Werner Herzog Reads From Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

in Books, Film, Radio | April 25th, 2012

Rough­ly since the 2005 release of his wide­ly seen doc­u­men­tary Griz­zly Man, Wern­er Her­zog has come into great demand. He does so not just as a film­mak­er (though he has dozens and dozens of movies of many kinds to his name), or as a writer (though sev­er­al vol­umes of his diaries and one long-form inter­view have appeared as books). Many of Her­zog’s newest fans, lured into the fold by the dis­tinc­tive voiceover nar­ra­tion he records for his doc­u­men­taries, sim­ply want to hear him talk. Hav­ing grown up in Bavaria, honed his craft in Ger­man-lan­guage projects through the sev­en­ties, and more recent­ly put down roots in Los Ange­les, Her­zog com­mu­ni­cates in a man­ner some­how more basic and more intel­lec­tu­al, more and less artic­u­late, than any oth­er pub­lic per­son­al­i­ty alive. In one char­ac­ter­is­tic line from Griz­zly Man, he com­pares his view of nature to his hap­less sub­ject, the late bear enthu­si­ast Tim­o­thy Tread­well: “What haunts me is that, in all the faces of all the bears that Tread­well ever filmed, I dis­cov­er no kin­ship, no under­stand­ing, no mer­cy. I see only the over­whelm­ing indif­fer­ence of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored inter­est in food.”

If you’ve nev­er seen the movie, imag­ine those sen­tences spo­ken with a Teu­ton­i­cal­ly inflect­ed delib­er­ate­ness and the non-native Eng­lish speak­er’s slight hes­i­tan­cy about word choice. Then imag­ine it ulti­mate­ly arriv­ing at the kind of grasp of and rev­er­ence for the mean­ing of those words you tend to have to spend a lot of time star­ing into the abyss to achieve. Giv­en his inter­est in the affect­less sav­agery of the world around us, it comes as no sur­prise that Her­zog counts him­self as a fan of the nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy. Pulled from an episode of NPR’s Sci­ence Fri­day, the above clip fea­tures Her­zog read­ing, and thrilling to, a pas­sage from McCarthy’s 1992 nov­el, All the Pret­ty Hors­es. “It can­not get any bet­ter,” he adds, “and for decades we have not had this lan­guage in Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture.” Crim­i­nal­ly, he did­n’t direct the adap­ta­tion of All the Pret­ty Hors­es, nor has he direct­ed any oth­er. But until the inevitable day that he does, per­haps he could just record McCarthy’s audio­books?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Reads “Go the F**k to Sleep” in NYC (NSFW)

An Evening With Wern­er Her­zog

Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture: An Open Yale Course

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Mystery of Picasso: Landmark Film of a Legendary Artist at Work, by Henri-Georges Clouzot

in Art, Film | April 24th, 2012

Pablo Picas­so’s art emerges in front of our eyes in this remark­able 1956 film by the French mas­ter of sus­pense, Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot.

The Mys­tery of Picas­so (in French Le Mys­tère Picas­so) is a unique col­lab­o­ra­tion between film­mak­er and painter. Pauline Kael called it “One of the most excit­ing and joy­ful movies ever made.” The film is not so much a doc­u­men­tary as a care­ful­ly con­trived cin­e­mat­ic depic­tion of Picas­so’s cre­ative process. While paint­ing is gen­er­al­ly expe­ri­enced as a fixed art form, in The Mys­tery of Picas­so we watch as it evolves over time.

In the first half of the 75-minute film, Picas­so uses col­or pens to make play­ful doo­dles on translu­cent screens. These sequences bear some resem­blance to a 1950 film by Bel­gian film­mak­er Paul Hae­saerts called Vis­ite à Picas­so (A vis­it with Picas­so), which fea­tures Picas­so paint­ing on glass. As Clouzot’s film pro­gress­es, the art­works become more refined. Picas­so switch­es from ink pens to oil brush­es and paper col­lage. A work that took five hours to cre­ate unfolds in a ten-minute time-lapse. At the 54-minute mark Picas­so says “Give me a large can­vas,” and the film switch­es to Cin­e­maS­cope.

Indeed, in The Mys­tery of Picas­so, the film itself is the artist’s can­vas. Clouzot draws atten­tion to this fact through a series of con­trivances. At one point he high­lights the tem­po­ral con­straints of the medi­um by cre­at­ing an ele­ment of sus­pense. He asks  cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Claude Renoir (grand­son of the Impres­sion­ist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir) how much film is left, and then we watch as the film counter ticks away the time while the 76-year-old painter races to fin­ish a paint­ing. When the The Mys­tery of Picas­so ends, the artist “signs” the film by paint­ing his sig­na­ture on a can­vas large enough to fill the screen. As Clouzot lat­er wrote, “It is some­one else’s film, that of my friend Pablo Picas­so.”

The Mys­tery of Picas­so (now added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online Movies) per­formed poor­ly at the box office but won the Spe­cial Jury Prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. In 1984 the French gov­ern­ment declared it a nation­al trea­sure. Picas­so’s paint­ings from the pro­duc­tion were report­ed­ly destroyed after­ward. They exist only in the film.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Alain de Botton’s Quest for The Perfect Home and Architectural Happiness

in Architecture, Television | April 24th, 2012

In the first episode of The Per­fect Home, embed­ded above, philo­soph­i­cal jour­nal­ist and broad­cast­er Alain de Bot­ton con­tends that we don’t live in the mod­ern world. Rather, we do live in the mod­ern world in that we exist in it, but we don’t live in the mod­ern world in that few of us choose to make our homes there. As de Bot­ton sees it, the res­i­dents of the devel­oped world have, despite keep­ing up with the lat­est cars, clothes, and gad­getry, cho­sen to hole up in shells of aes­thet­ic nos­tal­gia: our mock Tudors, our restored cot­tages, our Greek Revivals. Hav­ing writ­ten books and pre­sent­ed tele­vi­sion shows on philo­soph­i­cal sub­jects — you may remem­ber Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness — he even brings in Niet­zsche to diag­nose this archi­tec­tur­al dis­or­der as an abject denial of real­i­ty. Accord­ing to old Friedrich, he who builds him­self into a fake real­i­ty ulti­mate­ly pays a much greater price than what endur­ing real real­i­ty would have cost. With that omi­nous bit of wis­dom in mind, de Bot­ton trav­els the world in search of build­ings designed with mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties and mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy that nev­er­the­less make us hap­py with­out enabling self-delu­sion.

The search takes de Bot­ton all over the world, from Vic­to­ri­an theme-park­ish Eng­lish sub­ur­ban devel­op­ments to a Japan­ese Dutch vil­lage to Egypt­ian and Scan­di­na­vian embassies in Berlin to a heli­copter soar­ing above Lon­don with the archi­tect Nor­man Fos­ter to the con­crete-mod­ernist Zurich apart­ment of his own child­hood. Just as Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness grew from the same intel­lec­tu­al soil as de Bot­ton’s book The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy, so grows The Per­fect Home from The Archi­tec­ture of Hap­pi­ness. That book’s explo­rations pro­ceed­ed from the idea that we desire in our archi­tec­ture what­ev­er we feel we lack in our char­ac­ter: the undis­ci­plined grav­i­tate toward stark­ness and sim­plic­i­ty, per­haps, while the straight-laced build with more whim­sy. What does this say about the lady vis­it­ed in this first episode who devotes her every domes­tic impulse to con­struct­ing a “cozy” set­ting, burst­ing in every direc­tion with ted­dy bears? Though de Bot­ton demures from that ques­tion, he oth­er­wise goes to great lengths to find an escape from tire­some “pas­tiche” archi­tec­ture and a way our build­ings can embrace our times — a way, that is, we can final­ly live in the present.

 

Relat­ed con­tent:

Socrates on TV, Cour­tesy of Alain de Bot­ton (2000)

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­terAni­mat­ed
Gehry’s Vision For Archi­tec­ture

Ice Cube & Charles Eames Rev­el in L.A. Archi­tec­ture

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Animated Plays by William Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello and Other Great Tales Brought to Life

in Animation, K-12, Literature | April 24th, 2012


Yes­ter­day we gave you a fine BBC adap­ta­tion of Ham­let star­ring David Ten­nant (Doc­tor Who), not real­iz­ing that it hap­pened to be Shake­speare’s death­day — the day when the Bard died in 1616. The pass­ing of that anniver­sary calls for some­thing a lit­tle spe­cial. So, here we have it: The Ani­mat­ed Shake­speare.

