Haworth on TV - then and now

The Telegraph and Argus reports that Haworth is going to be on TV this weekend. In the first episode of the fourth season of Channel Four's Walking Through History :

Haworth and Brontë Country will be featured again on national television this weekend. Presenter Sir Tony Robinson will front an episode of his latest documentary series, which is called Walking Through History, on Channel Four at 8pm on Saturday. The footage was filmed in Haworth and Stanbury earlier this year when Sir Tony visited Ponden Hall, the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Haworth Parish Church.

This was also on TV but in 1977: Joan Bakewell visiting Haworth. (Via the Brontë Parsonage Museum Facebook page).

Still locally, Virtual Festivals recommends a trip on the Keighley and Worth Valley railway as it is

a unique way of enjoying the beautiful countryside immortalised by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë.

And moving further north, Big Think recalls Charlotte's opinion of Edinburgh:

... and that charm certainly did not miss its mark with Charlotte Brontë. In a letter dated 1850, she wrote: "My dear Sir, do not think that I blaspheme when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dun-Edin, 'mine own romantic town', is as prose compared to poetry, or as a great rumbling, rambling, heavy Epic compared to a Lyric, brief, bright, clear, and vital as a flash of lightning." (Frank Jacobs)

Not so accurate is the columnist of Spartan Daily, who attributes the wrong quote to Charlotte Brontë:

There is this quote from the novel “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë about depression that has always stuck with me.
“Crying doesn’t indicate that you’re weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you’re alive.” (Jerica Lowman)

And Vogue looks back on a 1961 essay by Joan Didion where she discusses crying too:

 It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

This is what this columnist from The Huffington Post remembers of her first time reading Jane Eyre:

It all started when I read Jane Eyre as a child. Rather than focusing on the gothic romance between Mr Rochester and Jane, all I could think of was the crazy wife locked in the attic. The thought haunted me for weeks and weeks, or more realistically, years and years. The image of her laughing on the roof as the house burnt down is absolutely terrifying, because she isn't a monster or a vampire or some extra-terrestrial being - she is one of us, a normal person pushed to the brink of her mind. (Shadi-Sade Sarreshtehdarzadeh)

The Pittsburgh City Paper also comments on Jane Eyre's gothic-ness:

[Playwright Carole] Fréchette relies heavily on gothic tales of the past — Jane Eyre, The Tell-Tale Heart, the legend of Bluebeard — to fuel the first half of her story. In the second, however, the "spookiness" gives way to a melancholy tone poem perfumed with more than a little magic lyricism about love and loneliness. (Ted Hoover) 

This reviewer from The Spectator hasn't enjoyed the film Fury, directed by David Ayer.

Action movies are, of course, wonderful, as long as the director and the writer control their impulses to blow us away with violence. I suppose today’s films are made for those who blog, text and post selfies: non-readers, whose imagination has to be jarred from their narcissistic state. Mind you, I’m not a fan of French films where everyone sits around and talks and nothing, but nothing, ever happens. (Directors of such movies are called auteurs.) Nor am I mad about films, or books for that matter, that focus on everyday grievances, the regrets that pile up as the years crawl by. (I tend to hit the popcorn too much.) But there is a happy medium, and the old flicks had it in spades. Was there violence in Rebecca? In Wuthering Heights? In Laura? Could anyone ever get bored with The Best Years of Our Lives? Or the best war film ever, Go Tell The Spartans, about early Vietnam, starring the great Burt Lancaster. And if you hate the Germans and the fascists, go see The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, written and directed by Vittorio de Sica, starring the best looking woman of her time, Dominique Sanda. I could go on and on and on. But I won’t. All I’d like to know is where has all the talent gone? And as always I will answer my own question: movies today reflect what the audience wants to see, and the audiences are imbeciles and uneducated fools and that’s why Fury will be a hit, so help me God. (Taki)

More on films, as A.V. Club looks at the different screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice:

In 2005, director Joe Wright cast Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen as the stars of his Pride And Prejudice. The film downplays the satire (although not the comedy) and takes a more romantic approach—both by emphasizing the love stories and in the literary sense of the word. In Wright’s Romantic aesthetic, the natural world reflects his characters’ emotional states. Darcy’s failed first proposal takes place outside in a torrential downpour, while the lovers’ reconciliation happens as the sun peaks over the horizon of a misty field. That climax even styles Darcy as a Heathcliff-esque hero with a flowing coat and proudly displayed chest hair. Where the 1940 version offers broad comedy and satire, Wright goes for sentiment. Both work well as individual films, and it’s a testament to Austen that her novel is rich enough to provide fodder for these wildly divergent interpretations. (Caroline Siede)