Tilda Swinton
(3 of 5)
And she likes--really likes--movies, of all genres and vintages, from the art house to the mainstream. (She was an inspired choice for the icy villain of the blockbuster Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) She started her career in pictures on the wilder shores of cinema, as muse to the avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman. They made seven films together, including the subversive, freewheeling biopic Caravaggio (1986) and The Last of England (1988), a hallucinatory imagining of a dystopian Britain that interweaves home movies from the director's childhood with scenes of urban decay. That vision was rooted partly in Jarman's confrontation with mortality--he had been diagnosed with HIV and would die of AIDS-related causes in 1994--but the film also reflected his and Swinton's shared pessimism about Britain under then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Swinton perceives parallels with today's credit-crunched Britain. Discussing the global Occupy movement and the ongoing encampment at St. Paul's in London, Swinton is seized with an idea: to project The Last of England on the walls of the cathedral as her gift to the protesters.
She may never get around to superimposing Jarman's vision on Christopher Wren's, but Swinton does have a record of putting her money where her mouth is. In 2008 she held a film festival in Nairn; the following year, she took the festival on the road in an odyssey that involved pulling an 80-seat mobile cinema across Scotland. Now she spearheads the 8 Foundation, co-founded with filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins and dedicated to introducing children to world cinema.
The project, and its name, was inspired by Federico Fellini's famous movie and by a question raised by Swinton's son Xavier when he was 8. What, he asked his mother, were people's dreams like before the cinema was invented?
Adventures in the Screen Trade
Xavier's ancestor ernest dunlop Swinton grappled with a similar question. One of several Swintons to climb high in the ranks of the military, he invented the tank--and in 1941, when H.G. Wells claimed that Swinton had stolen the idea from him, Swinton successfully sued the Time Machine author for libel. The two men had at least one creative impulse in common: toward science fiction. In "The Sense of Touch," a short story published in 1912, Ernest described a nightmare visit to a "cinematograph." The narrator is lured into the movie theater by a poster promising "life-repro," a newfangled entertainment consisting of hyperreal color footage--with sounds and smells--of a battle between a scorpion and a praying mantis, hugely magnified. The narrator watches, repulsed and fascinated, until the film jams and a child in the audience begins to cry.
The sparkle round the outline of the monsters in the picture changed all at once to a definite prismatic halo, and with a crackling noise each insect deliberately turned its head towards the woman and child. Then, before you could have whistled, [the mantis and scorpion] were out of the picture, scrambling over the little well where the orchestra had previously been playing.
The giant insects bloodily dismember members of the audience. Very Starship Troopers. But then (spoiler alert!) the narrator wakes to find he has been dreaming, of the cinema, in a cinema.