The religious context is Muslim, the official religion in Turkey. Islam religion has
influenced the aesthetics in the films directed by Metin Erksan (Yusuf Kaplan 660). Nevertheless, the film depicts a quite secular environment, with all the characters dressed in modern 1960s clothes (women wear mini-skirts) and drinking alcohol. In the two weddings (Lüftü/ Edgar and Yýldýz, Ali and Mine), the characters are in modern bridal outfits. Yýldýz and Lüftü sit at a table in the garden of the house, with an elder – judge. Both wedding receptions look like a village festival, with balloons and confettis. It is a quite tacky look, which emphasizes the falsity of both
commitments (especially Ali and Mine’s reception, where even the camerawork seems
exaggerated). Religion is restricted to the elders Joseph/ Uncle Yusuf (who carries and is seen using a misbaha, a set of Muslim praying beads) and Nelly/ Aunty Yadigar (who wears a hijab).
Joseph (Ahmet Danyal Topatan) is not associated to repression or fanaticism in this transposition.
On the contrary, he is a “benevolent elder” figure, in the same way that Shamu Uncle in Dil Diya was.93 I will analyse this archetype in Chapter 8.
93 “Uncle” and “Aunty” are treatments of respect for an elder, both in India and Turkey.
6.4.2.3. Hurlevent’s setting 6.4.2.3.1. Time setting: 1931
According to the intertitle after the credits, the setting is “1931, entre la Beaume et le Vidourle…”94 To start with a date and then the place recalls the opening paragraph of Brontë’s novel (“1801. I have just returned from a visit to my landlord”, says Lockwood, just before describing the area). The choice of Southeastern French Provence as setting in Hurlevent was deliberate. According to scriptwriter Pascal Bonitzer (“L’amour par terre”), Rivette wanted to transform the characters from the hypotext into something nearer to his French culture (a transposition “non Anglo-Saxon, mais française”), but there was also the pictorial factor. This transposition is based upon the series of Wuthering Heights’ illustrations painted by Balthus. Rivette himself says that “maybe” Hurlevent was set in the 1930s because this is the period when Balthus did these drawings (Hazette), although in true Surrealist fashion, he is pretty non-committal. Like Buñuel before him, Rivette is particularly vague when critics try to look for hidden meanings and symbolisms in the films he directs. He always insists that everything is there “by chance” or “he does not remember”. Balthus’ drawings have an atemporal quality. Backgrounds lack detail, while the unadorned clothes the characters wear could belong to any period between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth: men wear jacket, shirt and trousers, while women wear plain dresses outlining the body. In this film, the clothes are definitely from the 1930s (so is the doctors’
car). However, apart from the date at the beginning (and coherent with Brontë’s novel), there are no other historical references.
6.4.2.3.2. Space setting
The influence of Balthus is quite evident in the depiction of this film’s setting. In
numerous scenes, the actors recreate the positions from his series of illustrations about Wuthering Heights, becoming “tableaux vivants”. The opening scene, with Cathérine and Roch/ Heathcliff lying down in the moor, is based on drawing n. 6 (“Mais c’était un de leurs grands amusements de se sauver dans la lande”) (Illustration 3). Their escapade to the moor by jumping through a window reproduces drawing n. 7 (“Cathy et moi nous nous étions échappés par la buanderie pour nous promener à notre fantaisie”) (Illustration 4). Finally, Cathy’s position in the bed during her delirium recreates drawing n. 26 (“Oh, Nelly the room is haunted!”)(Illustration 5) of which other variants exist (with different positions). The use of the tableau was one of the characteristics of
94 La Beaume is a province in Provence- Alpes Côte d’Azur, Southern France, where the river Vidourle flows into the Mediterranean Sea in Le Grau-du-Roi. Its source is in the adjacent Cévennes mountains, northwest of Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort.
nineteenth-century theatre melodrama setting (John 31). Theatre is a habitual topic in the films directed by Rivette (extensively analysed by Frappart). Many plots revolve around a group of characters rehearsing a play (Paris nous appartient, La bande des quatre, L’amour par terre, Va savoir…).
Theatre becomes a metaliterary exercise, with characters and audiences questioning what is real and what is not. Like Wyler before, Rivette’s direction has been accused of theatricality because of the reliance on long shot framing. The distribution of the frame in Hurlevent is mainly long shots with several characters interacting, without cuts. The influence of Balthus is not restricted to the Wuthering Heights illustrations, but it includes the rest of his work: the use of strong, primary colours in the kitchen scene in the film reflects Balthus painting of the Parisian street (Le passage du commerce de Saint-André) (Illustration 6).
