Ballets, thrillers, cinematographers and podcasts, oh my!

A couple of reviews of Northern Ballet's Victoria mention the company's successful take on Jane Eyre.

Cathy Marston’s latest work for Northern Ballet follows the success of her 2016 Jane Eyre, a spare, clever reworking of the novel that will be danced by American Ballet Theatre in New York this June. (Louise Levene in The Spectator)

Cathy Marston’s last creation for Northern Ballet, Jane Eyre, is crossing he Atlantic to be performed by the prestigious American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in June,  and Victoria has already been confirmed to be performed by The National Ballet of Canada.  “It’s so hugely exciting,” she says. “Jane Eyre had comparatively humble beginnings on Northern Ballet’s mid-scale tour and now it’s moving to one of the biggest stages in the world. To know that it’s going to be reinterpreted and remembered in different places, discussed and owned by different dancers; it has its own life now and that’s enormously rewarding for myself and everyone at Northern Ballet who worked so hard with me to create it.“ (Ian Soutar in Sheffield Telegraph)

National Post features Danishka Esterhazy's thriller Level 16.

So when she graduated from the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, she immediately wrote the screenplay for Level 16, with a science-fiction vibe she once characterized as “Jane Eyre meets Logan’s Run.” No one would fund it. (Chris Knight)

American Cinematographer interviews cinematographer David Miller:

Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to try? I’d like to do a full-blown gothic romance — Wuthering Heights, but Gregg Toland, ASC beat me to it [in the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights].

According to Red, Wuthering Heights can be read from cover to cover on a mid-haul flight. Amelia Foster posts about Jane Eyre.

Finally, a couple of podcasts. On Book Riot's Recommended, writer Zen Cho recommends Villette. Here's the transcript:

My name is Zen Cho and Villette by Charlotte Bronte is my recommended.
So Villette follows the fortunes of Lucy Snowe, who is not unlike Jane Eyre from Brontë’s most famous novel. She’s, you know, sort of mean, pure, poor, obscure young woman, English woman. And she has been left alone in the world, due to circumstances she doesn’t go a huge amount of detail into. And she ends up going to Villette, which is a fictional, Belgian city. And she becomes a teacher there, at a school. And the story’s just all about her experiences there, the people she meets, and eventually, the person she falls in love with. And it follows quite closely, I think, Charlotte Brontë’s experience teaching in Belgium herself.
I grew up in Malaysia, and I didn’t have any libraries nearby, really, all the decent libraries were about an hour’s drive away, and as a child I didn’t drive. I was taken to a bookshop about once a week and allowed to buy one book, so what it meant was that I was perpetually, in kind of, reading deprived.[...]
And the discovery was the Penguin Popular Classics. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these, they’re sort of beige, mass-market paperbacks. The great thing about them was that they were very cheap, so they were 5.80 ringgit, which is about a pound, a British pound. And Jane Eyre, for example, provides a lot of reading material for 5.80 when you’re only allowed to go to the book shop once a week.
So, when I found these, I just started reading through them. I read Dickens, I read Austen, I read George Eliot, and, obviously, Brontë, the Brontës. And so, I read Jane Eyre first, and then just went through what else I could find by her. She hasn’t published all that much, three novels mainly, so Villette was the next thing, and I have to say, although Jane Eyre is more famous, Villette is definitely my favorite of the three.
And I think it’s just a really fascinating book, I can’t think of anything that is quite like it. And I think part of the reason is because Lucy Snowe, the main character, and it’s written in first-person, like Jane Eyre, is quite a weird person. Jane Eyre is pretty weird, but Lucy Snowe is even weirder. And given that when you sort of think of her, each of the protagonist probably followed Bronte fairly closely, sort of makes you think, wonder what sort of person she was.
Lucy Snowe is a really fascinating protagonist, cause one thing about her is that she well, firstly, she’s incredibly lonely, she’s a person that’s kind of been left alone in the world, she doesn’t really have any family that she tells you about. She doesn’t seem to really have any close friends. And she’s set herself up as a kind of observer, she’s conscious that she has no money, she has no family, she’s somebody who’s very insignificant in kind of Victorian society.
And so, what she does for a lot of the book, is observe other people. And kind of try to decide whether to keep them at a distance or allow them to affect her. (Read more)

And here's the second part of Bonnets at Dawn's Understanding Emily, recorded live at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.