First clips from Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights

Thanks to an anonymous reader who kindly left a comment, we can now watch four clips from Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights uploaded to YouTube by Jagfilm:





IndieWire's The Playlist comments on the clips:

The first thing you’ll notice about the clips is the immediacy and urgency of the camera work, one that drops the refined air of previous incarnations and gets right into the thick of the drama. The next you’ll notice is that this doesn’t come at the expense of the look of the film which, like “Fish Tank” before it, retains a strong eye to framing and composition even as it ducks and weaves between the characters. Oh yeah, and finally, we haven’t seen all the adaptations, but we’re pretty sure there wasn’t a sex scene portrayed with such…rawness. Arnold seems to have aimed for the primal emotion of the work with some interesting results. (Kevin Jagernauth)

IndieWire's Shadow and Act also comments on the footage and posts the official synopsis of the film:

By the way, the official synopsis for this adaptation reads: “A Yorkshire hill farmer on a visit to Liverpool finds a homeless boy on the streets. He takes him home to live as part of his family on the isolated Yorkshire moors where the boy forges an obsessive relationship with the farmer’s daughter.”
Not-so unlike the original novel’s plot.

And IndieWire's Thompson on Hollywood takes a look at the Venice Film Festival and says about Wuthering Heights:

The strong British influence in Venice’s competition films is confirmed by two more titles on successive days : a re-working of John le Carre’s complex espionage thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with a classy posse of Brit thesps – Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Tom Hardy among them; and Andrea Arnold’s take on Emily Brontë’s classic Wuthering Heights (a radically different one, allegedly) with lesser-known talent. (Anne Thompson)

EDIT:
Britscene:

Upon first viewing the clips and images the first phrase that springs to mind is “gritty reality’ followed by the words bleak, stark, rugged, dark and downright odd! Arnold is not relying on flashy camera work and drawn out set-pieces to tell the story, it’s the actors and the sheer bleakness of the Yorkshire Moors that do the work here. (Stewart)

Word & Film:

Now, judging by the above footage, it appears that Wuthering Heights is also getting its due in the form of Andrea Arnold’s exquisitely beautiful rendering of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece. In the build-up to the film’s premiere at next month’s Toronto Film Festival, Arnold has offered a tantalizing taste of what’s to come in the form of four brief snippets showcasing pivotal moments: Heathcliff’s baptism, a voyeuristic bathing scene, a voyeuristic sex scene, and pure romantic agony. Arnold is the first filmmaker to cast a black actor in the role of Heathcliff — a decision that now makes so much intuitive sense in terms of creating a visual reference for the overwhelming beauty and tragedy of his inextricable sense of otherness. No previous adaption has really captured the electrifying sexual chemistry that sparked from moment one between Heathcliff and Cathy. Until now. Just try not to come away from these brief snippets a little breathless and bowled over. If you succeed, it’s on you to nominate a previous adaptation that better captures the novel’s elemental heat. (Christine Spines)

Best for film:

The refinery of previous adaptations has been dropped completely, giving us an eyewitness view to proceedings. The drama feels urgent, the action feels immediate and the sex scene looks, erm, pretty provocative, with the uncomfortable addition of young Heathcliff watching from afar. In fact, from what we can tell from the trailer, this adaptation seems to be playing around with the theme of voyeurism in a very big way, with a lot of external observation and very close-up camera work.  (Kayleigh Dray)

Pureciné:

Ce premier aperçu du film, qui va être présenté cette semaine à Venise, est plus que prometteur et rompt radicalement avec les adaptations vues précédemment. Ici la caméra filme avec une sorte d'urgence, comme à son habitude Andrea Arnold passe d'un personnage à un autre avec des mouvements de caméras très rapides. Elle exige donc l'attention du spectateur. La lande est comme on l'imagine en lisant le roman. (Translation)

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights