It's always a bonus for me as both a cinephile and a bibliophile when I can talk about both at the same time. Unfortunately, not so much here as I have read only a few of Hemingway's short stories. I've never been really big into Hemingway and this documentary, while raising my interest some, has not done so much. I tend to be more into white modernist writers like Faulkner or Joyce. But I am sure I can muster up the strength for at least two Hemingway novels. Toni Morrison writes about Faulkner at length in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in-which she was trying to make an argument to read Hemingway with a very meta-critical eye, but it sort-of turned me off to the guy. This documentary confirmed to me that, indeed, Ernest Hemingway was a very terrible person who could write.
As far as this documentary itself, it is what you would expect from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Their biographic documentaries all seem to follow the same 3-part pattern that they have perfected over the years. I have observed that there is sightly more archival non-Ken Burns interview footage used here than you usually see in a Ken Burns doc, but if you can use it, use it. I probably won't watch this doc again for a long time simply because the subject has no interest to me, but it is what I like in a Ken Burns doc style-wise.
No comments:
Post a Comment