Decorative archaeology and other news

The Telegraph and Argus looks at what will soon happen at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

The Brontë Parsonage Museum is to be redecorated so that it looks more like the famous sisters’ home than ever before.
Decorators will draw on the research of specialists into what the building’s interiors looked like in the mid-19th century.
The “decorative archaeology” was carried out last winter while the museum underwent its annual two-month closure.
After the museum closes at the end of this autumn the restoration work will begin, ready for reopening in February.
The museum, run by the Brontë Society, said it wanted to offer visitors a “more authentic Brontë experience”.
The “new” look will be followed next March by an exhibition in the museum entitled Heaven Is a Home: the Story of the Brontës’ Parsonage.
The museum promises an “exciting” programme of special events throughout 2013 to celebrate the redecoration.
This will include a study day on March 23, at the nearby West Lane Baptist Centre, to explore the concept of houses in the English novel. As well as looking at the Brontes’ creations – including Wuthering Heights, Wildfell Hall and Thornfield Hall – the tutors will look at titles by other authors. Tickets cost £20 including entry to the museum, from jenna.holmes@bronte.org.uk.

The Brontë Weather Project writes - with pictures - about a trip to the Parsonage and the Brussels Brontë Blog posts about a recent talk by Lyndall Gordon called The Hidden Face of Charlotte Brontë.

The discussion that followed was very lively and wide-ranging. Lyndall Gordon told us that in a few days’ time she was to be filmed in the British Museum, talking about the Heger letters, for a documentary on the Brontë sisters to be shown as part of ITV’s Perspective series. The crew will then be coming to Brussels to film with our group. During the discussion we took the opportunity to explore some of the questions the documentary will be raising, such as the factors that may have contributed to producing the phenomenon of the Brontë family. We doubted that the programme would find all the answers in the hour allocated to it! 

Wuthering Heights 2011 is reviewed today by the Herald Sun (Australia) which gives it three stars.

Brace yourselves, literary purists. And put on your thickest overcoat while you're at it.
Otherwise this exhaustive (and exhausting!) re-imagining of the classic Emily Bronte novel will chill you to the bone.
Let me tell you right now: this is not the most talkative of motion pictures.
There are plenty of stares, whispers, glances and growls. And the wind, oh, the wind. How it howls away throughout Wuthering Heights, blowing a never-ending gale across the misty moors of Yorkshire.
But what of Brontë's time-honoured prose, especially all that torrid he-said-she-said banter? Virtually every word is left unsaid. If you can't bear the thought of the book being so radically re-edited, there will be no option but to consider yourself a victim of excessive silence. 

The Daily Dissident reviews the film as well and ABC's At the Movies with Margaret and David (Australia) also mentions the film in passing in a review of Woody Allen's To Rome with Love:

DAVID: Margaret?
MARGARET: It's a travesty of a Woody Allen film.
DAVID: Travesty? I wouldn't use that word.
MARGARET: It is. It is. Well, I suppose I'm going overboard in the negative, like you did with Wuthering Heights because...
DAVID: It was impossible to be too negative about that.

LA Weekly wonders, 'Why Do So Many Good L.A. Novels Have Bad Movie Adaptations?' but praises Jane Eyre 2011.

It's best not to do a remake of Ask the Dust so soon after Towne's version. But Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay — known for such visually arresting films as Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin — could direct the hell out of Play It As It Lays. Like Didion's, her work is airily engaging even as it descends into troubling blends of sex and violence. Cary Fukanaga, whose Jane Eyre is among the best literary adaptations in years and who's currently at work bringing Stephen King's It to screen, would be more than qualified as well. (Michael Nordine)

Science 2.0 writes about I Walked with a Zombie.

Now imagine the studio wants a follow-up and the studio head is still picking movie titles based on market research - and so "I Walked With A Zombie" is going on the poster. Who sits in the production meeting and introduces an idea like 'You know what would make a great zombie movie? Jane Eyre'.
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 indictment of Victorian culture wouldn't ordinarily lend itself to a zombie movie but Lewton was seeing bigger picture.  It had references to Jamaica and crazy people and the supernatural. "I Walked With A Zombie" uses an unsympathetic married man and a nurse who gradually falls in love with him.
But what makes the movie is the cinematography of Nick Musuraca and the moody direction of Jacques Tourneur. Lacking a special effects budget, they had to suggest horror. They did meticulous amounts of research on Voodoo culture and then introduce the ambiguity of science versus supernatural forces - is the wife really cursed by Voodoo, is it a physical malady caused by a tropical disease, or is she crazy? (Hank Campbell)

Books on the House seems to have found a Brontëite in writer Joan Hall Hovey.

BotH: If you could have dinner, coffee, or drinks with a fictional character, who would you choose and where would you go?
JHH: Oh, I think it would be wonderful to sit down with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre over a cup of tea.  Because the author has so instilled her character with her own passions and emotions, even after 150 years they rise off the page.  Charlotte Brontë lives on through her words.   

ExtraConfidencial (in Spanish) uses Heathcliff's initial situation in the novel as a simile for Spain's situation in Europe, mistakenly calling Emily Brontë a man along the way. DL-Online acknowledges - among others - the Brontë influence behind The Mystery of Irma Vep. A Bookish Way of Life and Accro aux mots (in French) both post about Wuthering Heights. Reading Rambo thinks that Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë wouldn't make good roommates.