The Telegraph interviews Andrea Arnold about her career and
Wuthering Heights:
'A lot of people have something to say about Wuthering Heights, but nobody
quite nails it,” says Andrea Arnold, whose latest feature, her third, is a
bracingly raw adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel.
“I knew that I wouldn’t nail it either,” she adds modestly, hugging her arms
around her body, “but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to spend some time
with that unfathomable story.”
She didn’t get as long as she’d have liked. From the moment she first received
an email from her agent asking if she’d be interested in taking on the
desperate, destructive relationship of Heathcliff and Cathy (her response:
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”), to the moment the film premiered in competition
at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Arnold had only 18 months, half the
time she’d needed to make each of her previous, Bafta-winning features, Red
Road and Fish Tank.
Urged on by her producers, she worked at unsettling speed, simultaneously
writing a spare, rough-tongued script and, as is her custom, assembling a
mainly non-professional cast.
Then, with scarcely a pause for rehearsals, she led her actors, her regular
cinematographer Robbie Ryan, a few dogs and a couple of horses up to an
abandoned hill farm on the North York Moors – and started the camera rolling. (...)
How people become themselves is the great theme of Arnold’s potent, poetic
films – and the mystery at the heart of Wuthering Heights that lured her to
break her promise never to make a literary adaptation.
On first discovering Brontë’s dense, dark book her “instinctive feeling” was,
she says, for Heathcliff, the abandoned “dirty, ragged, black-haired child”
found beaten and starving on the streets of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw and
taken home to live alongside his children, Cathy and Hindley.
“The thing I responded to was the way he was treated as a child,” says Arnold.
“I am obsessed with why people turn out the way they are. Heathcliff turns
out to be a very dark and vengeful character but, you know, when you look at
his childhood is anyone surprised?”
Keen to emphasise the strangeness of Brontë’s “dark-skinned gypsy” Arnold
broke with film tradition by casting black actors in the role of Heathcliff,
one (Solomon Glave) as a boy and another (James Howson) as a grown man,
returning to the Heights puffed up with wealth and vengeance. Between them,
these two first-timers and the two Cathys – newcomer Shannon Beer, and Kaya
Scodelario from the television youth drama Skins – exchange barely a handful
of sentences throughout the two-hour film. Their feral, ambiguous
relationship is mapped out in actions, not words.
When the young Cathy first claps eyes on Heathcliff, she spits in his face.
Later, she pins his head to the ground with the sole of her boot and, in the
film’s most electrifying moment, lifts his shirt to run her tongue across
the open wounds a recent beating has left on his back.
Arnold’s film cleaves fiercely to the wild spirit, if not the word, of
Brontë’s unsettling text, steering a ragged course far removed from the
conventions of period romance. There’s no swooning here, no happy endings.
“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of
little visible delight, but necessary… I am Heathcliff,” says Cathy in
Brontë’s novel.
“I find their relationship fascinating, the way they’re cruel to each other,
the sadomasochistic element of it,” says Arnold. “And I think it rings true.
We’re all just behaving ourselves, but really, underneath…” She unleashes a
dark, throaty laugh and the fire crackles in the grate. “I think we might
all be Heathcliff.” (Benjamin Secher)
Little White Lies reviews the film:
Music-less and virtually dialogue free,
Arnold’s film relies on helter-skelter images and meaningful glances for
its impetus. Filmed in a loose, hand-held fashion, Heights is best in
its superior first half when it unites the coarse beauty of the
Yorkshire moors with an impressive cast of young first-timers, all of
whom deliver raw, unsentimental turns that pulsate with feeling.
Despite her exceptional players, there’s no question who Arnold
thinks the real star is. The director is in love with her turbulent
Yorkshire landscapes, and embraces the elements almost to a fault. While
the rain-lashed imagery kindles a fittingly feral mood, her repetitive
use of certain images derails any sense of pace. At times, Heights
nearly resembles a David Attenborough documentary.
Something to be respected more than enjoyed, Heights is too long by a
good 30 minutes (its second half struggles to hit Brontë’s emotional
beats), and would have packed more punch with a little careful pruning. (Josh Winning)
And
Hope Lies:
Arnold’s film is destined to be a divisive
work. Quite how it will play to an average audience familiar with the
beats and tropes of this particular sub genre, no doubt expecting a
typical period drama (has any picture ever been as “safe”?) remains to
be seen, but it is one well worth investing yourself in, if only for the
rich visuals and in spite of some very temperamental performances.
While not quite the masterpiece one might have expected from the
director of Fish Tank, it’s an interesting film that stands
shoulder to shoulder alongside its geographical contemporaries in what
has been a great year for British cinema. (Adam Batty)
The December issue of
Sight & Sound also carries an article about the film and more:
Love will tear us apart
'Tis the season for revisionist takes on classics of British fiction,
it seems. Andrea Arnold, director of hard-edged contemporary fare such
as Fish Tank and Red Road, adapts Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
for her third film in a manner that might cause purists some
consternation, with a black Heathcliff, lots of swearing, sex and
violence…
Amy Raphael has the lowdown, and finds the film “brutal, violent and –
at times – formidable.” But the film’s real glory, as Raphael
acknowledges, is the cinematography, which finesses a raw poetry
entirely in keeping with Brontë’s vision of wild love on the moors. “DP
Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is so poetic it almost steal the film. His
imagery captures perfectly the heightened physicality of Cathy’s longing
for a boy as alienated and isolated as herself.”
PLUS David Jenkins surveys other screen versions, including efforts by Buñuel, Rivette, William Wyler and Yoshida Yoshishige.
And
Blu-Ray.com announces that Artificial Eye will release the Blu-Ray next March 26th, 2012.
Our very own John Mullan lists for the
Guardian the best men dressed as women in literature:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
In
a sequence usually omitted in film adaptations, Mr Rochester dresses as
an old Gypsy woman and turns up at his own dinner party to read the
fortunes of the guests. Even Jane does not recognise him, until he
suddenly throws off his disguise.
The Week asks the writer Howard Jacobson about his favourite novels:
Jane Eyre ranks at the top among all 19th-century English heroines.
I've recently seen Cary Fukunaga's new film adaptation, and was reminded
how passionately principled, articulate, and marvelously angry this
novel is.
Another writer and Brontëite in Ghana, via
GhanaWeb:
Nana Adwoa Konadu Bonney-Graves is a young talented author who has
always pursued writing as a pastime that truly evokes all emotion. She
was raised by her grandmother in Ghana, where she received her Early
Childhood and Junior Secondary School Education at North Ridge Lyceum, a
private institution in Accra. It was there after reading Charlotte
Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Max Ehrman’s “Desiderata” when she fell in love
with literature and its many genres.
The Scotsman reviews the latest book by Jeannette Winterson,
Why be Happy when You Could be Normal?
Lovers of Oranges [Are Not the Only Fruit] will be relieved to learn that Mrs W really did change
the ending of Jane Eyre when reading it aloud to Jeanette,
extemporising a new version in which Jane becomes a missionary. (Hermione Eyre)
Via
GalleyCat we found that Harper Press is looking for the Best Women's Fiction Books:
Readers can post their five nominations at this link
or send a direct email. A panel of authors and critics will pick the
top one hundred titles from the pool of nominees. Of the twenty-one
comments posted so far, several nominations for the works of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Marshall and Rose Gordon have been made. Who would you nominate? (Maryann Yin)
The
Austin Chronicle reviews the play
Guest by Courtesy by Jenny Larson and Hannah Kenah:
Can you imagine the more rivalrous parts of Sense and Sensibility, say, or Jane Eyre as re-imagined by Tex Avery?
The
Sydney Morning Herald reviews
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides:
Madeleine's preoccupation with the Victorian literature of the Brontë
sisters is gradually challenged by the post-structuralism of Jacques
Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes. This functions as an
awakening of sorts for Madeleine and it is also how she meets Leonard. (Mark Tewfik)
Montgomery Media reviews a local production of
The Mystery of Irma Vep:
Ludlam stuffed his plays full of movie references, classical quotations
and takeoffs from literature. “Irma Vep,” for instance, grafts together
bits of “Wuthering Heights,” “Gaslight” and “Rebecca,” plus echoes of
cheesy thrillers with wolfmen and ghostly apparitions, as well as the
occasional citation from Shakespeare and Poe. (Dante J.J. Bevilacqua)
Femme des Lettres talks about Jane Eyre and Helen Burns's friendship;
quietscramblingmarch posts about the Imagination in
Jane Eyre;
DeCine21 (in Spanish) discusses the recent Brontë revival in movies;
Periodistas en Español (in Spanish) reviews
Jane Eyre 2011;
Io Donna (Italy) has an article about
Jane Eyre, the novel and the movie; Paperblog (Italy) reviews
Jane Eyre, una rilettura contemporanea by Lorenzo Spurio.
This was the first Loreena CD I got, after hearing "The Mummer's Dance" on the radio. With each subsequent listen over the course of the last several years, I find myself loving this disc more and more. The music has more of a Middle-Eastern texture than most of her earlier work, and the sound quality is, in my opinion better as well, allowing the listener to hear Loreena's glorious voice like never before.
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