The mise-en-scène is totally minimalist. No extras appear, only the main characters, which reinforces the sense of isolation. The film was shot almost totally on location. The houses are real, not settings.95 Even most of the costumes used were real: Lydie Mahias, the script-girl, dug out lots of original women’s clothes from the 1930s from her family house (Hazette). This was not only done because of budget constraints (although budget was very tight). Filming in natural locations is recurrent in all the films Rivette directs. It was also characteristic of Louis Feuillade’s feuilleton (Rosenbaum. “Inside the Vault” 9), which has influenced Rivette’s style, especially the use of improvisation while scripting and shooting. According to Bonitzer (“L’amour par terre”), this working method has its disadvantages. Rivette was not happy with the scenes in the Thrushcross Grange manor. The director of photography worked too slowly, so they had to simplify a lot (Hazette). In the scene of Cathérine’s delirium, the script was not finished and they did not have props to use in the set. The painting with the little child, which features prominently during the scene, was there in the location house and to use it was a last-minute decision (Bonitzer. “L’amour par terre”). While in classic Hollywood settings, all the props were there for a reason, Rivette’s follow the Surrealist tendency of placing out-of-context elements in the setting (e.g. the aforementioned billiard table).
6.4.2.3.2.1. The two households
Like in the novel, the Lindons/ Lintons get rents from farmers, while the Seveniers/
Earnshaws farm their own land. The two households are very different. Wuthering Heights/
Hurlevent is a typical Mediterranean farming household, with stone walls, wooden roofs and ploughing tools scattered everywhere. There is a huge stone fireplace in Cathérine’s room and in
95 The stone building farm (Wuthering Heights) is in Ardèche whereas the mansion (Thrushcross Grange) is not nearby, but 100 kilometres below, between Nîmes and Montpellier, near Sommières.
some of the others. Isabelle comments about how isolated the household is. In contrast,
Thrushcross Grange (the household does not have a name in the hypertext) is an elegant manor with an archway in the garden and a fountain, like in Dil Diya. It has a veranda with a huge view of the town. There is also a tennis court and the inhabitants dress in immaculate white. The interiors are more refined, with walls painted in bright colours. However, the Grange is an unwelcoming space, as entrance is restricted by a metallic fence. Roch and Cathérine peer at the Lindons from behind the branches when Cathérine’s foot gets caught in a trap. The gamekeeper (who carries a gun and two hunting dogs) grabs Roch by the ear and takes him to the masters, without caring about the injured girl. On the contrary, the gate is always open in Hurlevent, which resembles a Gothic-like setting, labyrinthic, huge and full of corridors and doors. There are also plenty of stone archways (like “La Granja” in Abismos and the temple in Dil Diya). Next to the ironing room, there is a very steep staircase, where Roch hides during the “Je suis Roch” scene (assuming a similar position to Hihintayin).
Apart from the house being real, the hypertext depicts quite accurately the life in the Hurlevent farming household, including the most unpleasant aspects (like in the later version WH2011). The rabbit that Hélène is realistically skinning compares to the dead rabbits that
Lockwood confuses with kittens in the novel (52). In La littérature et le mal, Bataille (120) compared a housewife skinning a rabbit to Sade’s fiction. He says that both reveal “the reverse of the truth”, which is also “the heart of the truth”. Like in the hypotext, Guillaume/ Hindley divides the house according to class after M. Sevenier/ Mr. Earnshaw’s funeral. He sets different tables for masters and servants. Hélène refuses to remove Roch’s dish (Guillaume has commanded her to do so, to mark that Roch is a servant now) and Cathérine goes to eat in the kitchen in protest.
In some scenes, characters appear in front of their reflection in a mirror. In the billiard table room, there is a huge mirror where Cathérine admires herself (Roch calls her “a hypocrite monkey dressed as a doll”). Her action evokes Balthus’ painting “Les beaux jours” (Illustration 7), in which a woman is captivated in the contemplation of her own image, while the man is in the background. Later in her room, Cathérine tries dresses in front of the mirror, a very similar scene to Balthus drawing n.11 (“Alors pourquoi as-tu cette robe de soie?”) (Illustration 8), which he later transformed into a painting titled “La toilette de Cathy” (Illustration 9). There is a huge mirror wall in Thrusscross Grange living room, in front of which Isabelle and Cathérine fight for Roch. Their dialogue reproduces the one in the hypotext (141). The mirror is a Surrealist element, which artists have often employed in their works to reveal both the seductive power and the fundamental falseness of the image (Linda Williams [1992] 143). When Cathérine admires herself in front of the mirror, she exposes the falsity of her social identity: the beautiful dresses transform her into an
acceptable notion of femininity, but apart her from Roch (her true self). Nevertheless, she does not adopt this mask exclusively to please Olivier/ Edgar or the Lindons, but it is narcissistic self- seduction (she is fascinated by her own image in the mirror). Like in the hypotext (but unlike Roopa in Dil Diya), Cathy is not so much “trapped” in Thrushcross Grange as lured inside.
