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For Emily (Whenever I May Find Her)
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16378 |
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THE ARTS
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5 / 1989 |
1,609 Words |
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Paul Coates
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Wuthering Heights is so intense that it seems better suited for filming than any of the great nineteenth-century novels, with the exception of the works of Dostoyevski. But whereas Dostoyevski has been well served by several great directors, including Kurosawa and Bresson (and less well served recently by Wajda), Emily Bronte's central work--for all its cinematic dislocations of mood and time scale--has been known to most filmgoers only through the suffocating creamy stylization of William Wyler's version. Wyler seems almost to have been diabolically commissioned to render incomprehensible the surrealists' adoration of the divine Emily.
No feminist director has attempted to measure herself against the greatest of the Brontes; feminists seem to be more interested in the more accessible intensity of Jane Eyre. Perhaps the only candidate for the contemporary reincarnation of Emily has been the extraordinary British singer Kate Bush, whose "Running up That Hill" storms heaven with a purposiveness that justifies her first hit's allusions to Wuthering Heights.
In the last few months, however, North American audiences have had a rare opportunity to view two versions of the film from the surrealist stable, one by a modern Japanese director heavily influenced by the surrealists, the other by the founding father of cinematic surrealism. The films in question are Yukio Yoshida's 1987 Onimaru and Luis Bunuel's Abismos de passion (1953) which has been circulating in the movable feast of a Bunuel retrospective.
Yoshida's Onimaru (The Demon) begins under the spell of Kurosawa, like a colorized version of the dust-driven volcanic slopes of Throne of Blood. Heathcliff is Onimaru, and first appears as the violent guardian of the resting-place of Kinu (Cathy), which he shields from would-be grave robbers. Onimaru is the demonic version of Kurosawa's samurai hero.
Yoshida uses mirrors to suggest the degree of Onimaru's dependence upon Kinu: She first draws his attention by flashing a mirror's dazzling light into the dark outhouse where he crouches; the famous declaration "I am Heathcliff" is delivered before a mirror. When Onimaru summons Kinu's daughter to his fort, she imitates her mother by turning a mirror upon him. Herself the mirror-image of Kinu, she gazes into the mirror of solicit maternal aid in the struggle against Onimaru--a struggle initiated by Kinu herself when she swore that on her death she would take Onimaru down to the underworld with her, to protect her family from him.
The use of mirrors recalls Yoshida's earlier Incident at Akitsu (1962), in which the girl who has restored the hero to life is repeatedly positioned alongside mirrors, indicating her willingness to distance herself from her own life and give it over to another. In that earlier film the man and woman continually part and reunite, each haunted by the death between them, which her gift of life has only appeased in part: It is as if her one life is insufficient for the two of them. Their deep elective affinity is transposed into a darker key in Onimaru, in which the lover's unanimity--their oneness of soul--is their joint rebellion against tradition.
Kinu is a member of the Yamabe family, whose priestly task is to appease the wrath of the dragon of the sacred mountain; tradition strictly forbids them from descending into the valley below. Kinu violates
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