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For Emily (Whenever I May Find Her)
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16378 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1989 |
1,609 Words |
| Author
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Paul Coates
Paul Coates is professor of literature at McGill University,
Montreal, Canada. |
Wuthering Heights is so intense that it seems better suited for filming than any of the great nineteenth-century novels, with the exception of the works of Dostoyevski. But whereas Dostoyevski has been well served by several great directors, including Kurosawa and Bresson (and less well served recently by Wajda), Emily Bronte's central work--for all its cinematic dislocations of mood and time scale--has been known to most filmgoers only through the suffocating creamy stylization of William Wyler's version. Wyler seems almost to have been diabolically commissioned to render incomprehensible the surrealists' adoration of the divine Emily.
No feminist director has attempted to measure herself against the greatest of the Brontes; feminists seem to be more interested in the more accessible intensity of Jane Eyre. Perhaps the only candidate for the contemporary reincarnation of Emily has been the extraordinary British singer Kate Bush, whose "Running up That Hill" storms heaven with a purposiveness that justifies her first hit's allusions to Wuthering Heights.
In the last few months, however, North American audiences have had a rare opportunity to view two versions of the film from the surrealist stable, one by a modern Japanese director heavily influenced by the surrealists, the other by the founding father of cinematic surrealism. The films in question are Yukio Yoshida's 1987 Onimaru and Luis Bunuel's Abismos de passion (1953) which has been circulating in the movable feast of a Bunuel retrospective.
Yoshida's Onimaru (The Demon) begins under the spell of Kurosawa, like a colorized version of the dust-driven volcanic slopes of Throne of
... (1997 of 9622 Characters)
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