A series which cannot be missed

Several news sites recommend this weekend's Heathcliff, It’s Me: Adapting Wuthering Heights series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. From The New York Times:

HEATHCLIFF, IT’S ME: ADAPTING ‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS’ at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Feb. 24-27). Just because a movie is adapted from one of the most revisited works in English literature doesn’t mean that its director can’t find a fresh angle, as these five auteurist takes on Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel demonstrate. The approaches differ not only in structure — screenwriters generally ignore the book’s second half, as Luis Buñuel’s 1953 film (Friday and Sunday) does — but also in tone. For romantic delirium, none can match William Wyler’s ethereal 1939 Hollywood version (Sunday and Monday), starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. But Jacques Rivette’s 1985 reworking (Friday) has a tinge of the playfulness of his “Céline and Julie Go Boating.” Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1988 adaptation (Saturday) substitutes cloudy Japanese mountains for cloudy English moors, while Andrea Arnold’s 2011 interpretation (Saturday and Monday), the first with a black Heathcliff, favors a claustrophobic, hand-held shooting style.
212-875-5601, filmlinc.org (Ben Kenigsberg)

From Thirteen:

Staff Favorite: Heathcliff, It’s Me: Adapting Wuthering Heights
Film Society of Lincoln Center
February 24th—27th (various films and times)
It’s always interesting to see how a book is adapted to the screen, how the characters, settings, and themes are taken out of the pages and visually depicted through the medium of film. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a powerful literary work that explores passion, identity, social class, nature, and the supernatural. It is a work that is worth reading not only once, but multiple times. And from February 24th—27th the Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a series of film adaptations of this memorable story. How did Luis Buñuel interpret it? William Wyler? Jacques Rivette? This series cannot be missed. (Meredith Coleman)

Film Comment has a lengthy post about it.

“Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production,” Charlotte Brontë wrote, in apology for the untamed and harsh character of her sister Emily’s novel, published in 1847. “It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath . . . In its storm-heated and electrical atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe lightning.” The description of Wuthering Heights as a crude outpouring of unconscious passions might fit the cultural legacy of the novel more than the book Emily wrote. Far from being simply elemental or atmospheric, Wuthering Heights has an intricate internal timeline, concealed by a compounding of unreliable narrators, impenetrable regional dialects, and arcane issues of inheritance law. Few novels are as precisely structured. And yet the story of Heathcliff’s pitiless love for Catherine Earnshaw, indistinguishable from the revenge he takes upon her for marrying Edgar Linton, has spawned a rough and dreadful cinematic brood of films from many different cultures. Filmmakers have been especially drawn to the horror elements in the novel: hanging of dogs, and grave-desecration in the source material, among other scattered threats of eye-gouging and blood-drinking. (Read more) (Ben Parker) 

The Film Stage recommends it too.

Still in the United States, Fansided suggests To Walk Invisible as a replacement for the Victoria series which is about to end.

Let’s go in chronological order, as per the Masterpiece schedule. First up is To Walk Invisible The Brontë Sisters, which surprisingly enough tells the story of the three Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — and how they put their writing talents to use. (Some spoilers: it has to do with the use of pseudonyms. Charlotte, for example, went by Currer Bell, as noted in the Encyclopedia Britannica.) You’ll be able to catch this on March 26. (Cheryl Wassenaar)

Aol interviews actress Francesca Reale.

Who would you like to collaborate with in the future?
[...]  I would also work with Cary Fukunaga -- I loved his interpretation of "Jane Eyre." It is very depressing, but he knows how to tackle drama in a way that a lot of directors really don't understand. (Brittany Vanbibber)

Edmonton Journal tells about the life of writer Helen Forrester, who

 As a girl, she developed her storytelling skills with her grandmother, who fed her Dickens and Bronte and encouraged her to write letters. (Madeleine Cummings)

And the blunder of the day award goes to the news site India.

While nearly two centuries have passed since moody Mr Rochester gave Jane Eyre the run-around in Charlotte Bronte’s 17th century classic, it seems the tropes and narratives of romance have barely moved on.

While the silly theory award goes to La Voz de Galicia (Spain), which thinks creativity comes from damp weather conditions.

Es curioso cómo muchas mujeres, nacidas y criadas en lugares húmedos y recónditos, son capaces de conectar con las pulsiones humanas sin más armas que un papel y un tintero. Las Brontë, Jane Austen, Rosalía de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazán, en eterna lucha contra una sociedad que las marginaba y consideraba inferiores, pero brillantes y plenas a través del tiempo. (Nieves Abarca) (Translation)

And bad news from Bradford Council budget meeting yesterday, as reported by The Telegraph and Argus:

CUTS
The cuts proposed by the ruling Labour group at today’s budget meeting include: [...]
- Closing all but one of the district’s remaining public toilets. The seven to close, unless groups take them over, would be in Saltaire, Bingley, Baildon, both Brook Street and Riverside in Ilkley, and both in Central Park and by the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth. The public toilet at City Park would remain open;

A reader of MyRepublica discusses Jane Eyre. Big Screen, Small Words has a post on Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights.