1943

British Film Institute has selected 'A great horror film from every year, from 1922 to now' and the one for 1943 is

1943: I Walked with a Zombie

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Perhaps the greatest of director Jacques Tourneur’s films for Lewton, I Walked with a Zombie is a loose retelling of Jane Eyre, transposed to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian. Not a zombie film in the Romero sense, but one drawn from the rituals of vodou, its metaphors are disquietingly potent. A film about enslavement and the legacies of colonialism, the suggestiveness of the duo’s earlier Cat People is taken to oblique heights. In constant, critical dialogue with its own exoticism, Tourneur’s astonishingly expressive direction often edges towards abstraction in its uncanny diagnoses of its tropical maladies. (Matthew Thrift)

British Film Institute also reviews Zach Cregger’s film Barbarian.

If the ensuing onslaught of stomach-turning subterranean set-pieces signal Cregger’s distance from any obviously lofty artistic intentions, he’s still working from some high-end reference points. An extended flashback sequence boldly quotes the roving camerawork of Gerald Kargl’s indelibly savage 1983 video nasty Angst, while a discarded copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre puts a wryly Gothic frame around the action. (Adam Nayman)

Screen Daily and Sussex World both recommend Emily.

StarTribune reviews Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser.

Britain in the 19th century was a wonderland of inspiration for great novelists. The country's rigid class system, its decadent aristocracy, its yawning extremes between rich and poor — all of this was mined for literary gold by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and the Brontës, writers whose books have never gone out of print.

Arizona State University professor Devoney Looser is a Jane Austen expert and author of several books. She thought she knew this era. Then one day, researching in California's Huntington Library, she happened upon the letters of Jane and Maria Porter, the sister novelists of the title of this book. A new window into the age opened to her, and this biography of two writers of "blazing genius" is the result. (Mary Ann Gwinn)

Let's end this post in the same year it began as the mythic 1943 edition of Jane Eyre illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg makes it onto a column in The Evening Sun.

Last night, I was hunched over Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, enjoying the pleasant feel of the heavy tome on my lap. I had come upon the book years ago in an antique shop Upstate New York, snatched it off the shelf, and paid for it. If it hadn’t been for sale, I probably would have stolen it.

Printed in 1943, the paper has oxidized over the years and become a lovely shade of ... I’m not sure a word exists to describe the creamy color of those gently aging pages. If the book had ever possessed a dust jacket, it is long gone. However, printed on the thick cardboard front is an unforgettable image of a long line of orphans, two in each row, all emaciated, and all wearing dark dresses. They move from the top of the book cover to the bottom, hands clasped modestly before their bodies, eyes downcast, and hollow expressions on their faces.

One of the orphans, of course, is Jane Eyre.

This cover illustration, as well as additional wood engravings throughout the book, were created by Fritz Eichenberg, an artist who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, settled in New York City, and illustrated books written by everyone from Dostoyevsky to Edgar Allan Poe.

And, of course, both Brontë sisters.

All of his engravings for Jane Eyre are evocative, ponderous, and sad. (Shelly Reuben)

British Indians, now that Rishi Sunak is the brand new PM, in The Times:

Occasionally a sinister character would cross the pages of a novel. In Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë is obscure about Heathcliff’s origins; the closest we get is that the child is picked up in the streets of Liverpool, probably the offspring of some “Lascar” — Asian — sailor, an impression reinforced by Nelly’s later speculation about his dark complexion: “Who knows but that . . . your mother was an Indian queen?” (Trevor Phillips)

Die Presse (Germany) reviews Mithu Sanyal über Emily Brontë:

Dass Sanyal, die offenbar wie Goethe vom Mütterchen die Lust zu fabulieren mitbekommen hat („Meine Mutter hatte die Fähigkeit, Bücher spannender nachzuerzählen, als sie waren“), jede dieser Lesarten nachvollziehbar darstellen kann, liegt an ihrer fundierten Kenntnis des Romans durch häufige Lektüre – eine milde Form der Besessenheit, die dazu führt, dass sie zahlreiche Ausgaben besitzt. Sanyal verschenkt „Wuthering Heights“ auch, fordert das Buch aber zurück, wenn die Beschenkten es nicht gebührend zu würdigen wissen, wobei die Würdigung wohl in ebenso eingehender Lektüre bestehen müsste. (Karin S. Wozonik) (Translation)