Text / Wang Laifu In the middle of the
night, I woke up from a dream with dry tongue and dry mouth. After getting up and drinking water, I couldn't sleep. So, I turned on my laptop and pulled out a disc from the DVD I bought online a few days ago. In this way, the whole body was tightly nested in the quilt, and time passed by in the darkness.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Adapted from the original Hemingway short story, the novel has a strong "stream of consciousness" color, past and reality, fantasy and reality, and a large number of psychological descriptions, which is actually the writer's memory of his past love.
The film, starring Parker, retains many of the unique psychological monologues in the original book, and makes the ending completely different from the original. At the end of the novel, author Harry died after attaining spiritual ascension under Mount Kilimanjaro, but the film brings him back to life with the help of his wife. This is also where Hemingway was very angry and dissatisfied after seeing the film, but the audience seemed to be more satisfied with the hopeful ending of the film.
This is probably the basic dividing line between novel readers and movie audiences.
"Kilimanjaro is a mountain with an altitude of 19,710 feet and is covered with snow all year round. It is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The western peak is called "Oaqi-Oai" of the Masai people, that is, the temple of God. Near the western peak, there is the body of a leopard that has been dried and frozen. No one has explained what the leopard is looking for in such a cold place."
This is the most famous and classic of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" a paragraph. The film also begins with this sentence, because it contains the deep moral of both the novel and the film: death.
Hemingway was a pessimist, and "death" was the most common theme in his work. In the novel "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", everything Harry sees in his eyes symbolizes "death": big birds, hyenas, big bare trees, even the night. In the movie, in the dim light, the sickly monologue of a weak man also shows a strong breath of death.
Like the novel, the movie is also a retrospective of the past, but in a certain sense, the "Harry" in the movie is equivalent to Hemingway, and it is a retrospective of Hemingway's career in literary circles, love and ideals.
The 19,710-foot Kilimanjaro stands quietly in the land of Africa, and the mysterious and vast Africa has become an ideal place for Harry/Hemingway's spiritual creation. Whether in the face of love or death, the spiritual essence contained in novels and movies is handed down in the same vein, but the expression is different, or in other words, the carrier is different. One is expressed in words, while the other is in images.
Ling Ling sent a text message to ask me what I was doing. I said listening to music, Kilimanjaro. "The melody is kind of poignant," I said. The poignant melody touched my soul, and I seemed to see the ancient magic and beauty of Kilimanjaro, the vastness and desolation of the African land, and the insignificance and helplessness of human beings in the face of the vast sky.
Life passes so quietly in time.
2008-04-03
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