Aired between 1992 and 1994 on the BBC and HBO, The Ani­mat­ed Shake­speare brings to life 12 famous Shake­speare plays. Leon Garfield, a well-known British chil­dren’s author, wrote the scripts, main­ly using Shake­spear­i­an lan­guage. And some tal­ent­ed Russ­ian artists did the ani­ma­tion. Above, we give you the ani­mat­ed Mac­beth.

Below you will find com­pan­ion ver­sions of Julius Cae­sar and Romeo & Juli­et, plus links to nine oth­er plays. The full set can be pur­chased on DVD in high­er res­o­lu­tion right here.

Oth­er Plays:

  • Julius Cae­sar — Watch
  • A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream — Watch
  • Ham­let - Watch
  • King Richard III - Watch
  • Oth­el­lo — Watch
  • The Tem­pest - Watch

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Space Exploration is Good for Our Culture (and More Good Links From Around the Web)

in Video - Science | April 23rd, 2012

Pre­sent­ing the keynote speech at the 28th Nation­al Space Sym­po­sium, the new pub­lic face of astro­physics, Neil deGrasse Tyson, con­tin­ued mak­ing his case for fund­ing NASA and fund­ing it well. Here he tried out a new argu­ment. NASA is not just good for sci­en­tif­ic progress. It’s good for our cre­ativ­i­ty, imag­i­na­tion and col­lec­tive cul­ture. His argu­ment begins at the 14:45 mark, which is where we start the video.…

Now dis­cov­er more Cul­ture from Around the Web (which all orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our Twit­ter Stream): 

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Har­vard Biol­o­gist E.O. Wil­son Explains the Evo­lu­tion of Cul­ture

Extend­ed Trail­er for David Cro­nen­berg’s Adap­ta­tion of Don DeLil­lo’s Cos­mopo­lis Now on the Web

Lis­ten Online: Norah Jones’ New Album ‘Lit­tle Bro­ken Hearts’

Allen Gins­berg Reads “What would you do if you lost it?,” 1973

Ray­mond Chan­dler on the Split Infini­tive

To Infin­i­ty and Beyond: BBC Untan­gles the Most Expo­nen­tial Mys­tery

Alan Tur­ing’s WWII papers on Code Break­ing Released by British Gov­ern­ment

Wish You Could be Jane Eyre? Com­pa­ny Will Reprint Clas­sic Nov­els Star­ring You & Your Friends

Par­ents Were Pushy Too in Ancient Rome, Accord­ing to Mary Beard, Pro­fes­sor of Clas­sics, Cam­bridge U

Jen­nifer Egan and Neil Gaiman Vis­it Google and Talk Lit­er­a­ture.

Kurt Von­negut Reads the Begin­ning of “Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons”

The Craft of Verse: The Nor­ton Lec­tures, 1967–68 by Jorge Luis Borges. Audio

Spike Lee’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers

A Trove of Rare James Joyce’s Unpub­lished Man­u­scripts (inc Ulysses & Finnegans Wake) as PDFs

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Acclaimed BBC Production of Hamlet, Starring David Tennant (Doctor Who) and Patrick Stewart (Star Trek)

in Film, Theatre | April 23rd, 2012

In 2008 the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny drew rave reviews for its pro­duc­tion of William Shake­speare’s Ham­let, which fea­tured the Scot­tish actor David Ten­nant, star of the hit BBC sci­ence fic­tion show Doc­tor Who, as the trag­i­cal­ly inde­ci­sive Prince of Den­mark.

“Gre­go­ry Doran’s pro­duc­tion is one of the most rich­ly tex­tured, best-act­ed ver­sions of the play we have seen in years,” wrote Michael Billing­ton in The Guardian. “And Ten­nant, as any­one famil­iar with his ear­li­er work with the RSC would expect, has no dif­fi­cul­ty in mak­ing the tran­si­tion from the BBC’s Time Lord to a man who could be bound­ed in a nut­shell and count him­self a king of infi­nite space. He is a fine Ham­let whose virtues, and occa­sion­al vices, are insep­a­ra­ble from the pro­duc­tion itself.”

