Wuthering Heights

(Abismos de pasión)

featuring

Irasema Dilián, Jorge Mistral, Lilia Prado, Ernesto Alonso,

“[Luis] Buñuel’s purest and, in spite of destructively indifferent acting, most successful exposition of l’amour fou. Wuthering Heights is the novel of a feverishly tortured imagination, and it can’t be done by having Cathy tripping about on a photogenically wild moor while Heathcliff glowers sullenly through knitted eyebrows. It needs a touch of the inferno, which is precisely what Buñuel gives it with his petrified landscape of baked earth and blackened trees; and his action gives the lie to Marvell’s famous couplet, ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none I think do there embrace.’ . . . The smell of death literally hovers over the whole of the film. . . . L’amour fou in its uncompromising self-absorption—and it is cruelty which dominates this dead landscape: the butterflies pinned alive to Eduardo’s drawing board . . . the live toad thrown into a cauldron as an incantation. ‘Buñuel’s bestiary’ . . . lovingly underlined by billows of the deceptively tender Wagner on the soundtrack” (Tom Milne, Sight & Sound). 

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Luis Buñuel
  • Arduino Maiuri
  • Julio Alejandro
Based On
  • the novel by Emily Brontë

Cinematographer
  • Agustín Jiménez
Language
  • Spanish
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • 90 mins
Source
  • George Eastman Museum
Permission
  • Películas y Videos Internacionales

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