Little White Lies Issue 109

WELCOME TO… LWLIES 109: A TILDA SWINTON READER This issue is a study of the actor as auteur. As one is often drawn into looking for patterns in the work of writers and directors, those that perform in front of the cameras are dismissed as shape-shifting pawns, human avatars manifesting the desires and dreams of those shady figures behind the viewfinder. Tilda Swinton – Ongoing is a major exhibition taking place at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam between 28 September 2025 and 8 February 2026. Rather than the usual mausoleum of trinkets and artefacts displayed to help us retroactively piece together a creative life already lived, Ongoing is about performance as a continuum that gifts us the infinite possibility for renewal and rebirth. “I wouldn’t call her an actor,” says Julia…

1984 Joined the Royal Shakespeare Company; appeared in ‘Measure for Measure’ 1986 Caravaggio Derek Jarman 1986 Egomania: Island Without Hope Christoph Schlingensief 1986 Caprice Joanna Hogg 1987 Aria Derek Jarman 1987 Friendship’s Death Peter Wollen 1987 The Last of England Derek Jarman 1988 Das andere Ende der Welt Imogen Kimmel 1988 Member of the jury at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival, 1988 Cycling the Frame Cynthia Beatt 1988 Degrees of Blindness Cerith Wyn Evans 1988 L’Ispirazione Derek Jarman 1989 Play Me Something Timothy Neat 1989 War Requiem Derek Jarman 1989 Performed in Joan Jonas’ performance art piece, Volcano Saga…

The very first moment we see Tilda Swinton in the history of cinema is just off-screen in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, looking like any one of a rabble of young men who are watching a fist fight and cheering. She comes into frame when she frees the loser from the match (the pugilists are tied together) and proceeds to kiss the winner, her lover, passionately. We see her (and him) through the eyes of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: not as man and/or woman, but as an object of beauty in which he can lose himself. Though it’s been over 40 years since this film’s release, and Swinton has gone on to star or feature in dozens of projects that have slowly defined her as one of the most uniquely…

Tilda Swinton is credited as ‘The Nurse’ in Derek Jarman’s 1989 film adaption of Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem’. She first appears in the crimson and white uniform of a World War One nurse, standing over the body of the Unknown Soldier and pressing her fingers into her eyelids as she lets out a Brechtian silent scream. About 50 minutes into the film, Swinton appears in an altogether different guise – now seated on the stone steps of an altar, she wears a large, masculine white shirt which has fallen off her left shoulder, baring her pale skin. Her head piece is gone, and now she sits twisting her long blonde hair into tightly woven plaits. Britten wrote his ‘War Requiem’ for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in May…

As with one of her great friends and creative partners, David Bowie, Tilda Swinton is an avid reader. It’s fun to delve into old interviews and just bump into another weird and wonderful literary reference, or a hat-tip to a book she’s currently enjoying. These range from old faithfuls like Muriel Spark, Herman Melville and Nancy Mitford, to some intriguing deep cuts such as Patrick Dennis’ 1955 comic novel, ‘Auntie Mame’, the collected works of poet Frank O’Hara, and the complete essays of Michel de Montaigne (“Should, in my humble opinion, replace Gideon in hotel bedside tables the world over”). One book that crops up on a few occasions is ‘Bento’s Sketchbook’ from 2011. It’s a late work by the art critic and poet-philosopher, John Berger, who trained a generation…

Sticky Gold Stars: A Column in Celebration of LGBTQ+ Cinema If one role were to foreshadow the range of epithets that would be most associated with Tilda Swinton (ethereal, otherworldly, enigmatic, the list goes on) it would be none other than that of the titular character in Peter Wollen’s 1987 sci-fi two-hander (and sole solo feature), Friendship’s Death. As the woman who fell to Earth, Swinton plays an extraterrestrial android powered by sophisticated A.I. in a feminine corporeal shell, who is sent as a peacekeeping envoy to exhort humanity to reform its aggressive ways – and truly, Swinton’s distinct otherworldliness could not have been put to better use. Instead of landing in the US where her programmers intended her to address the United Nations, a navigational error causes Friendship to…