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Moving: On the Cinema of Kate Bush by Willow Maclay

By Yasmina Tawil

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Experimenting with film is exciting to me. It feels like it has purpose.
-Kate Bush, Egos and Icons, 1993

Kate Bush has always been more than your average musical artist. Its not ordinary to have a chart-topping single when youre 19-years-old, let alone a number-one hit about a classic literary text of all things. From the onset, she was more than hooks. She was a wizard of merging artistic interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could offer as an artist. Bush is never satisfied, but geniuses so rarely are, and when she masters one art form, she moves onto another with a ravenous appetite for perfection. In her art she has combined music, dance, mime, literature, fashion, and cinema into one. Her art is overwhelmingly dense and, from the beginning, few could truly reckon with her talent. Her music videos and concert television specials, in particular, are the purest distillation of her skills, and in cinematic terms, share a kinship with the likes of Maya Deren, Jacques Rivette, Franois Truffaut, and Terence Fisher.

In an interview with a British Television station from 1978, Bush recalled a moment in her childhood which would have a lasting effect on her psyche and her engagement with art. She was struck by an image from a television adaptation of Wuthering Heights. She caught the last five minutes of it and, without context, the image of a ghostly Kathy (the protagonist of the novel) haunted her. It was an extreme close-up, with Kathy begging for a window to be opened so she could enter her old house. From her earliest inclinations as an artist, she was first and foremost interested in visual imagery. Bush would also say in this interview that she wanted to write a song about the image that had stuck with her, but she needed to read the book first so she could have context and get the tone right. What would become of this collision course of image, text, and music is her first number one single in Britain, Wuthering Heights. The music video that followed would be one of the best the genre has ever seen.

There are numerous videos for the Wuthering Heights single, but two are widely recognized as the canonical examples in Bushs oeuvre: The red dress video and the white dress video. Both present different formal takes on the single, and both are altogether dynamic in their connection to the song. The first of these, the white dress video, is shot on a sound stage with golden, harsh lighting, emanating from Bushs body as she does her interpretive dance of the song. She makes big, swooping gestures with her limbs and has wide Clara Bow-like eyes. The image is split into two separate sections to create one fluid imageone a close-up so you can see her facial reactions to the song, the other with a wider scope so you can see the gestures shes making to emphasize certain lyrics and passages of the song. Occasionally time-lapse photography is used to give off the illusion that Bushs body is splitting into parts as she moves like Da Vincis Vitruvian Man. Cinematically, this video shares DNA with some of the earliest short films, more specifically the Serpentine Dance experiments that many different directors used to showcase how images could move in a certain way, but updated to aesthetics that would be more commonly used in early experimental music videos. These techniques were used to better capture singular movement and siren, ghostly feminine images, like in Bruce Conners groundbreaking video for Breakaway, starring Toni Basil. It would be startling in its own right if it were the only video for Wuthering Heights, but Kate Bush did one better when she donned the red dress.

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Moving: On the Cinema of Kate Bush

By Yasmina Tawil

By Willow Maclay
image

“Experimenting with film is exciting to me. It feels like it has purpose.”
-Kate Bush, Egos and Icons, 1993

Kate Bush has always been more than your average musical artist. It’s not ordinary to have a chart-topping single when you’re 19-years-old, let alone a number-one hit about a classic literary text of all things. From the onset, she was more than hooks. She was a wizard of merging artistic interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could offer as an artist.

Read more


Filming the Unfilmable: On Six Versions of Emily Bront's Wuthering Heightsby Soheil Rezayazdi

By Yasmina Tawil

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[Editors note: One of the six Wuthering Heights adaptations discussed in this essay is Andrea Arnolds 2011 version, which is distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures. The opinion expressed below was developed independently of Oscilloscope and is entirely reflective of the authors point of view.]

I needed a love story in my life. If not love, at least an obsession. Something to pass the time and occupy the mind. Id spent much of the summer simmering in heartache, the kind that makes you feel young againand not in a good way. I got used to weeping behind sunglasses on the subway. I remembered the wild, irrational agony of a text message ignored. I felt the total loss of self-control we call emotional vulnerability.

All that crazed energy with nowhere to go. Amidst a thick melancholic fog, I found a tattered 1970 paperback of Wuthering Heights in the foyer of my apartment building. I knew the Kate Bush karaoke anthem and the gist of the novel as a Romeo & Juliet-esque story of star-crossed lovers. Thisll do, I thought.

Those 400 pages held something else entirely: a knotty saga of love souring into resentment, exploitation, and violent grief. Emily Bronts 1847 novel doesnt balm a broken heart, I learned; it hardens it. Our principal lovers, Heathcliff and Catherine, spend most of the book in a histrionic rage. They manipulate and blame one another for their loves collapse. Catherine marries another man; Heathcliff seduces the other mans sister just to rattle the cage. Their love curdles into something ghastly.

And then, of course, one of them dies. And we still have 200 more pages of book to read.

Despite the romance-novel reputation, Wuthering Heights goes down about as bitter as any pill Ive taken. Bront depicts passion as a dangerous double-edged sword; it intoxicates, sure, but it also turns humans into monsters. Her characters personify the adage hurt people hurt people. Heroes become villains in a multi-generational tale that balances a dozen key characters, rests on an elaborate nesting-doll structure, and offers a master class in cruelty.

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Filming the Unfilmable: On Six Versions of Emily Brontë's ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Soheil Rezayazdi

By Yasmina Tawil

image

[Editor’s note: One of the six Wuthering Heights adaptations discussed in this essay is Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version, which is distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures. The opinion expressed below was developed independently of Oscilloscope and is entirely reflective of the author’s point of view.]

I needed a love story in my life. If not love, at least an obsession. Something to pass the time and occupy the mind. I’d spent much of the summer simmering in heartache, the kind that makes you feel young again—and not in a good way. I got used to weeping behind sunglasses on the subway. I remembered the wild, irrational agony of a text message ignored. I felt the total loss of self-control we call “emotional vulnerability.”

All that crazed energy with nowhere to go. Amidst a thick melancholic fog, I found a tattered 1970 paperback of Wuthering Heights in the foyer of my apartment building. I knew the Kate Bush karaoke anthem and the gist of the novel as a Romeo & Juliet-esque story of star-crossed lovers. This’ll do, I thought.

Those 400 pages held something else entirely: a knotty saga of love souring into resentment, exploitation, and violent grief. Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel doesn’t balm a broken heart, I learned; it hardens it. Our principal lovers, Heathcliff and Catherine, spend most of the book in a histrionic rage. They manipulate and blame one another for their love’s collapse. Catherine marries another man; Heathcliff seduces the other man’s sister just to rattle the cage. Their love curdles into something ghastly.

And then, of course, one of them dies. And we still have 200 more pages of book to read.

Despite the romance-novel reputation, Wuthering Heights goes down about as bitter as any pill I’ve taken. Brontë depicts passion as a dangerous double-edged sword; it intoxicates, sure, but it also turns humans into monsters. Her characters personify the adage “hurt people hurt people.” Heroes become villains in a multi-generational tale that balances a dozen key characters, rests on an elaborate nesting-doll structure, and offers a master class in cruelty.

Read more

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