Moving Backward, Looking Forward

Abstract

In comparison to the well-known 1939 film version of Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette’s French adaptation of the novel, Hurlevent (1985),¹ is perhaps only known to those film aficionados dedicated to the study of Rivette’s work, as, in Alan Riding’s words, ‘a founding member of the French New Wave’ (Riding, 1991, p. A.14). An obscure film that was only briefly shown in cinemas when released, Hurlevent has received little critical attention. The 1985 film’s obscurity in comparison to its 1939 counterpart is perhaps fitting as Rivette admitted a dislike for the 1939 film and its ‘melodramatic’ aesthetics (see Hazette, 2003, n.p.). Rivette said that when making his own film, ‘I had a very strong memory of the Wyler movie — because I hate it’, noting that the 1939 film ‘makes no sense whatsoever with all those ball scenes sprinkled everywhere. … Actually, Wuthering Heights is Wyler’s movie, after a novel by Jane Austen!’ (Rivette quoted in Hazette, 2003, n.p.) In contrast, Rivette provides a stark and uncomfortably intimate film that seems to be the antithesis of Wyler’s aesthetics of spectacle. However, rather than viewing Hurlevent as an obscure oddity, pitted against its antithetical Hollywood production, I wish to engage with this film as a similarly symptomatic text for both its immediate context of 1980s France and the wider context of the Wuthering Heights ‘tradition’.

I believe more and more that the role of the cinema is to destroy myths. … I truly believe that cinema’s role is to disturb the audience, to contradict all ready-made ideas but even more those established patterns of thought that underlie those ideas. We have to stop the cinema being reassuring.

Jacques Rivette (1968, n.p.)

In a 1990 documentary … he admits that he is not overly given to close-ups; he likes to see the whole body, he says, and the way shape or gesture may amplify facial expression. But then, he says once you have the body, why do you really need its setting — the room, the house, the place? That in turn leads you to wonder about how that setting fits in with the town, the locale, the territory. Mr. Rivette shows a constant tendency to move backward, to find the ultimate context.

David Thomson (2001, p. 2.11)