The battle of the bonnets

The Washington Post has an article on 'the battle of the bonnets', that is, the Austen vs Brontë debate, now sparkled by the new Jane Eyre movie.

“When I need order in my life, I read Jane Austen,” says Alison Owen, an English film producer. “When I’m feeling more emotional, and when I need that passionate punch, I turn to ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” [...]
The Brontës are more difficult. Things don’t end well. The writing is beautiful, but Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff — Charlotte and Emily’s two most famous heroes — are basically thugs in morning coats. They say savage things. They emotionally torture the women they claim to love. They keep other women locked in attics and blame drunken housekeepers for bumps in the night. Things burn. People die.
The storminess of the Brontë women’s writing makes for an intensely personal reading experience — a private world of melodrama and creepy love. This might explain why there has never been a definitive film version. For any screen adaptation to approach the emotional pinnacles achieved by readers in their imaginations, it would have to include so much lavish emoting that it would end up looking ridiculous.
“It’s especially true with ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ” says Andrew McCarthy, the director of the Bronte Parsonage Museum in England. “As a naturalistic adaptation, it’s unfilmable, really. There almost needs to be a new media or a new art form.”
In some ways, McCarthy says, “the most successful adaptations are the ones that pay the least respect to the book.” (Monica Hesse)

The Yorkshire Post has tells about Screen Yorkshire's work:

Nor can we measure the reaction of Yorkshire viewers when they recognise East Riddlesden Hall in the ITV adaptation of Wuthering Heights, or the Yorkshire Post building in the Red Riding series on Channel 4. [...]
The screen agency is instrumental in bringing movie and television productions to the region. It is thanks to its work behind the scenes that we see Sheffield in This is England, or Elland Road in the Tom Hooper movie The Damned United. It is also thanks to the agency that we will soon see Yorkshire locations in the Andrea Arnold cinematic re-imagining of Wuthering Heights and North Yorkshire feature in The Woman in Black starring Daniel Radcliffe. (Nick Ahad)

The Yorkshire Post also asks Brian Cantor, Vice-Chancellor of the University of York, about his favourite books and he includes Wuthering Heights on the list.

We are not leaving Yorkshire just yet, as The Scarborough Evening News points to that town's 'real' literary corner:

A GROUP of some of Scarborough’s newer houses, occupying a hillside site rising up from Stepney Grove (1930), could be described as the town’s true literary corner. Leading off from Laughton Avenue (1970), there are Walmsley Gardens (1971), Bronte Close (1977), Holtby Grove (1970) and Jameson Crescent (1969). (Dr Jack Binns)

The New York Times reviews the revival of Martha Graham's Death and Entrances.

Solos of this kind occur in “Deaths and Entrances” (1943) and “Cave of the Heart” (1947), both of which rejoined the Graham repertory on Wednesday night. “Deaths” concerns three sisters haunted by remembered children (who may well be their younger selves), and preoccupied by four men. If you know (the program tells you) that Graham was thinking of the Brontë sisters, then the drama may become the struggle of a female artist to convert experience into art. (It’s far from certain that anyone would reach that conclusion without external prompting.) [...]
“Deaths” abounds in ambiguities; “Cave” has few. These are historic works. On Wednesday, though, neither was believable. The dancers seemed not to believe in them, merely to be ravenously exhibiting themselves in them. “Cave,” which can be riveting, kept turning into a Ballets Trockadero parody. “Deaths” was the more seriously interesting, but also dimmer. I could never tell which of Tadej Brdnik and Maurizio Nardi was meant to be the Dark Beloved and which the Poetic Beloved or why it mattered.
At least in “Deaths” the two main soliloquies for the central sister (danced by Miki Orihara) were arresting compositions, with oddities and originalities worth analyzing. Graham’s dramas are always most interesting when what’s being said can’t be neatly translated into words. The changes of pace and angle, the sudden stops and retractions, the unexpected gestures: all these showed in principle why a Graham heroine is remarkable.
Ms. Orihara’s performance could have succeeded in a different context, and Mr. Brdnik’s virile force can breathe life into heroic roles. As Jason in “Cave,” Ben Schultz injected fresh vim into a few moments. But the performances of Katherine Crockett (a sister in “Deaths,” Chorus in “Cave”), Mr. Nardi and, to a lesser extent, Blakeley White-McGuire (another sister in “Deaths,” Medea in “Cave”) all proved fatal to their roles: these were performances of performing, archly commenting on their own sophistication and cultivated intensity. (Alastair Macaulay)

