Hemingway 6x60, 3x120

“A new PBS documentary offers a fresh look at a great and tragic writer who disappeared into a self-created macho stereotype.” – Wall Street Journal

“Most surprisingly, the documentary shows a man who—far from being a relic of the past—is instead an avatar for the 21st century, with the narrative coalescing around themes near and dear to the millennial heart: gender inequity, mental health, and the thirst for fame.” – Bloomberg

“…Burns a déclaré que le film déconstruit l’image d’Hemingway comme un archétype “hyper-masculin”. “Nous avons été attirés à essayer d’atteindre un vrai Hemingway et je pense que le personnage de l’homme sauvage, de l’ivrogne, du gars du bar, du chasseur de gros gibier, du grand pêcheur en mer est en quelque sorte ce dont nous héritons, les bagages que nous transportons. Mais presque immédiatement, nous avons commencé à voir à quel point c’était maigre et fragile, pas seulement pour lui mais en fait.” – Crumpe

Hemingway, a new documentary film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, examines the visionary work and the turbulent life of Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest and most influential writers the world has ever produced. Interweaving his eventful biography — a life lived at the ultimately treacherous nexus of art, fame, and celebrity — with carefully selected excerpts from his iconic short stories, novels, and non-fiction, the series reveals the brilliant, ambitious, charismatic, and complicated man behind the myth, and the art he created. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, written by Geoffrey C. Ward and produced by Sarah Botstein, Novick and Burns.

Narrated by long-time collaborator Peter Coyote, the series features an all-star cast of actors bringing Hemingway (voiced by Jeff Daniels), his friends and family vividly to life. Through letters to and from his four wives—voiced by Meryl Streep, Keri Russell, Mary-Louise Parker and Patricia Clarkson—the film reveals Hemingway at his most romantic and his most vulnerable, grappling at times with insecurity, anxiety and existential loneliness.

The filmmakers were granted unusually open access to the treasure trove of Hemingway’s manuscripts, correspondence, scrapbooks and photographs housed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Interviews with renowned biographers and scholars, including Mary Dearborn and Marc Dudley, shed new light on the man and his work; and well-known writers around the world—including Edna O’Brien, Abraham Verghese, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mary Karr, Tim O’Brien, Akiko Manabe, Leonardo Padura and Tobias Wolff—deepen the film’s exploration of Hemingway’s oeuvre. It also includes moving commentary from Hemingway’s surviving son, Patrick, and from the late Senator John McCain, whose lifelong role model was not Hemingway, but Robert Jordan, the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Across the series, the filmmakers explore the painstaking process through which Hemingway created some of the most important works of fiction, including novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea; short stories “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Up in Michigan,” “Indian Camp” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro;” as well as the nonfiction works Death in the Afternoon and A Moveable Feast.