The Wuthering Heights script finally became a film in 1954. Unfortunately, Pierre Unik had already died in a Nazi concentration camp. Buñuel, exiled after the Spanish Civil War, had been working for the Mexican studio system for several years. The critical success of films like Los olvidados (1951) made him a director to be considered and encouraged him to ask producer Oscar Dancingers for the opportunity to shoot Wuthering Heights. Although Buñuel was still willing to transpose the novel, he realized that his fascination had somehow decayed. He decided then to concentrate on that aspect of l’amour fou which is also animosity and destruction (Pérez Turrent and José de la Colina 88). Like WH1920 filmmakers many years before, he depicted the film not as a love story, but as a story of hate. Alejandro/ Heathcliff and Catalina/ Cathy never care about social decorum and only seem to find pleasure hurting one another. Their passion is a devastating force that threats the stability of the community around them. The music is again Wagner’s
Liebestod from Tristam and Iseult. Despite Buñuel claiming that the choice was casual (Bazin and Doniel Valcarze 32), we have seen how the love pattern in this myth resembles Wuthering Heights. Similarly to L’âge d’or, Buñuel declared that he chose the title Abismos de Pasión at random and did not like it (Matthews 92). However, it may come from the sentence pronounced by Alejandro/ Heathcliff after Cathy’s death both in the film and the novel:
“…no me dejes solo en este abismo!” (Abismos de Pasión)
“…only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you!” (WH 204)
In truly surrealistic fashion, Buñuel was always adamant that critics searched for hidden meanings in his films where none were intended. He insisted that those details they endlessly analysed (for example, the scene in Abismos where Ricardo/ Hindley throws a fly to a spider) were improvised during shooting, with the exclusive purpose of enriching a scene (Pérez Turrent and José de la Colina 87). However, we cannot always believe that his intentions were so innocent: he claimed that his mockery of police prefect Chiappe (who had forbidden L’âge d’or) in Le journal d’une femme de chambre (1964) was a coincidence (Pérez Turrent and José de la Colina 30). As he was a filmmaker used to provoke polemic, to pretend that the scandalous meaning was in the eyes of the beholder could be a tactic to avoid censorship.
Although he was working within the constraints of commercial cinema, Buñuel almost always managed to keep his Surrealist point of view in the films he directed in Mexico (Aranda 48). Tepeyac, the company that produced the film, was by no means as intrusive as Goldwyn and restrictions were mainly budget-related. This is what happened with the cast in Abismos: the only reason why Spanish Jorge Mistral (Alejandro/ Heathcliff), Polish Irasema Dillian (Catalina/ Cathy) and Mexican Lilia Prado (Isabel/ Isabella) were chosen as protagonists was that they had been hired for a film that was cancelled and had to be used somehow. Years later, Buñuel declared that he would like to shoot the film again with more adequate actors (Pérez Turrent and José de la Colina 88).
Abismos does not factually follow Brontë’s novel. According to Buñuel himself, he was only interested in transposing a literary text if he could rework it to say something of his own
(Matthews 139-140). The spatial setting was changed to the Mexican countryside, with location shooting near desert-like Taxco. The characters’ clothes suggest that the temporal setting was sometime in the nineteenth century. The Protestant community of the novel becomes Catholic in the film. Luis Buñuel was as contemptuous of organized religion as Brontë (as we will see in Chapter 6) and many films he directed were accused of irreverence. The use of religious imagery was recurrent but, following the Surrealistic custom, those symbols were placed out of context, which made them appear ridiculous (i.e. the altar to Virgin Mary in a slaughterhouse in El Bruto,
1950). Brontë prefigures this practice in the Jabes Branderham dream in Wuthering Heights (65), an episode that could have easily been written by a Surrealist (Seijo-Richart. “Buñuel’s Heights” 28). Only the middle chapters of the novel were taken into account in this transposition. The film starts with Catalina/ Cathy already married to wealthy Eduardo/ Edgar and pregnant with his child. She receives the unexpected visit of Alejandro/ Heathcliff, who comes back to “La Granja”, his childhood home, after a ten-year absence. It ends with Catalina’s and Alejandro’s deaths. She dies in childbirth, like in the novel, while he is shot dead by Ricardo/ Hindley at her tombstone. There are no childhood scenes and no second-generation story. Jorgito/ Hareton appears as a child, but Catalina’s baby is a boy (“un niño hermoso”). Abismos de pasión does not seem to have been a commercial success. The shooting process was difficult and even the filmmakers agreed that the final result was far from perfect (Buñuel. Mi último suspiro 200). However, we will see in the next chapters how it became a very influential film, especially between the “New Wave”
filmmakers and critics that appeared in the 1960s.