6.4.2.3.2.2. Nature: “la garrigue”
Nature, especially the awareness of the seasons, is a recurrent motif in Balthus paintings.
The mountains appear as preferred landscape (i.e. his 1937 painting “La montagne”) (Illustration 10). He once declared to have been impressed by the moors of the North of England, which is evident in his illustrations for Wuthering Heights (Balthus the painter). In Hurlevent, instead of the Yorkshire moors, we have “la garrigue”, a particular type of scrubland in Provence and Corsica, but nevertheless equivalent to the one in the novel:
“As in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads of the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, the aim is to reveal “the primary laws of our nature as they may be apprehended through human experience in a wild and isolated setting” (Hazette).
According to Rivette, the Cévennes area is “characterized by a wild, sun-drenched landscape where isolated farms can be several miles apart” (Hazette). Leaving apart the sunny Mediterranean weather, the lonely households of this transposition are a perfect equivalent of those in the hypotext. Nature is equally malevolent. There are very few night scenes or darkness (the dog biting scene takes place in broad sunny daylight) and apparently it is forever summer:
However, there seems always to be a storm about to begin: thunder is constantly heard in the background, even when there is no rain in sight. The summer storm, which appears out of the blue where there was apparent calm, is used thorough this hypertext as a symbol of the repressed passion between the two main characters.
The countryside seems to belong exclusively to Cathérine and Roch, who ramble around while the music by The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices sounds. This is a choir of feminine voices who perform traditional Bulgarian songs a capella, the only soundtrack used through this
hypertext. The wild “garrigue” is the only space where the protagonists can be themselves (their private space). The rocks where the first scene takes place resemble the bare rocks in WH1992:
both seem to picture “the eternal rocks beneath” (WH 122). The birds are an important symbol in this transposition. While they ramble across the countryside, Roch climbs a tree and captures one, which Cathérine asks him to put “back to the nest”. This is similar to the episode in the hypotext in which Heathcliff kills some lapwings and Cathy makes him promise not to do it again (160). When Roch disappears, a desperate Cathérine says: “the birds must have carried him.” A
rooster is heard while Hélène puts her to bed, and again while she is ill. The rooster announcing a tragedy, the destruction of the individual, is a recurrent symbol in the films directed by Buñuel (Aub 383). In Abismos, it announces the betrayal to come.
We could also consider as lovers’ private spaces the billiard table (where the protagonist reminisce about their childhood) and Cathérine’s room in Hurlevent, although we do not have evidence that they shared the bed as children. Cathérine changes clothes in that room when she first feels ashamed of Roch seeing her half-naked. Later, Roch reacts very violently when he finds Isabelle sleeping there. The final scene also happens in that room. The room’s window is a threshold or barrier between this world and the underworld, which separates the characters.
Roch, who does not die, is at the window, unsuccessfully trying to reach the hand of Cathérine’s ghost.
6.4.2.3.2.3. Thresholds and barriers
The threshold is an important motif, related to the idea of imprisonment. Characters are constantly crossing corridors, opening and closing doors, like Guillaume/ Hindley in the opening scene, or Cathérine when she goes to speak to Hélène in Thrusscross Grange. Characters are placed under an archway at significant moments: e.g. when Roch seduces Isabelle. When Cathérine comes back after her first stay with the Lindons, Roch is hiding under an archway and some branches. She hugs him. After he escapes, Cathérine chases him in the rain and waits on a stone archway in the countryside. This is totally different to Balthus’ drawings: n. 10 (“Je ne resterai pas ici pour qu’on se moque de moi”) (Illustration 11) shows Cathy hugging Heathcliff inside
Wuthering Heights, surrounded by Nelly, Frances and Hindley instead of on their own. N. 14 (“Cathy in the storm”) (Illustration 12) shows her from behind, running through the open moor.
Windows and open doors also serve as thresholds. Action is seen from behind a doorframe in many scenes. Like in the hypotext, we peer at the characters from afar. While Roch is on a
staircase in the “Je suis Roch scene”, so is Isabelle after she escapes from Hurlevent. We see them both from a high angle, in order to emphasize their suffering.
There are also many examples of the characters’ imprisonment, which is totally faithful to the hypotext. At the beginning, Guillaume locks Roch in the shed. As revenge, Cathérine locks herself in her room (Crouse’s aforementioned idea of imprisonment as control, 180). During Cathérine and Roch’s first escape, the lock prevents them from crossing the gate. We mentioned before that the light of the window (like a jail) is projected over Cathérine when Roch disappears.
In the second half of the film, Roch and Isabelle are placed in that same position.