume in a kind of classical punk aesthetic, and we can sometimes see the backstage work going into the movie we’re watching. There’s a sense of joy and homecoming that is conveyed here. Preciado places his characters in beautiful natural settings, defeating the dominant narrative that pretends they are unnatural.

Shot on a shoestring, the film is finely composed—the richness of Preciado’s text conveys truths we may never have realized from a mere documentary approach. Nonbinary, we learn, does not mean another sexual identity. It is the recognition that gender is socially invented and that the traits of our humanity are not part of what he calls the “regime of sexual difference.” Orlando: a Political Biography is a film of poetry and unexpected insights.