Movies Make for Two Vastly Different Emily Dickinsons

Juan Barquin reviews the newest movie-ode to Emily Dickinson, Wild Nights With Emily (aside: it's hilarious and poignant!), at Hyperallergic. The comparative question: "If both A Quiet Passion and Wild Nights with Emily are telling the same story, occasionally even depicting aspects of Dickinson’s personality in a similar manner, why are they so different?" More:

Olnek and Davies are vastly different filmmakers. Olnek is a proud queer woman whose debut feature was titled Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, while Davies is a queer man who once told an interviewer: “I have hated being gay, and I’ve been celibate for most of my life.” Olnek’s portrait of Emily Dickinson feels modern in every way. It frequently breaks the boundary between story and storyteller, directly critiques those who erase and manipulate history, and celebrates a romance between two women openly, from their first kiss to their last touch.

But Davies’ style of haunting, deeply personal cinema, grounded in his own suffering more than anything else, is no less queer; it’s just that his queerness manifests in a far different form than Olnek’s. While he can be critiqued for entirely ignoring Emily and Susan’s letters, A Quiet Passion is impacting in its own way. As Michael Koresky notes in his book on Terence Davies (an excerpt of which is featured here), “The beauty that emerges from such pain reveals a method of re-appropriating the past that we might call ‘queer’ in the way it reconstitutes shards of Davies’s cultural and familial detritus into new forms.”

Read on here. Also: ahem (a hymn).