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Wuthering Heights on Film and Television A Journey across Time and
Cultures
Valérie V. Hazette
Bristol: Intellect,
2015 Paperback. xiv+359 p. ISBN 978-1783204922.
£30
Reviewed by Janet Gezari Connecticut College
Valérie
V. Hazette's book provides the most thorough and detailed account we have of
adaptations of Wuthering Heights for
film and television over the course of nearly a century. Beginning with A.V.
Bramble's 1920 black and white silent film and ending with Andrea Arnold's 2011
film, Hazette juxtaposes British and world films as well as period and
anti-period projects produced in England and outside it. Her book's governing
critical assumption is that film adaptations of Wuthering Heights succeed insofar as they mobilize the novel's
hidden or subterranean themes, motifs, and structures. Her project is
fundamentally different from Patsy Stoneman's in Brontë Tranformations : The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre
and Wuthering Heights (1996), and not just because it focuses on one novel
and one medium of translation. For the first time, Hazette provides a context
for these adaptations in the history of film, the conditions of film and TV
production, and the individual careers of directors and scriptwriters. Her book
is a welcome contribution to Brontë and film scholarship for these reasons
alone. Part I
explains Hazette's methodology, an exercise which most post-graduate programs
and publishers now require their students and authors to perform. She first
presents the novel's "deep structure" by way of its sources or
analogues (the myth of Psyche's quest for Eros, the fairy tale of Beauty and
the Beast, the romance of Tristan and Iseult) and then as themes addressed by
Georges Bataille, whose brilliant reading of Wuthering Heights has directly influenced several film adaptations,
and in particular those of Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette, and Kiju Yoshida. The
novel's literary, psychological, and mythic elements come together in what
Hazette describes as a "small scale, flexible, mythocritical 'Chart of the
Mythical Components, Bataillan Themes and Planar/Gothic Figures' " [50].
The chart didn't help me to see the ways the novel or its adaptations put these
mythic and thematic elements into relation with each other or with a narrative
program. Hazette is more successful in doing this in her discussions of
individual adaptations. Part 2
has a distinct project: the recovery, insofar as recovery is possible, of the
lost (and presumably destroyed) first feature film of Wuthering Heights, directed by A.V. Bramble and adapted from the
novel by Eliot Stannard in 1920. In her effort to reconstruct and understand
this film, Hazette presents a ten-page program that has survived and provides a
cast list, a foreword, and a synopsis. The cast list alone provides crucial
information about the kind of film this must have been: no Lockwood, Isabella,
or Linton Heathcliff; and two Cathys, three Heathcliffs, two Edgars, and two
Catherines. As Hazette points out, the omission of Lockwood is common in film
adaptations, and the omission of Isabella and her son Linton "helps in
obliterating the most unsettling parts of the tale" [84]. She does not
comment on a feature of the cast list that tells a lot about how the film's
director and writer understood the novel. The first character named is
Heathcliff, who is followed by Mr. Earnshaw ("who found and befriended
Heathcliff"), Hindley ("his son and Heathcliff's enemy"), and
Frances ("Hindley's wife"). Cathy appears after Frances in the cast
list, and she is described as "Hindley's sister." The
second-generation Catherine is Edgar's "daughter and afterwards Hareton's
wife." This is a reading of the novel as a revenge tale with Heathcliff as
its hero and its female characters relegated to conventional supporting roles. To
supplement these materials, Hazette also presents newspaper accounts of the
production process, reviews, and stills documenting the film's production. She
studies the careers of A.V. Bramble and Eliot Stannard, who, in addition to
adapting Wuthering Heights, was the
screenwriter for nine of Hitchcock's silent films made between 1925 and 1928. She
also examines Bramble’s and Stannard’s collaboration on the film that
immediately preceded their Wuthering Heights,
Mr. Glifil's Love Story, which adapts a short story by George
Eliot, and The Manxman, a Hitchcock
and Stannard collaboration that seems especially relevant to her because its
storyline resembles that of the first volume of Wuthering Heights. Part 3
could have stood on its own as a wide-ranging and substantial project. Its
historical survey of film versions of Wuthering
Heights is anchored by the two famous films that followed Bramble's, Luis
Buñuel's Abismos de pasión (1953) and
William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939).
The creation of Buñuel's film, grounded in the Surrealist concept of
"l'amour fou," spanned twenty years, involved several collaborators
at different stages, and was importantly affected by the conditions of its
production, including the producer's requirement that Buñuel use a cast already
hired for a musical. Its difference from Wyler's film, which its
cinematographer Gregg Toland described as "a love story, a story of escape
and fantasy" filmed with romantic close-ups of Catherine's and
Heathcliff's faces and set in "a chiaroscuro country of the mind"
rather than in a realistic Yorkshire landscape is striking [177]. Released in
the same year as Gone with the Wind,
which won the Academy Award for best picture, Wyler's Wuthering Heights is still the version of Brontë's novel most alive
in the popular imagination. Hazette discusses several other period and anti-period
feature and made-for-TV films, including, notably, Jacques Rivette's Hurlevent (1985), inspired by both
Bataille and Balthus, whose illustrations for Wuthering Heights Rivette had admired, and Yoshida's Onimaru (1988), set in 14th-century
Japan. Hazette is at her critical best describing Andrea Arnold's aesthetics as
"televisual" and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of
"Heathcliff's exclusivity as bearer of the camera" [295] in Arnold’s
film. Part 3 also includes transcripts of Hazette's interviews with the
directors of several of the film adaptations she discusses. Although
her research is always impressive, Hazette’s prose often displays the worst
features of academic writing. With its preference for nominalization, theory argot,
and all of the devices that enable a sentence to escape the ordering
confinement of its syntax, it is not as clear and precise as it could be. One
example will suffice to show the obfuscation that sometimes results: Just as there is a sociological aftermath for those
trailblazing adaptations hit by corporatist (or even chauvinistic)
reviews—Albert V. Bramble’s and Andrea Arnold’s come immediately to mind—a
sense of loss and missed opportunity can often arise from a scholastic
disengagement from the bustle of the ‘main/most overt[/hidden] source[s] of intertextual connection’ or, in other
words, from an archaeology of the
hypermediatic-activist operations that promote the place of ‘the Other’ (or of
‘the Foreign’). [46] The
dropping of substantial quotations into the text, often without comment from Hazette
or attribution in the text (there are endnotes), is also jarring. Hazette's
habit of quoting frequently and at length suggests that she didn't take the
time to digest the insights of her sources, bring them into clear relation to
her own analysis, and provide transitions. Finally, when she turns from
describing the circumstances of a film's production to describing the film
itself, she might easily make her analysis more accessible to readers not as
familiar with the films (or the novel) as she is. Her observations about the
changes Buñuel makes to Brontë's plot, for example, aren't easy to follow for a
reader who doesn't know the film as well as she does. These changes are
considerable, and go far beyond his omission of the second generation of
characters and of the first generation’s childhood. Buñuel’s film, like the
best of the films Hazette presents, really is a translation of Brontë’s novel. Inspired
by the novel, it far exceeds the project of adapting it to the medium of film. His
Heathcliff dies on the night of Catherine's funeral, shot by Hindley in a
spacious crypt, just after he has opened Catherine's coffin and kissed her. She
is wearing the dress she wore at her marriage to Edgar, and she has just given
birth to a child, not a girl, as Brontë had it, but a boy. >>> IIlustrated version on the Victorian Web
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