Can you decrypt a colossal figure like Ernest Hemingway? The most famous American writer, read and admired all over the world from Mark Twain has had such a powerful influence on literature and the cultural imaginary that today on the task of unraveling the life and work of him might seem too tareful. Touch the myth, for what?
That is precisely what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick were proposed, two prestigious documentalists who have been working together for two decades, authors of Canon The Vietnam War (18-hour) and other classics such as Baseball or The War, on the Role of the United States in World War II. Now this miniseries of the PBS, North American public television, which was released last April - in Spain made a first pass in July the Docdoc Festival in the thermal of Málaga- surrounded by expectation for the number of photographs and unpublished documents what includes. Burns and Novick had privileged access to the personal files that Mary Hemingway, the widow of the writer, bequeathed to the Boston John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
The documentary has a spectacular narrator squad -JEFF Daniels lends his voice to Hemingway and Meryl Streep and Patricia Clarkson are responsible for the voice in Off- and has the opinions of a handful of writers who admire without falling into the blind idolatry Like Tobias Wolff, Edna O'Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa or Mary Karr. The miniseries lasts six hours scattered in three chapters and the truth is that it does not have a minute left over: Each phrase, photography and testimony serve to underpin a sober and rigorous account whose task is to demystify the author of Paris was a party and That, however, it encumbre it even more. Like his literature, in Hemingway he explores the beautiful and the ugly, how nice and cruel, the brave and the petty.
The Miniseries Humanize the writer who committed suicide in 1961 after years of depression and alcoholism. Combat addict, he suffered repeated brain shocks from which he ever recovered and most of him dragged heavy headaches and concentration problems. Hemingway was in the two world wars: in the first, very young, in an ambulance of the Red Cross (nobody had prepared him to see the body of a woman without a head when he was barely two weeks destined in Italy) and in the second, with 44 years, jumping on the Geneva Convention and killing Nazis as a more, euphoric soldier at times. He was in Omaha day D (he could not step on the beach, something he did his by then wife, the reporter Marta Gellhorn), was received with champagne in the Norman villages released and with a row of 50 martinis at the Ritz of Paris before to enter into German territory, in the hard battle of the Hürtgen forest.
The documentary does not avoid the darkest part: its accesses of violence and ill-treatment suffered by their wives, alcoholism, their egocentric and authoritarian nature, misogyny and racism who beat in some of their texts or their inclination for the Androgyan. The world saw it as an example of masculinity, but all the life of him was "secretly intrigued by the blurred lines between the masculine and the feminine." "He was a very good father," says Patrick Hemingway, who reminds him as an inaccessible figure in the mornings, when he wrote, but delivered to the games in the afternoons during the eight idyllic years who lived in Key West, in Florida, Before things get complicated.
Hemingway renewed American literature, changed the way the characters spoke in a story, expanded the limits of what a writer could explore and, in general, he had such an intense life that it costs to understand why he began to lie about himself When it was already famous. In 1929, when goodbye to the weapons was a bestseller around the world, they began to circulate "colorful stories" about his figure, many of them told by himself: that if he had been about to become a professional boxer, which If he had fought with the Italian army in the First World War, that hunger almost finished with him in Paris while learning to write ... Everything lie.
"It was mitified to himself," says Edna O'Brien. "Why does he mean people? To attract people and also to keep them at a distance. To feel insufficient, but boast of being too much." The big mistake of him, the big mistake of all the creators of myths, was to think that he would be able to dominate him. But the myth, as it happens, acquired his own life and as the writer Michael Katakis points out, "became very tired to be Ernest Hemingway. And when I was in public, I was in a showcase and people expected Hemingway to be Hemingway." For Wolff, "every public person creates an avatar of himself, a holography of himself to publicly present and keep him private. The problem is that your avatar consumes you."
After the double air accident that almost ended with his life in Africa (Hemingway came to read his own obituary), it was not the same again. The sequels caused hallucinations, paranoia, delusions and depression. He became someone scared, irritable, impatient and tyrannical, so much that his son Patrick abandoned home. He was recovering in Villa Vigía, Cuba, when a reporter called him to tell him that he had won "that Swedish thing", the Nobel.
The worsening of your health affected your writing. When asked for a few words to welcome you as a new president to Kennedy, he took four weeks to write two sentences. Sad, frustrated, tired and overwhelm, the shot of grace was the frustrated invasion of Cuba of 1961 by the CIA, which became impossible the return to which he considered the true home of him. He had already tried to commit suicide several times when he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic. He ended his life on July 2, 1961. He was 61 years old and as O'Brien points out, that day he became "immortal".
Date Of Update: 06 January 2022, 08:56
