'The Brontës are much better'

Variety interviews film director Terence Davies:

Brent Lang: Do you prefer if people watch your films on streaming services or do you want them to be seen on the big screen?

T.D.: I want my films to be seen in cinemas, but I never really thought I’d even have any audience for them, certainly not one abroad. Personally, I don’t go to the cinema anymore. When you make films, you become aware of the music, the acting, where the camera is, and in British films, there’s a lot of the same people in all of them, so you just see a collection of mannerisms. It’s so bad, you think, “I can’t watch this.” Jane Austen films, I refuse to watch. They are paralyzingly boring. The Brontës are much better. There’s a bit more sex to them. Once you start making something, it’s impossible not to see the structure. You just sit there calling out the shots — close up, close up, back to wide, and now another close-up or over-the-shoulder shot.

Once again, we are reminded of that newspaper clipping in the Brontë Parsonage Library: 'In Austen, sex is just a kiss on the back of the hand, whereas in the Brontës everything happens' (which according to Patricia Ingham in her book Authors in Context: The Brontës was said by the producer of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1996 in the Observer Review on August 25th, 1996).

Angelus News interviews Catholic teacher Cheri Blomquist who has written the book Before Austen Comes Aesop, with her own list of children’s great books.

Sophie Martinson: What inspired you to write this book?

C.B.: I’ve always loved children’s literature, and after I began teaching in local homeschool co-ops, I started paying attention to classes and programs for literature. I noticed that many literature programs were pushing kids only in eighth, ninth, or 10th grade to many, fairly heavy adult classics, like Dickens and Austen and Brontë — books that I was not ready to read at that age.  I didn’t see how these kids could absorb all those books in a single year. 

Then in 2013 or 2014, I read a book by Seth Lerer that was a children’s literary history, from ancient times to the present. It was kind of a dry, academic book, but I was very inspired by it and thought, “Wait a minute. If these books have been so important throughout history, maybe there is this counterpart to the ‘Great Books’ that are really the children’s ‘Great Books’ — the ones that have been the most important and have impacted children the most. What are those?” 

And so I started on a journey. I was just going to share on my website with parents as I went, but it just got bigger and bigger.