Contenido de los capítulos dedicados a REPowerEU

The third factor which influences the transposition of Brontë’s novel to the cinema is the type of industry within which the filmmakers work. Patterns and aesthetics vary substantially between what we understand as “commercial cinema” and what we consider “arthouse”. Those aspects which are condemned in the classic transpositions are praised in the Surrealist ones: while necrophilia plays a significant role in Abismos, it features nowhere in WH1939. The distinction between “commercial” and “arthouse” also helps us assess how the filmmakers relate to their own period and culture. Films produced within the parameters of commercial cinema are considered to be representative of the ideology of the establishment. In the classic transpositions of Wuthering Heights, it seems possible to reconcile the protagonists’ individual desires within the boundaries of the social order: both Dil Diya and WH1992 have straight happy endings. Surrealist transpositions, on the contrary, use the identity conflict to expose the flaws of a society against which they react:

endings are more open. These films have been produced within “subversive” cinema movements, movements of reaction against classic cinema. In many reviews, it is left clear that the Surrealist filmmakers regard WH1939, the most popular “classic” transposition, as the model to reject (Pérez Turrent and José de la Colina 85-86).

Despite this, it would be a mistake to categorically affirm that all commercial films are conservative or all “arthouse” films are subversive. We have commented before that Hindi art cinema has always enjoyed critical recognition in the West. It is the same case with art Filipino films, which have recently got prizes in European film festivals.⁶⁵ In contrast, their entertainment industries (Bombay popular film and Filipino “teenage” productions) have been dismissed as escapism and silliness, when not directly accused of being inartistic, bad cinema. Claims have been made that they can only be enjoyed ironically, an accusation that nineteenth-century theatre

65 Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza won Best Director Award at Cannes Film Festival for Kinatay, 2009.

melodrama also suffered (John 30). We can only wonder why many critics seem to take films seriously only when they deal with gritty realism (like the majority of Hindi and Philippines art cinema), but not when they provide pleasure for the audiences. First, the association of Hollywood to entertainment has not been an impediment to value the films they produce as works of art. It is more interesting to analyse the social implications of “escapist” cinema. In a similar way to

eighteenth-century romance novels, these films provide their audiences with the right to dream.

Those Hindi cinemagoers who watch Bombay popular film productions to evade from the hardship of their daily lives are not different from European postwar audiences, who favoured entertainment films as they allowed them to forget about poverty and rationing. The popularity of the oneiric musicals with Carmen Miranda and Esther Williams in post Civil War Spain, or

Gainsborough “bodice- ripping” melodramas (analysed in Chapter 7) with British audiences during Second World War attests to this. Describing this type of films as “guilty pleasures” is a way to justify that spectators enjoy and consume them massively. Moreover, enjoyment does not render spectators unable to keep their “aesthetic distance” (Booth 122). Their emotional involvement with this type of films is mediatized by their awareness that they are a fantasy, an artifice.

Second, the “low-class entertainment” tag applied to nineteenth-century theatre melodrama and Gothic fiction must not hide the fact that they offered their audiences an

alternative of freedom from the repressive code of morality of the Victorian era. Their twentieth-century descendant British horror genre (within which WH1970 was produced) provided an escape from the decorum and restraint associated to the mainstream cinema of the country.

Similarly, the emphasis Eastern art cinema puts on harshness seems to perpetuate the view of those countries as an impoverished, exoticized “Other” (Capino 41), which is not particularly progressive. On the contrary, we find a wider spectrum of social archetypes in popular film industries. By concentrating their narratives on college students, the Filipino “kilig love” films portray a twenty-first-century urban Philippines. On the other hand, the required “happy ending”

of Bombay popular film makes it possible for the protagonists to flaunt tradition and neither being

“punished” by the narrative nor lose the approval of the audience: in Refugee (2000, dir. J. P.

Dutta), the traditional Muslim heroine gets away with having a baby out of wedlock by the man of her choice.

My analysis of the film industries included in this thesis does not only include the purposes of the filmmakers, but also the audiences’ reaction. I will take into account box-office success, critics’ reviews and how or if each transposition influenced the others.

5. Chapter 5: Literary text versus cinematic text: Introduction

The screen shows a book whose pages are being turned.

