Jane Eyre: 1996 Movie Assessments
The novel Jane Eyre ends, not with a reference to the love of Jane and Rochester, but to Jane's cousin St. John River. Jane's distant cousin is a missionary who has exorcized his passion for a worthless woman from his heart and stripped himself clean of all worldly desires in the pursuit of his faith. He dies, a faithful man in a far-off godless land, filled with the knowledge that what he has done is right for his own personal soul and struggle. This last, novelistic reference to St. John, although not nearly as famous as the statement 'reader, I married him,' is just as important when analyzing the differences between the book and movie versions of Charlotte Bronte film. This last reference to St. John, and the intimate reference to the reader of the text stresses the two key elements of distinction between film and book -- the book's greater stress on religion than the later film and of the shift in perspective from the novelistic first to the cinematic third person, which brings the film's emphasis on romance to the tale's forefront, as opposed to Jane herself.
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Orson Welles to Visual Arts One of the most influential motion picture directors and producers of the 20th century was Orson Welles, whose well-known radio rendition of "War of the Worlds" in 1938 panicked an entire country long before September 11, 2001. Shortly after "War of the Worlds," Welles would go on to direct "Citizen Kane" in 1941, regarded by some film critics as the greatest motion picture ever made.
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