To sum up, the Surrealists were by no means interested in the place of Wuthering Heights in the canon. On the contrary, they were attracted to its first consideration as a scandalous book. Surrealist ideals found their reflection in the very elements that had disturbed the novel’s first critics: the main characters’ moral ambiguity and cruelty, and their defiance of law, religion and social structures.
2.4. Conclusion
The critical evolution of Wuthering Heights from a “polemic” novel in the 1840s to a “classic” of literature by the ending of the century has clearly influenced its transposition to cinema, with Abismos and WH1939 as representative of each tendency, respectively. These two films have become the point of reference for all the subsequent transpositions of Wuthering Heights to the big screen, though the interpretation of Brontë’s novel each one offered was radically different and even contradictory. The same text that was seen as a classic by the dominant ideology was hailed as a weapon of rebellion by a radical movement. These two divergent interpretations should by no means be analysed according to notions of which one is right and which one is wrong. The meaning of a literary or cinematic text is not fixed, but negotiated through the
constant interaction with audiences who, according to Stoneman (1996), are “historically specific” (231). Audiences are not the passive receivers of a message, but they actively contribute to create a new meaning for the text by bringing their own cultural knowledge and ideological perspectives into the process (Gledhill. “Klute 1” 69). By differentiating between the notions of “meaning” and “significance”, Hirsch acknowledges the creative role of readers in the decoding process of a text
(7 – 8). The significance of Wuthering Heights does not only depend on Emily Brontë’s original intentions, but also on how it has been decoded by readers, who have the possibility of assuming different positions. We talk about dominant reading when the ideology of a text is accepted; negotiated reading when certain aspects are accepted and certain others are not; and oppositional reading when it is rejected (Mayne [1993] 92). For instance, in her study about the audiences of 1940s-1950s Hollywood melodramas (like WH1939), Stacey [1994] discovered that the target female spectators were not attracted to those films because of their final restoration of patriarchal values. In a similar fashion to surrealist spectators looking for a “subversive” scene, it was the bit of the film where the heroine rebels that appealed to them, not the final restoration of her to “her place” (158). Time and changes in society also affect the way a text is perceived. What was
acceptable for the nineteenth-century readers of Wuthering Heights may not be in the twenty-first century and vice versa: in the novel, it is mentioned quite casually that little Hareton was “hanging a litter of puppies from a chairback” (217). This was a common method of getting rid of unwanted puppies in an eighteenth-century farming household. The same scene, included in the 2011
transposition (dir. Andrea Arnold), distressed modern audiences and it was considered
unnecessarily cruel towards animals.37 Moreover, the socio-cultural background of the readers/ spectators also influences their identification with the text.38
All the different film transpositions of Wuthering Heights provide interesting case studies for the reception of the novel. They are examples of a particular reading by the filmmakers, who have not tried to reproduce the text without a negotiation. On the contrary, they have reinterpreted it according to the society of their time, the conditions of production and their respective cultural backgrounds. How does the text appeal to them? In the next chapter, I will classify the film transpositions of Wuthering Heights according to this double consideration, depending on what attracted the filmmakers to the novel and the version they follow as model.
37
This particular scene was one of the most commented in the screening of the film at Bradford Media Museum in 19th November 2011, even when the required “Animal Rights” disclaimer in the final credits left clear that the animals had not been killed for real.
38
After attending a screening of Babel (2006, dir. Alejandro González Iñarritu) in UK with a group of
international students, we realized that the viewing experience had not been the same for each of us. The film has three storylines happening simultaneously in several countries (the United States, Japan, México and Morocco). We had needed the subtitles (restricted to the non-English speaking parts) at different times. On the other hand, while certain cultural aspects were immediately recognizable for some of us (ex: the Mexican wedding rituals for the Spanish spectator), they were not so easy to understand for the rest.