Abstract
Luis Buñuel’s Mexican film Abismos de pasión is less an “adaptation” of Wuthering Heights than an intercultural reworking of the source material to defamiliarize the original tale’s conflicted melodramatic form. These conflicts are both structural—the novel is woman-centered but male-narrated—and superstructural, for the world of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a romance that its characters seem to regard as “timeless” colliding headlong with historicized questions of gender and property ownership. In Abismos de pasión, Buñuel employs a process of transplantation, in which canonical source material in one culture is uprooted and relocated to a second culture. Here, the distinctive material context of the second culture is actuated through the equally distinct formal capacities of an alternate medium in the move from novel to film, radically rearticulating the conflicts structured into the original tale. Transplantation signifies a change in context, in this case resulting in contrasts Buñuel will find useful to his critique of social roles. Buñuel was not interested in a technical remanufacturing of plot material for a new medium, that is, a traditional cinematic adaptation. Rather, he used the vast cultural differences between Brontë’s England of 1847 and the post-World War II Mexico that he found himself in to explore the gendered politics of postcolonial Mexico.1
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© 2014 Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett
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Hagopian, K.J. (2014). The Melodrama of the Hacienda: Luis Buñuel’s Abismos de pasión as Postcolonial Trans/Plantation. In: Qi, S., Padgett, J. (eds) The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405159_5
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