Skip to main content

Hemingway review – a gripping portrait of a literary legend

Renowned documentary-maker Ken Burns turns his attention to perhaps the most famous American writer in history, via cameos from the likes of Meryl Streep. What a treat

Those familiar with the Ken Burns style – memorably put to use to unpick such varied topics as the Vietnam war, jazz and baseball – will expect a certain standard from the renowned documentary-maker’s take on Ernest Hemingway (BBC Four). With his regular partner, Lynn Novick, Burns offers a meaty and impeccably researched look at perhaps the most famous American writer in literary history. Over six episodes, it examines the author’s life in chronological order, recruiting top-flight actors – Patricia Clarkson, Jeff Daniels and, later, Meryl Streep as his third wife, the foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn – to read his work and his letters, as well as letters sent to him by friends and family. It also circles the themes that came to define his work and the myths around the man that have led him to be considered, in more recent times, a controversial figure.

“He made himself the most celebrated American writer since Mark Twain,” says the narrator, just as the story begins. That “made himself” makes it plain that this is not a hagiography. This is as much about the creation of the Hemingway myth, by him and others around him, as it is the myth itself. Though as one contributor, the writer Michael Katakis, puts it, “the man is much more interesting than the myth”.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3qwOwWI
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more