The cast includ­ed Mari­ah Gale as Ophe­lia, Peter de Jer­sey as Hor­a­tio, Oliv­er Ford Davies as Polo­nius, Pen­ny Down­ie as Gertrude, and Patrick Stew­art of Star Trek fame in what Charles Spencer of The Tele­graph called “the strongest, scari­est per­for­mance as Claudius I have seen. A mod­ern tyrant in a sur­veil­lance state full of spies, inform­ers and two-way mir­rors in Doran’s thriller-like pro­duc­tion, he presents a façade of smil­ing, bespec­ta­cled genial­i­ty.” Stew­art also played the Ghost of Ham­let’s father.

“This is a Ham­let of quick­sil­ver intel­li­gence, mimet­ic vigour and wild humour,” wrote Billing­ton: “one of the fun­ni­est I’ve ever seen.” Accord­ing to Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Stan­dard, Ten­nant brought new insights into his char­ac­ter’s unpre­dictable behav­ior: “His humor­ous Ham­let emerges as an undi­ag­nosed man­ic depres­sive, whose mood swings ren­der him tem­pera­men­tal­ly inca­pable of ful­fill­ing a revenge sce­nario.”

For those of us unable to see the stage pro­duc­tion, we’re for­tu­nate that Doran held the orig­i­nal cast togeth­er long enough to make a film ver­sion, first broad­cast on BBC Two in 2009. You can watch the com­plete three-hour movie online over at PBS. A scene where Ten­nant per­forms Ham­let’s Solil­o­quy can be viewed above. And for more of Ham­let and Shake­speare, you can access text and audio ver­sions of the great writer’s com­plete works in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions.

The BBC pro­duc­tion of Ham­let has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Bruce Springsteen Exhibition Held in Philadelphia; It’s Now Official, The Boss is an American Icon

in Music | April 23rd, 2012

It’s offi­cial. Bruce Spring­steen has gone from musi­cian to Amer­i­can icon, join­ing the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Want some proof of his tran­scen­dence? Just look to Philadel­phia where The Nation­al Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter is hold­ing the first major exhi­bi­tion about the Amer­i­can song­writer. From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Spring­steen takes a com­pre­hen­sive look at Spring­steen’s body of musi­cal work with the help of 15o arti­facts. Ask why a Spring­steen exhib­it deserves to be held in The Nation­al Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter, and its CEO/President David Eis­ner will tell you that the “Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter is about the val­ues [e.g. free­dom & equal­i­ty] and dreams on which Amer­i­ca was based, and Spring­steen’s music is all about achiev­ing the Amer­i­can Dream.” What’s more, Spring­steen’s music touch­es on deeply Amer­i­can polit­i­cal issues, includ­ing the First Amend­ment.

The exhi­bi­tion runs through Sep­tem­ber 3rd (tick­ets avail­able here), and every Fri­day the Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter plans to pub­lish on its blog arti­cles inspired by Bruce Spring­steen and the First Amend­ment.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

McLuhan Said “The Medium Is The Message”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

in Media, Radio | April 23rd, 2012

For my mon­ey, “I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly agree with every­thing I say” tops the list of Mar­shall McLuhan-isms, fol­lowed close­ly and at times sur­passed by “You don’t like those ideas? I got oth­ers.” Many pre­fer the immor­tal “You know noth­ing of my work!”, the line McLuhan deliv­ers dur­ing his brief appear­ance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. In 1977, the same year Allen’s pro­tag­o­nist would sum­mon him to defeat that pon­tif­i­cat­ing aca­d­e­m­ic, McLuhan flew to Syd­ney to deliv­er a lec­ture. Then, for the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion’s Radio Nation­al, he record­ed a pro­gram answer­ing ques­tions from stu­dents, nuns, and oth­ers about his views on media. (Find Part 1 above, and Parts 2 and 3 here and here.) McLuhan hap­pened to view media in a way nobody else did at the time, and the fields of media stud­ies and media the­o­ry would go on to devel­op in large part from his work. This Joyce-lov­ing, God-fear­ing, six­teenth-cen­tu­ry-pam­phlet-study­ing pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture nev­er­the­less deployed mod­ern sound bites with as much indus­try as he scru­ti­nized them. Hence the endurance, over thir­ty years after his death and over forty years past the peak of his pop­u­lar­i­ty, of “The medi­um is the mes­sage,” a phrase that, seem­ing­ly since the moment McLuhan first uttered it, has stood as a light­ning rod to his detrac­tors.