CAPTION: “It is a very faithful adaptation”

One of the most recurrent issues when dealing with the transposition of a literary text to the screen is to what extent the film (hypertext) is “faithful” to the literary source (hypotext). A transposition will be labeled as “literal” if it follows closely the facts from the plot and “free” if it just gets some ideas, events and/ or characters. In a great amount of reviews about the

transpositions of Wuthering Heights, the question of how closely the film reflects the “original” is raised. Fidelity in film transpositions is, nevertheless, a very complex notion. It could be

questioned if it is possible to be totally faithful to the novel, as literature and film are completely different languages. The first is based upon the written word, while the second combines image and sound: even silent movies can never be fully understood without their musical

accompaniment. McFarlane suggests that, while some elements may be transferred unaltered from one narrative medium to another (i.e. a dialogue), others must find quite different equivalences in the film medium (quoted. in Kaye and Whelehan. “Introduction” 3). In WH1992, the attachment of some characters to nature over civilization is defined by introducing them by the light of the storm. The narrative processes are also different in literature and film. Even if a literary

transposition respects the dialogues from the original, their meaning can be altered. In the hypotext, Cathy tells Nelly during her delirium that Heathcliff killed some little lapwing birds (160). The scene features in WH1992, although in a different situation. We see Heathcliff telling Cathy what he did while they sit in the oak bed. In the hypotext, the scene marks her progressively losing her mind.⁶⁶ In this hypertext, it symbolizes their attachment and, at the same time, their progressive estrangement: Heathcliff killed the lapwings during Cathy’s stay at Thrushcross Grange because, as she was not there to see them, there was no point in the birds living.

Although Hirsch’s aforementioned notion of significance puts into question the very existence of a “correct” interpretation (6), the criticism of film transpositions has been dominated by the comparison to the source novel, always judged as superior. The higher the consideration of the novel, the harder will be the judgment of the movie. In the case of a widely known novel like Wuthering Heights, expectations would be very high. We have seen how Ideal producers kept emphasizing that WH1920 was faithful to the “original novel”. Nevertheless, what the film expresses in visual terms is the interpretation that particular readers (the filmmakers) make of the

66 We do not know for certain that Heathcliff killed the birds.

text. The process involves a selection of those elements considered more relevant for that idea of the text, while others will be left behind. Although filmmakers should always feel free to approach the text, this does not usually happen. Joy Gould Boyum postulates, “in the case of a classic

literary work, a transposition will be considered faithful to the extent that its interpretation remains consistent with those put forth by the interpretative community; with the interpretation (or

possible interpretations) of that classic work, then, that made it a classic in the first place” (quoted in Burrows 138). We have seen that the harsh critical reception of WH1992 was mainly motivated by this consideration. However, scriptwriter Anne Devlin felt she was being “true to the novel” in making changes. In the hypotext, after Cathy’s death, Heathcliff gets to her coffin because Nelly has left the window open. In WH1992, he smashes the window instead, “as an echo to Lockwood in the bedroom” and also because Devlin thought “it would be in Heathcliff’s character to do this”

(Study Film Education Guide). Hopkins suggests that it is possible to reshape a modern classic if the reshaping is performed in the context of a coherent guiding project (68- 69).

When confronted with the transposition from a literary source, each film industry around the world understands the notion of fidelity in a different way and its importance varies. We could establish a pattern by saying that, in the Classic transpositions, fidelity is more apparent than real, while in the Surrealist ones, it is more real than apparent. In his review for WH1939, Winsten points out that, despite “fidelity to mood, appearances and certain lines”, this transposition is not as faithful as it would appear at first glance. Between other things, he cites the more sympathetic portrayal of the novel’s “diabolical” Heathcliff. Nacache (69) has pointed out that, despite

publicity usually emphasizing the contrary, fidelity to the original source is not a great concern for Hollywood standards. In any case, the term is understood as fidelity to facts, setting and

characters. On the contrary, in Surrealist transpositions, filmmakers are not frightened of deviating from the original plot or setting, but are adamant about keeping the ideas underneath the text.

Buñuel insists that the transposition he directed is more faithful to the “spirit” of the novel than Wyler’s. He argues that, despite the change of setting, Abismos accurately depicts the love relation as doomed, which was absent in WH1939 (Pérez Turrent and José de la Colina 85). These

different film transpositions may not replicate the same symbols and motifs as the novel Wuthering Heights, but the important is if the ones used have an equivalent in the original: while in the novel, characters gather around the hearth (which was the center in Victorian houses), in the Wuthering Heights- inspired TV series Sparkhouse (set in 2002), characters sit together in front of the TV set.

However, this is totally faithful to the novel, as both actions reflect the same idea. Nowadays, the TV set has replaced the hearth as house center.

In the next three chapters, I study how the different transpositions construct their cinematic text in contrast to Brontë’s literary text. Chapter 6 deals with setting, Chapter 7 deals with plot, while Chapter 8 deals with characters. The main objective of this analysis is not if these