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Popular Culture Review
it undermines the tremendous importance that cinematic atmospherics play in
bulwarking character psychology. The way a movie looks—when handled
skillfully—will often reflect how characters feel.
This relation will be seen all through / Walked With a Zombie, where the
angular play of light and shadow will underscore Betsy’s emotional state—she
knows that there are vast patches of missing information, and that it is her
responsibility to fill them—but the same approach and the same technique also
permeates Stevenson’s 1944 Jane Eyre, much to the same effect. Moreover,
these stylistic choices are being made precisely because they fit the spirit of
Charlotte Bronte’s prose. Atkins and Riley find that Stevenson is substituting
cinematic style for thematic heft, but it’s entirely possible to argue that style is
in fact underpinning theme (that, in Vladimir Nabokov’s famous phrase, matter
is style). Movies cannot convey the shifts and turns of thought through prose;
instead, these shifts and turns find their signifiers in spatial and temporal
arrangements. This is all a very convoluted way of saying that, in movies, what
matters most—what conveys not just the most information but also the most
important information—is movement.
Gardner Campbell, in an essay attempting to make a case for Welles as the
co-director of the film, points to the significance of mise en scene throughout the
1944 Jane Eyre. Campbell notes that Welles “loves to frame his shots with one
figure on one side of the frame in the extreme foreground, one figure on the
other side of the frame in the middle ground, and one figure in the center in the
background, all in focus.” It doesn’t really matter, for the purposes at hand,
whether it’s Welles or Stevenson who is responsible for these arrangements.
What matters is that Campbell is right in suggesting that when we see Jane in
the extreme foreground we are in fact imbuing her with a “double authority as
character and narrative creator.” It’s even more striking to find how this
particular mise en scene makes its way to the scene that Atkins notes but fails to
see repeated—that of Jane meeting Rochester in the moors for the first time.
Atkins, who fails to see in the Stevenson version a strong or “faithful” rendition
of Jane, does commend the film for the following: “Jane causes the fall,
foreshadowing her impact upon him. . . but by making Jane the immediate
cause of the incident, Stevenson’s film emphasizes that it is Jane, her particular
qualities and character, which put an end to Rochester’s headlong flight through
life” (151). Stevenson’s Jane will often find herself in the exact same position in
the frame, and so will both create an echo of this scene and also reinforce our
sense of the heroine as both narrator and as an active—and compositionally
resistant1—part of the narrative and cinematic frame.
The measure to which Jane/Betsy participates in her own narrative can be
measured by the two movies’ most overt nod to the novel: in both Jane Eyre and
I Walked With a Zombie, the heroine tells her story, interprets it and assigns
meaning and value to its particular parts, through voiceover. Jane seemingly
goes farther by opening with pages from the book, and with Jane reading from
them, though it should be noted that what Jane reads cannot be found in the