Very often, some­one will insist that, no, the con­tent of a mes­sage mat­ters too, mak­ing the pro­nounce­ment with the atti­tude of hav­ing seen through the emper­or’s clothes. A dis­em­bod­ied voice makes a sim­i­lar crit­i­cism of McLuhan’s crit­ics in The Medi­um is the Mas­sage, the 1968 album that mir­rors both the con­tent and the dense, exper­i­men­tal visu­al col­lage form of McLuhan and graph­ic design­er Quentin Fiore’s epony­mous book. Lis­ten to the album (side A, side B) at UBUwe­b’s Mar­shall McLuhan sound archive and get an aur­al glimpse into the mind that, upon receiv­ing a proof of his book back from the print­er’s with the title mis­spelled, sud­den­ly real­ized that only the word Mas­sage, with con­no­ta­tions of the mass media in whose age he lived, expressed the full extent of his mean­ing. But he did believe that the very exis­tence of the tele­phone or tele­vi­sion, and the effects of their exis­tence on human­i­ty as a whole, made for an infi­nite­ly rich­er object of study than what­ev­er con­tent humans hap­pened to send across them. Through the pieces of media in this post, you can see and hear McLuhan expand upon this idea in his delib­er­ate, ora­tor­i­cal­ly metaphor­i­cal, some­times mad­den­ing­ly oblique man­ner. He works through the impli­ca­tions of, exten­sions of, and pos­si­ble con­tra­dic­tions to this odd­ly robust notion, which some, in our hyper­com­mu­nica­tive, end­less­ly medi­at­ed inter­net age, would in hind­sight call prophe­cy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing

Mar­shall McLuhan: The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

An Easy, Scientifically-Proven Way to Make Yourself Smarter. Go for a Good Walk or Swim Every Day

in Life, Science, Video - Science | April 21st, 2012

This week, The New York Times gave us some good news. Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Gretchen Reynolds, a decade of research by neu­ro­sci­en­tists and phys­i­ol­o­gists shows fair­ly con­vinc­ing­ly that exer­cise can make you smarter. She writes:

Using sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nolo­gies to exam­ine the work­ings of indi­vid­ual neu­rons — and the make­up of brain mat­ter itself — sci­en­tists in just the past few months have dis­cov­ered that exer­cise appears to build a brain that resists phys­i­cal shrink­age and enhance cog­ni­tive flex­i­bil­i­ty. Exer­cise, the lat­est neu­ro­science sug­gests, does more to bol­ster think­ing than think­ing does.

There’s appar­ent­ly a lot to be gained from a sim­ple dai­ly walk (assum­ing it checks out with your doc­tor). And, as the video below shows, the gains goes beyond cog­ni­tion itself:

The pho­to above was pro­vid­ed cour­tesy of Big­Stock­Pho­to

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Celestial Lights: Spectacular Auroras Move Across the Scandinavian Skies

in Astronomy, Film, Photography | April 20th, 2012

Nor­we­gian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ole C. Salomon­sen has cre­at­ed a stun­ning time-lapse film of the auro­ra bore­alis over rugged Nordic land­scapes.

Salomon­sen lives in the city of Trom­sø, 200 miles north of the Arc­tic Cir­cle, where the sun does­n’t rise above the hori­zon between Novem­ber and Jan­u­ary. Trom­sø is con­sid­ered one of the best (inhab­it­ed) places on Earth to see North­ern Lights. This past win­ter the light show was par­tic­u­lar­ly intense, as the sun moved clos­er to the peak (expect­ed in ear­ly 2013) of its 11-year cycle of elec­tro­mag­net­ic activ­i­ty.

The pho­tog­ra­ph­er went to extra­or­di­nary lengths to cap­ture these images, trav­el­ing across north­ern Nor­way, Swe­den and Fin­land over a half-year peri­od begin­ning in Sep­tem­ber and end­ing ear­li­er this month, when the day­light hours grew too long. “I have dri­ven thou­sands of km between loca­tions up here in the arc­tic this sea­son,” Salomon­sen writes on his Vimeo page. “I was run­ning between 2–3 cam­eras like a mad­man.” He esti­mates he shot about 150,000 expo­sures to get the 6,000 or so frames used in the four-and-a-half-minute video above. He writes:

The video is a merge of two parts; the first part con­tains some more wild and aggres­sive auro­ras, as well as a few milky way sequences, hence either auro­ras are mov­ing fast because they are, or they are fast due to motion of the milky way/stars. Still, some of the strait up shots are very close to real-time speed, although auro­ras most­ly are slow­er, she can also be FAST! The sec­ond part has some more slow and majes­tic auro­ras, where I have focused more on com­po­si­tion and fore­ground.

The music is by Nor­we­gian com­pos­er Kai-Anders Ryan. To learn about the tech­ni­cal aspects of Celes­tial Lights, and to see the film Salomon­sen made dur­ing last year’s auro­ra sea­son, vis­it his Vimeo page. And to see his beau­ti­ful still images, vis­it Salomon­sen on Face­book and Flikr.

via Uni­verse Today

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Clive Owen & Nicole Kidman Star in HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn: Two Writers, A Marriage and a Civil War

in Books, Film, History | April 20th, 2012

On the 28th of next month, HBO will air Hem­ing­way & Gell­horn, a fea­ture-length dra­ma based on the tit­u­lar writ­ers’ five-year mar­riage. Direct­ed by well-known adapter of lit­er­a­ture and his­to­ry Philip Kauf­man — he of The Right Stuff, Hen­ry & June, and Quills — the film roots itself in the peri­od of 1936 to 1945, begin­ning with the cou­ple’s first encounter in Flori­da and fol­low­ing them into the Span­ish Civ­il War, which pro­vid­ed both of them with vivid mate­r­i­al indeed. Amer­i­cans and Euro­peans — and no doubt much of the rest of the read­ing world — need no intro­duc­tion to Ernest Hem­ing­way, author of such oft-assigned nov­els as The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Ris­es, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the quin­tes­sen­tial high-liv­ing, sav­age­ly artis­tic, and aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly respect­ed fig­ure movies love, he’s under­gone a great many cin­e­mat­ic res­ur­rec­tions this last decade and a half: Albert Finney played him in Hem­ing­way, The Hunter of Death; Vin­cent Walsh played him in Hem­ingway: That Sum­mer in Paris; Corey Stoll played him most vis­i­bly in Woody Allen’s Mid­night in Paris; and Antho­ny Hop­kins will play him in next year’s Hem­ing­way and Fuentes. Movie-star buffs must have all kinds of expec­ta­tions for “Papa” as embod­ied in the ever-ris­ing Clive Owen, but some­thing tells me they’ll have even more to say about Nicole Kid­man’s turn as Martha Gell­horn.

If you can’t imme­di­ate­ly place the name of Martha Gell­horn in the life of Ernest Hem­ing­way, it’s per­haps because she, her­self, helped ensure that. After she divorced him in 1945, Gell­horn specif­i­cal­ly request­ed that her inter­view­ers nev­er so much as bring up Hem­ing­way’s name. Though it counts as no fail­ure to fall under Hem­ing­way’s shad­ow in the pub­lic lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion — most writ­ers do, after all — Gell­horn carved out her own siz­able place in the his­to­ry of for­eign cor­re­spon­dence, report­ing on war not only from Spain but from Eng­land, Hong Kong, Viet­nam, Fin­land, Sin­ga­pore, Ger­many, Czecho­slo­va­kia, Bur­ma, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, and the Mid­dle East. Hem­ing­way & Gell­horn, whose trail­er you can watch above, seems like­ly to fill in plen­ty of bio­graph­i­cal details that many of Hem­ing­way’s read­ers, and even many of Gell­horn’s, don’t know. But you can’t yet watch it on the inter­net, or on DVD — or in any form at all, for that mat­ter — until after May 28th. Then, pre­sum­ably, you can see exact­ly how Martha Gell­horn inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Remem­ber­ing Ernest Hem­ing­way, Fifty Years After His Death

Ernest Hem­ing­way Reads “In Harry’s Bar in Venice”

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Ani­mat­ed Not Once, But Twice

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |


« Newer Entries | Older Entries »

  • Great Lectures

  • Sign up for Newsletter

  • About Us

    Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.


    Advertise With Us

  • Great Recordings

  • Book Lists By

  • Syllabi

  • Favorite Movies

  • Archives

  • Search

    • Quantcast