Read Good Shit On Musings: ralph fiennes

By Yasmina Tawil

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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By Yasmina Tawil

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

By Yasmina Tawil

May We Always Go on Singing: Sunshine and Making Peace With the Past by Daniel Carlson

By Yasmina Tawil

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There is a scene where they are leaving the building where they have just changed their name, and they are laughing and happy. My heart was sad shooting those shots, my heart was sad editing the scene, and my heart is sad every time I see it, because I know this was the first and the greatest mistake they made. I want to yell at them, Why are so happy. Are you crazy?

Istvn Szab

If theres no God, and there never was a God, then why do we miss him so much?
Ivan Sors

///

Istvn Szab is haunted. Born in Hungary in 1938, he began his career as a writer-director right after high school, attending an academy for theater and film, where he cut his teeth on shorts before graduating to features. Before he was 30 years old, he was making films about the intersection of his personal history and the tumult his nation had seen in the twentieth century. He was drawn to the occupation of Hungary by the Nazis during the second world war, the passing of the torch to the Communists, the peoples uprising of 1956; all things that had shaken his homeland and reshaped his own family. These things sound so long ago now, but thats something else that Szab would explore in his work the way history isnt really history, and how were never free from our past or our past selves. Over and over again, Szab would return to the wars that had sent cracks through Europe in the first half of what was supposed to be a century of tolerance and progress, finding new ways to explore what it was like to come of age in such a time. He also became increasingly focused on what wed today call identity politics: the meaning of ones name, faith, heritage, and fortune, and the degrees to which were willing to compromise those things when we tell ourselves such compromises are necessary for our success. In other words, Szab was worried about the high personal cost of surviving in a world that always seemed ready to strike you down, and in 1999, he made a masterpiece about what it takes to keep going: Sunshine.

Sunshine is the kind of historical drama to which one can apply descriptors like sweeping and grandiose without sounding hyperbolic. It deals with the members of the Sonnenschein bloodline, a family of Hungarian Jews, from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, and while it technically touches on five generations, three of them form the core of the film. In a move that could have been a gimmick in less capable hands and might have proved disastrous with a less worthy performer, Ralph Fiennes gracefully plays three successive generations of Sonnenschein men: Ignatz, born in the late 1800s and eventually involved in the politics and military operations of World War I; Adam, who reaches adulthood in the 1930s as the Nazis are coming to power; and Ivan, who survives a labor camp and grows up to work for the Communist regime. Szab, who co-wrote with playwright Israel Horowitz, is fascinated the evolution of identity and the tension between assimilation and independence. The name Sonnenschein means sunshine, and its easy to see the association with light, clarity, honesty. Its by light that we see. The film, though, is a look at what happens when identity gradually erodes and the light begins to dim, and it starts with the names. Ignatz, a promising lawyer, is told that he needs a more Hungarian read: less Jewish name if hes going to become a judge, so he decides to change his surname to Sors. His siblings go along with the name change, too: Ignatzs brother, Gustave (James Frain), and their cousin, Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), who grew up in their home after her father died and was raised as their sister. When they change their name, theyre almost giddy with the possibilities before them, and they practically prance out of the government building where they completed the paperwork. But Szab doesnt rejoice with them, and the gentle camera and absence of music lend the moment a kind of sadness. This is the first step in giving away who you are: to forfeit your name in an attempt to fit in. The sunshine has been hidden, and darkness is allowed to seep in. The siblings picked Sors for its sound, but also, ironically, for its meaning: fate.

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By Yasmina Tawil

May We Always Go on Singing: “Sunshine” and Making Peace With the Past by Daniel Carlson

By Yasmina Tawil

image

“There is a scene where they are leaving the building where they have just changed their name, and they are laughing and happy. My heart was sad shooting those shots, my heart was sad editing the scene, and my heart is sad every time I see it, because I know this was the first and the greatest mistake they made. I want to yell at them, ‘Why are so happy. Are you crazy?’”  

— István Szabó

“If there’s no God, and there never was a God, then why do we miss him so much?”
— Ivan Sors

///

István Szabó is haunted. Born in Hungary in 1938, he began his career as a writer-director right after high school, attending an academy for theater and film, where he cut his teeth on shorts before graduating to features. Before he was 30 years old, he was making films about the intersection of his personal history and the tumult his nation had seen in the twentieth century. He was drawn to the occupation of Hungary by the Nazis during the second world war, the passing of the torch to the Communists, the people’s uprising of 1956; all things that had shaken his homeland and reshaped his own family. These things sound so long ago now, but that’s something else that Szabó would explore in his work — the way history isn’t really history, and how we’re never free from our past or our past selves. Over and over again, Szabó would return to the wars that had sent cracks through Europe in the first half of what was supposed to be a century of tolerance and progress, finding new ways to explore what it was like to come of age in such a time. He also became increasingly focused on what we’d today call identity politics: the meaning of one’s name, faith, heritage, and fortune, and the degrees to which we’re willing to compromise those things when we tell ourselves such compromises are necessary for our success. In other words, Szabó was worried about the high personal cost of surviving in a world that always seemed ready to strike you down, and in 1999, he made a masterpiece about what it takes to keep going: Sunshine.

Sunshine is the kind of historical drama to which one can apply descriptors like “sweeping” and “grandiose” without sounding hyperbolic. It deals with the members of the Sonnenschein bloodline, a family of Hungarian Jews, from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, and while it technically touches on five generations, three of them form the core of the film. In a move that could have been a gimmick in less capable hands and might have proved disastrous with a less worthy performer, Ralph Fiennes gracefully plays three successive generations of Sonnenschein men: Ignatz, born in the late 1800s and eventually involved in the politics and military operations of World War I; Adam, who reaches adulthood in the 1930s as the Nazis are coming to power; and Ivan, who survives a labor camp and grows up to work for the Communist regime. Szabó, who co-wrote with playwright Israel Horowitz, is fascinated the evolution of identity and the tension between assimilation and independence. The name “Sonnenschein” means “sunshine,” and it’s easy to see the association with light, clarity, honesty. It’s by light that we see. The film, though, is a look at what happens when identity gradually erodes and the light begins to dim, and it starts with the names. Ignatz, a promising lawyer, is told that he needs a “more Hungarian” — read: less Jewish — name if he’s going to become a judge, so he decides to change his surname to Sors. His siblings go along with the name change, too: Ignatz’s brother, Gustave (James Frain), and their cousin, Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), who grew up in their home after her father died and was raised as their sister. When they change their name, they’re almost giddy with the possibilities before them, and they practically prance out of the government building where they completed the paperwork. But Szabó doesn’t rejoice with them, and the gentle camera and absence of music lend the moment a kind of sadness. This is the first step in giving away who you are: to forfeit your name in an attempt to fit in. The sunshine has been hidden, and darkness is allowed to seep in. The siblings picked “Sors” for its sound, but also, ironically, for its meaning: “fate.”

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