The Wall Street Journal also reviews this dance piece:

Later on the second program, the less-distinguished music by Hunter Johnson that accompanies Ms. Graham's "Deaths and Entrances" (1943), more like a moody movie soundtrack than a motivating force, proved less debilitating to the effectiveness of her choreography.
Handsomely set by Arch Lauterer's original sculptural pieces, which delicately indicate a fusty interior, and somewhat dulled by Oscar de la Renta's busy reworking of the original costumes, "Deaths and Entrances"—recently trimmed of some 10 minutes by Ms. Eilber—concerns a turbulent household dominated by three sisters, said to be based on England's literary Brontës.
Taking on the role of the most dominant sister (Emily?), a stoic yet steely Miki Orihara brought remarkable resonance to Ms. Graham's former role and to the choreography's deep and dark picture of an insular world—one fraught with memories and filled with moves that suggest running toward and away from haunting personal recollections.
The rest of the cast framing Ms. Orihara's key figure brought all due honor and luster to Ms. Graham's penetrating yet oblique depiction of sisterly feelings and individual longings. As a secondary sister, Ms. White-McGuire was fine, illuminating Ms. Graham's sometimes emphatic movements with the shade of expressive gesture. (Robert Greskovic)

A columnist from NewsTime remarks,

Naturally, reinterpretations of classic works in another medium cannot be considered remakes. Nobody would claim that a new film of “Wuthering Heights” is a remake of William Wyler’s 1939 classic. (Digby Ricci)

Author J.E. Taylor Blog talks to writer David Lender:

JET: Which authors had the most influence over you growing up?
[...] I also admire Hemingway, Joyce, the Brontë sisters, Henry James, Conrad and Steinbeck.

We don't exactly understand what Carla Gugino means in this interview on A.V.Club:

AVC: In terms of period drama, there’s a universe of great characters that you’re not even quite old enough to play yet. It’s perhaps the space between young and older women that isn’t as well populated. 
CG: I know, although the truth is that it’s only right now, because if you think of Ava Gardner or Bette Davis, they were actually in their thirties, probably into early forties, with their prime time. The Age Of Innocence or Dangerous Liaisons, there are things that have women all across the board, age-wise. It’s just that they don’t make those movies any more. I mean very, very rarely. It’s true, there are certain ones like Jane Eyre, that have been aged down.  (Sam Adams)

Aged down?

The Telegraph & Argus talks about the Wuthering Hike course; David E. Petzal on Field & Stream confesses:

I will answer only questions that can be dealt with in a couple of sentences, since we live in the age of the sound bite. If you’d like an analysis of Bill Heavey’s stylistic indebtedness to Emily Brontë, you will have to get it elsewhere. 

The New York Times reviews the novel Becoming George Sand (erm - that title sounds familiar somehow) by Nancy Kline:

Her admirers included Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. The last three thought her the greatest French stylist of her time. (Nancy Kline)

The actual praise comes from a letter to W.S.Williams (April 12th 1850)

Now I can understand admiration of George Sand; for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout (even Consuelo, which is the best, or the best that I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence), yet she has a grasp of mind, which, if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound[.]

The Brontë Sisters celebrated Patrick Brontë's birthday yesterday. She is Too Fond of Books is beginning a Jane Eyre Read-Along and We'll Always Have Books is finishing another. Spoilers and Nuts reviews that same novel. Katharine Yee posts about the 1944 adaptation.

Categories: Brontëites, Dance, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights