Both Love London Love Culture and Northern Arts Review announce the Autumn performances of a new production of Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre in Colchester and Chester.
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights is a popular hit, but it pales beside the ‘towering nightmare’ of Emily Brontë’s original. Let's never forget its power. (...)It was Saint Valentine’s Day, wasn’t it, when “Wuthering Heights” was let loose on the world, dividing its audience while filling cinemas and leading publishers to reprint the stormy and extraordinary 1847 novel amid the studio’s marketing circus. Now HBO Max are streaming the movie with Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, so that you can watch this shattering romance over and over in the company of your loved ones with whatever tubs of ice cream and home-made popcorn you think fit. But before you do, it’s worth taking another look at how extraordinary the writing is in this towering Romantic nightmare of a book. (...)It’s difficult to grasp the form in Emily Brontë. It’s certainly not akin to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Daphne Du Maurier. Emily Brontë has no formal mastery of form: she’s no Sophocles, she’s rather a Shakespearean writer whose untidiness has lent it the grandest kind of vitality which brings alive every improvised gesture and makes it seem inevitable. The lunacy of this is that everything is sex, therefore nothing is sex. The heart aches with the desolation of the elements it hits up against. (...)It would be a great thing if the book was read in its thousands once more. It is an extraordinary pagan horror show washed in the bitterest tears. But we shouldn’t be too hard on Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.There is nothing sage or soothing about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Nothing but the appalling grandeur and the truth of art. How many babies will be called Heathcliff now? (Peter Craven)
As much as the Swedish DP may enjoy shooting in IMAX, Emerald Fennell’s vision for her reimagining of Emily Brontë’s seminal novel had a different ambition than the one he fulfilled for Denis Villeneuve on Dune: Part Three. The writer-director wanted her tragic period romance starring Margot Robbie (Cathy Earnshaw) and Jacob Elordi (Heathcliff) to have a tactile, impressionistic quality, hence the decision to shoot the majority of the piece on standard 35 mm film.When it came to landscape shots of the Yorkshire Moors — as well as wide interior shots involving Edgar Linton’s (Shazad Latif) decadent manor — the filmmakers sought a higher resolution for the sake of detail, but without sacrificing film grain. Neither standard 65 mm nor IMAX were going to uphold both of those requirements. Thus, Sandgren and Fennell opted for VistaVision, a large 35 mm film format that presents high resolution and just enough grain to maintain continuity with the rest of the film’s 3-perf 35 mm.“Each format will affect the emotions, and there’s a huge difference to me within the film formats. We tested 65, but Emerald was missing the grain, so we went for 35 to see the grain,” the Oscar-winning Sandgren tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Wuthering Heights’ 4K release. “Our technical reason for VistaVision was to capture the landscape shots in a high resolution [with a finer grain] because they include small details that you want to see better. Basically, all real exteriors and wide-shot interiors were VistaVision.” (Brian Davids)
The recent movie Wuthering Heights is based upon the famous 1847 novel by Emily Bronte. But while this film is an attempt to reinterpret, not just reproduce, the original story, it only works some of the time. (...)For a time, the harshness of this Wuthering Heights is interesting; it’s good to see what the film’s 21st century lens finds beneath the surface of mid-19th century social disturbances. And Emily Bronte’s story about the conflict between the demands of a highly formal society and raw human passions leaves plenty of room for all manner of speculation.But the new film, I think, goes beyond rebellion against restraint to grotesque but empty gesture. The film loses control with Cathy’s costumes, angry sex and the color red. There’s so much red in the film the color runs past meaning and impact. Excess can be liberating – but maybe in moderation – because eventually you start rolling your eyes and hoping for a quick end to the movie. (Howie Movshovitz)
En Cumbres Borrascosas, al convertir a Isabella en una sumisa que da su consentimiento, Fennell da a entender que las acciones de Heathcliff, aunque siguen siendo perversas, resultan más fáciles de digerir para el público al hacer que su comportamiento parezca menos monstruoso… E incluso sexy. Andrea García-Santesmases Fernández considera que la película utiliza el consentimiento para validar un tipo de relación que de otra manera resultaría deleznable. “No se trata solo de un juego sexual puntual, sino que desde el primer momento Heathcliff le dice a Isabella que la va a humillar, que la va a utilizar, que la va a degradar. Estas amenazas parecieran diluirse porque las acompaña de un ‘¿te parece bien?’ a lo que ella contesta ‘sí’. De la misma manera, cuando la vemos atada con una correa, a cuatro patas, en medio de la inmundicia, viviendo literalmente como una perra, la violencia de la imagen se suaviza porque ella da a entender que eso es lo que quiere”, asegura.Para la sexóloga, el problema está en situar el consentimiento como una validación no solo legal, sino ética, e incluso, política, de una relación. “Lo que acontece entre ambos no es un delito ya que ha sido acordado entre dos adultos, pero eso no quiere decir que esté bien, ni mucho menos que sea una expresión de empoderamiento femenino o de libertad sexual. En este sentido, es interesante señalar que en el libro de Cumbres Borrascosas no aparece esta alusión repetida al consentimiento por lo que se trata de una estrategia contemporánea para validar narrativas problemáticas”, advierte. (Marita Alonso) (Translation)
While Lutz sets Emily’s life within the familiar context of the Brontë family as creative individuals passionately creating worlds in their tales, she draws on newly available notebooks and manuscripts of Emily’s, including some of her juvenilia and early poetry, to illustrate the writer’s determination to work tirelessly on her writing and to pay only marginal attention to family cares. As Lutz points out, “The longing that suffuses most of Brontë’s writing—for a lost self or land, the dead, or the liberty found in leaving the body behind—grew out of her own searching nature.” Brontë’s persistent haunting of the moors and her familiarity with the animal life around her led to her belief that the divine could be located in the natural world. According to Lutz, “The night, the stars, the moon—these were her poetic muses.”Brontë emerges from Lutz’s splendid biography as a “consummate artist who developed her genius quickly and with great confidence.” She started writing Wuthering Heights in 1845 at the age of 27; after much revision and scribbling, the novel was published in late 1847. Reviews were scarce and few were glowing; most cited the novel as coarse, savage and gloomy. As Lutz observes, it would take readers close to 100 years to catch up with Brontë’s accomplishment and “recognize in its weird, witchy, and ghostly passions a masterpiece.”Like Emerson, Brontë embraced nonconformity and individualism, and for her the boundaries between the personal and the cosmic were permeable. With her genius she was able to depict “the grandeur of changing skies and the moods of clouds and storms” and to capture the “heights that owe everything to the lowlands and the dead.”Lutz’s exhilarating prose animates This Dark Night, lending fresh insights into the life and writing of one of literature’s most enduring authors. (Henry L. Carrigan Jr.)
“It’s really hard to get at who Emily Brontë was,” biographer Deborah Lutz remarks, “but also interesting because it is challenging.” In This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life, Lutz approaches the enigma of the “weird, strange, difficult, mysterious person” who created the monumental Wuthering Heights. For Lutz, who is a professor of 19th-century English and American literature at Penn State, this aura of mystery makes Emily the “most fascinating Brontë.” Using recently discovered poetry manuscripts and focusing closely on Emily’s day-to-day life, Lutz creates an unforgettable portrait of a multitalented genius. [...]Similarly, in This Dark Night, Lutz wanted to reconstruct the bodily experience of Emily, “how her body felt, what she smelled, what she heard, how cold she was, what kind of clothing she wore, [even] where she went to the bathroom,” she tells BookPage. Lutz’s research thus included walks on the treeless moors surrounding the family’s Haworth home, where the birdsong and fierce wind mirror what Lutz sees as Emily’s “inner wildness.” Lutz thinks of her as a “capital R” Romantic writer, like Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, poets Emily loved who yearned for immersion of the human self in the larger natural world. In Brontë’s case, her love of nature also included observations of how the Industrial Revolution, particularly mining, was altering her beloved moors. [...]A chief pleasure of This Dark Night is Lutz’s analysis of the drawings found in Brontë’s notebooks and marginalia, some of which are included in the biography. Her letters, poems and manuscripts are adorned with doodles that hint at the author’s personality. Some of these communicate “humor and lightness”: A silly drawing accompanying a somber poem indicates Brontë’s “refusal to grow up and her resistance to writerly rules.” A sketch of a gnarled tree reinforces her “devotion to the unreclaimed, uncultivated and scarred.” But she also doodled horrific little depictions of violent scenarios: decapitations, bludgeonings, piles of corpses. The gothic novels and stories Emily was reading at the time were redolent with violence, rape, flagellation and other gruesome and unsavory acts. These elements of her imagination emerge in the domestic and sexual violence depicted in her novel. As they say: Wuthering Heights is not a love story.Brontë was not a violent person, but she “wasn’t always the kind of person we would approve of today,” Lutz explains. She was “a misanthropic person . . . she didn’t always like other people, and part of that misanthropy comes out in [imagining acts of] sadism.” She prized solitude and liked dogs more than she liked people. She desired to lose herself in the natural world, as in her poem “I’m happiest when most away,” which imagines her “spirit wandering wide / through infinite immensity.” Lutz notes how many of Brontë’s poems imagine scenes of a lover weeping at the graveside of their beloved, as Heathcliff does over Catherine’s grave. Catherine’s dream of being flung out from heaven onto the heath of Wuthering Heights, where she “woke sobbing for joy,” exemplifies her desire to haunt the Earth. Perhaps, Lutz suggests, Brontë’s vision of an earthly afterlife is a form of grief, a way of finding her own mother’s ghost wandering the moonlit moors. By “excavat[ing] the undergloom,” Lutz writes, Emily penned “her great novel about the heights that owe everything to the lowlands and the dead.”When I ask Lutz how she feels about Emerald Fennell’s controversial film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, she diplomatically responds, “I’m glad that the movie has caused people to read the novel.” Her own favorite work based on Wuthering Heights comes from Anne Carson, whose 1994 poem “The Glass Essay” reflects on Brontë’s character as a “whacher.” As Lutz explains in This Dark Night, “whacher” was Brontë’s preferred spelling for “watcher,” as in someone who is primarily an observer of life. “Whacher is what she was,” Carson writes. “She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. / She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.” Lutz’s own close observations of this weird, “whachful” and wonderful Brontë illuminate the author like never before. (Catherine Hollis)
A world away from the characters he’s often inhabited – whether laying on the sneer as Captain Flint in Starz’s pirate caper Black Sails or the smirk as Rochester in 2006’s Jane Eyre – he is open and likeable, warmth radiating from him in waves. Not a curled lip in sight. Then there’s his laugh: big and sonorous, the only one I’ve encountered that can unironically be described as a guffaw. (Patrick Smith)
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