Out Of The Fog

Hollywood Video here in town is closing its doors, and today they marked everything down to 90% off. I found a treasure trove of movies old and new in their library - films you take to heart and then somehow forget for a few years like Hideous Kinky or And The Band Played On - and I made off like a bandit. One film I didn't find hiding in the aisles that would have been perfect was Orlando, the '92 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel starring Tilda Swinton. The novel and the movie both left such a deep impression I didn't find it again until just recently, when I began work on The Book of Elizabeth.

An older Elizabeth features in Orlando (Quentin Crisp does her in drag in the movie, which I fear made more an impression than anything else) but when I close my eyes, it's Swinton I see as my Elizabeth. I discovered in writing the book just how much of an impact the themes and ideas - half remembered, like a dream - the book/movie had on impressionable young me back in the early 90's. I didn't find the movie today (for a dollar anyhow; Barnes and Noble has it for $30, which is too much for me) but I did come home and find some nuggets of it on YouTube. I found this bit, and wanted to share it. Fog is a significant image in the book and this sequence seems to me like some half-remembered dream:

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