Hemingway A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

 Have you been seeing on PBS the advance trailers for the new Ken Burns film on Hemingway? I’m getting excited.

Now, to be honest, I haven’t always been a Hemingway fan. In college I had a knee-jerk reaction to the macho, big-game hunter misogynist image. I say image, because I had a change of heart after reading A Moveable Feast—after which I turned to his earlier works, the novels etc. It is the style, not the man, I most admire.

I’ve tried to adopt his use of the declarative sentence. In flash there is a need to pare down words into a paragraph essence. A squirt or a dab will hopefully evoke, jusgt enough to bring the reader into the equation. I still tend to overwrite, throw the whole thesaurus at an idea.

Hemingway was a complicated man and I’m interested in what Burns and Novik have uncovered in their documentary. One of the trailers hinted at one of the obstacles I had with the man/writer: his focus on gender and how it might not be as boxed in as critics once thought. From the website, https://kenburns.com/films/hemingway/:

“The film penetrates the mythology surrounding Hemingway – cultivated by his larger than life exploits, public bravado, and occasional tall-tale – to reveal a deeply troubled and ultimately tragic figure. His story is told with the help of interviews with literary scholars, celebrated writers including Edna O’Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa, Abraham Verghese, and Tobias Wolff, and Hemingway’s son, Patrick. Six years in the making, HEMINGWAY is a treasure trove of rarely seen photographs and archival footage.”

I signed up for a free webinar, Hemingway, Gender and Identity, Thursday March 11 from The Center for Fiction

https://centerforfiction.org/event/hemingway-gender-and-identity/

 

Hemingway's writing studio, Key West, taken by author in 2015, bike trip from Jacksonville to Key West