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    Aqsa Parveen
    This document discusses and analyzes a film adaptation of Wuthering Heights that casts Heathcliff as black. It summarizes that while this casting choice was meant to challenge conventions, it also risked stereotyping the character. It then discusses how critics more positively received the film by framing it as an adaptation that stripped away layers from previous versions and the source novel to make the story feel new. One critic argued it achieved a "pre-literary reality effect" by attempting to show events that could have occurred before the book was written.

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    This document discusses and analyzes a film adaptation of Wuthering Heights that casts Heathcliff as black. It summarizes that while this casting choice was meant to challenge conventions, it also risked stereotyping the character. It then discusses how critics more positively received the film by framing it as an adaptation that stripped away layers from previous versions and the source novel to make the story feel new. One critic argued it achieved a "pre-literary reality effect" by attempting to show events that could have occurred before the book was written.

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    This document discusses and analyzes a film adaptation of Wuthering Heights that casts Heathcliff as black. It summarizes that while this casting choice was meant to challenge conventions, it also risked stereotyping the character. It then discusses how critics more positively received the film by framing it as an adaptation that stripped away layers from previous versions and the source novel to make the story feel new. One critic argued it achieved a "pre-literary reality effect" by attempting to show events that could have occurred before the book was written.

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    26 views2 pages

    CCC

    Uploaded by

    Aqsa Parveen
    This document discusses and analyzes a film adaptation of Wuthering Heights that casts Heathcliff as black. It summarizes that while this casting choice was meant to challenge conventions, it also risked stereotyping the character. It then discusses how critics more positively received the film by framing it as an adaptation that stripped away layers from previous versions and the source novel to make the story feel new. One critic argued it achieved a "pre-literary reality effect" by attempting to show events that could have occurred before the book was written.

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    effectively to offer modern audiences ‘a crystal-clear analogy for the brutal classism of

    late eighteenth-century English society’ (376). But the framework also runs the risk of
    trapping the viewer within a very limited position, the position of a ‘figure on the margins of
    legitimate society’ (Carroll 26). I would argue that the film’s casting of Heathcliff
    as black was challenging but its deployment of some of the conventional ways of representing
    racial difference ran the risk of stereotyping the character rather than rendering
    him more fully.
    Given its revisionist ambitions, it is perhaps ironic that Wuthering Heights should win
    more praise when more conventional frameworks were used. One is that of adaptation
    since Bronte’s novel has been a popular source of screen adaptation and this new version opened
    up the possibility of making comparisons with other versions. The most
    popular source of comparison was MGM’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier’s suave
    Heathcliff; Sight & Sound listed a number of versions including Rivette’s Hurlvent (1985)
    and Yoshishige’s Arashi Ga Oka (1988) to emphasize the distances an adaptation could
    travel (Jenkin 37). Reviewers could also comment on how the film went back to the
    book; Jonathan Murray, for instance, in Cinéaste, detailed a comparison between the
    novel and the film to examine how the association of Heathcliff with animals finds its
    justification in Bronte’s metaphors.
    In general, though, applying the framework of adaptation to the film makes a virtue
    of its difference from the source and from the traditions of period drama. The films
    uses little dialogue and Heathcliff almost none, an approach which Murray praises
    in commenting that this version avoids the ‘logorrhoea that scars so many period literary
    adaptions’ (58). The most consistent metaphor used to frame this adaptation is
    that of making the story new again by stripping away the layers of adaptation which
    have accreted round the source. The film’s ‘creative vandalism rips off the layers of
    fluffy chiffon that have adhered to the tale through the course of numerous stage and
    screen adaptations’ (Brooks); it is ‘an admirable, frustrating attempt to strip away the
    novel’s inherited “classic” status’ (Scott). If the film was a success, it was because it
    ‘succeeds brilliantly in injecting the shock of the new into this well-thumbed English
    classic’ (Stables). This metaphor of stripping away was pushed even further by Peter
    Bradshaw who argues that it is not just previous adaptations that are stripped away but
    also the source itself:
    Arnold achieves a kind of pre-literary reality effect. Her film is not presented as another layer
    of interpretation, superimposed on a classic’s frills . . . but an attempt to create something
    that might have existed before the book. . . a raw semi-articulate series of events, later polished
    and refined as a literary gemstone. (‘Andrea Arnold’s adaptation’)
    In this reading, the use of adaptation as the frame of reference allows the casting of
    Heathcliff as black to be explained as another example of the radical approach the
    director takes to this much-adapted classic. Bradshaw describes the world portrayed in
    the film as ‘elemental, almost primaeval . . . Heathcliff is reimagined, not as the vaguely
    exotic dark-skinned Gypsy, but as simply black’ (ibid). He too is stripped back to elemental
    essentials and the violence he does to himself and others is set in the context of
    the brutality of the weather, the cruelty wreaked on animals and birds and the endless
    keening of the wind.

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