To unveil and to mask : Buñuel's and Yoshida's revisioning of the religious theme in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

In an insightful essay on Arashi Ga Oka, a 1988 film adaptation of Bronte's Wuthering Heights, John Collick remarks that its maker, Yoshishige Yoshida, "intended the film to be a part-tribute to the unfinished [sic!] film version of Luis Bunuel, a director whom[ ... ] he regards as a major influence on his work" Again fascinatingly, Collick implies that such influence from one of the founding fathers of the European cinematic avant-garde should account for Yoshida's decision to "evoke the transgressive element in Emily Bronte's book" That Collick delves no deeper into his Yoshida-Bunuel connection in no way minimises the veracity of his statement. In what follows I would like to determine in fact the extent of Yoshida's debt to Bunuel by considering how both directors handle the religious dimension of Bronte's "transgressive element" - for the novel's religious theme strikes me as being crucial to an understanding of Arashi Ga Oka as a Bunuelian adaptation. Significantly, true to Bunuel's famous dictum "Thank God I'm still an atheist", not only does Yoshida focus on Bronte's religious transgressions but, more revealingly, he emulates Bunuel in transgressing them in turn. Indeed, though Bunuel and Yoshida effect different changes in Brontean time and space, by respectively transposing Wuthering Heights to late nineteenth-century Mexico and the medieval Japan of the Onin period, they are both deeply attracted to what Davies calls the Brontean lovers' "joint rejection of Divine law" in allegiance to an intensely heretic passion that involves "violent pain and loss" Nevertheless, while acknowledging the Brontean cathartic effect of such suffering, both Bunuel and Yoshida depart from Bronte's vision by rejecting its underlying suggestion that the lovers might find in Death their spiritual transcendence. In at least these crucial thematic aspects, Arashi Ga Oka recreates Bunuel's Ahismos de Pasion in stunning images of its own. Yet this statement can be viewed in truer perspective if we first analyse how Bunuel revisions Bronte's religious theme by employing what Keith Cohen would term an "unveiling/masking" technique whereby, paradoxically, Bronte's supernatural intimations are evoked to be subverted. We are then in a better position to chart Yoshida's similar path to the paradoxical Bunuelian abyss of Bronte's heights.