THE BENEFICIAL influences of literature and film are based on the technical and educational values of literacy, writing, reading, dramatic acting, speech skills, and the visual language of film-making. When people from specific nations and societies apply or focus these creative and technical qualities on themselves, we are able to identify various aspects of their specific cultures in their creative works. But another broader, less diverse local culture exists, and is also reflected in novels, stories, poems, plays, films, music and dance, made by artists of these disciplines in perhaps all nations where citizens possess access and exposure (particularly through being literate, and the use of bookstores, libraries, and films) to additional achievements other than those of their own society, nation, or culture.

The pleasure of being literate, and of enjoying it by consuming literature and films creates a universal culture that is made up of all the nations whose literature and films we can get our hands on. To be interested only in the novels, short stories, plays, films, music ,etc, of one’s nation, region, race or culture, is to remain at an ABC level of knowledge and culture, though it makes no sense to know more about what other nations and cultures have produced while being ignorant of what your own has produced.

Indeed, it is essential to consume both one’s cultural products, and those of others, in order to see and realise what one culture offers and another does not; what one promotes and another does not. Bookstores, libraries, cinemas, and TV film programmes of the best quality help the public to recognise this. In countries where there are no good used or new bookstores, or classic and contemporary films of quality, consumers without acquired knowledge of literature and films are left to wander aimlessly without beneficial cultural direction.

When certain creative writers and film-makers achieve international success or fame, or in other words, when their works are exposed to others around the world and find acceptance, that is the result of readers and cinema-goers not restricting themselves to cultural products from their societies and nations alone. It is also usually the result of a creative style of literature and film-making which is broad and universal enough to find acceptance and even be influential among the literate of diverse nations who can recognize technical and educational values in a work of art.

Ernest Hemingway
For example, when we consider the 20th Century novels and short stories of Ernest Hemingway, one of the most profound, original, and humane creative writers the world has ever known, and an American born in Chicago, we notice that ten out of the eleven novels he wrote do not take place in the USA, but in Spain, Italy, France, Africa, and Cuba.

Hemingway, a winner of the Noble Prize for Literature, was self-taught like many of the 20th Century’s greatest writers, such as William Faulkner, Georges Simenon, Claude Simon, John O’Hara, and others, but by age twenty, became a globe-trotting journalist for the Toronto Star daily, in Canada, where he also lived.

One of the first noticeable aspects of Hemingway’s foreign-based novels and stories, unlike scores of other American writers, is that the majority of their characters are not identified as Americans abroad, and have no role as representatives of an American cultural identity or nationality abroad. What interests Hemingway is showing and preserving the mostly egalitarian vitality and fecundity of nature, also the lessons of self-reliance and bravery in facing such a basic world, and the priority of being a human individual who feels, loves, lives, and responds to fellow humans without basing one’s attitudes and responses on a priority of race, religion, ideology, nationality, etc.

Hemingway’s contribution as a great writer to the pursuit of better human relations is rooted in his creative motto that “as a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” One of the most famous examples of such Hemingway literature is the brilliant short novella, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’. 

Here is an amazing piece of visual writing which alternates between an outdoor scene in the African wilderness, and the inner thoughts of an injured man dying of blood poisoning in his leg, the result of an unattended infected scratch on his knee during a dangerous African safari.

The man and his wife are white Americans, but there is only one reference to her origin from Florida, and the couple is totally referred to as ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’ in the text. We can assume that these two characters are based on Hemingway the writer and adventurer, and one of his past wives, but what the story emphasises brilliantly is the basic, vital and completely commonplace virtues and pleasures of enjoying unspoiled natural environments, good cooking, good reading, making love, travelling, and hunting for one’s food.

However, the man’s inner thoughts reveal him remembering past experiences, and arguing with himself, exposing his guilt and anger over living too carefree off his rich wife’s money, blaming her for preventing him from writing the stories he would never write now that he was dying of gangrene in the wilderness, when, in fact, he knows her money actually helped him, made him happy and secure to write, and that it is his own fault for neglecting his discipline as a writer, not the fault of his loving wife.

In the 1950s, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ was made into a colour film starring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, and Ava Gardner. It was an atrocious film, in all aspects: Directing, screenplay writing, and acting. This resulted because Hemingway’s terse, bare, deceptively simple style was ignored and tampered with, dressed up and embellished to commercially suit a stereotypical sentimental movie audience. But the greatness of Hemingway’s writing style does not allow successful tampering. In fact, Hemingway never liked any of the films made from his books and stories, except perhaps the 1940s Film Noir adapted short story masterpiece, ‘The Killers’, directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster in his film debut, and ‘The Old Man And The Sea’, starring Spencer Tracy.

Two other Hemingway novels made worthy films, the second Hollywood version of ‘A Farewell To Arms’, starring Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson, and the much too long ‘The Sun Also Rises’, starring Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner.

Different style
By comparison with Hemingway’s terse and bare but melodious cosmopolitan literary style, Britain’s John Braine, a brilliant self-taught ex-librarian, showed a completely different literary style in his first novel, ‘Room at the Top’, published to instant acclaim in 1957, then becoming an outstanding British film in 1958. Braine’s novel is about an educated working-class English youth who leaves his poor English working-class town and comes to a bigger and more prosperous local town where he works for a leading company.

Filled with ambition and simmering resentment for his humble background, he seduces his boss’s spoilt attractive daughter, and becomes ruthless and conniving on his way up the social ladder. The novel is written in a detailed, colourful, self-critical and self-analytical first-person style that no emerging creative writer should ignore reading. The British civic environment, neighbourhoods, customs, attitudes of various people, young and old, rich and poor, the delightful old couple who rent the ‘hero’ a room in their comfortable house, etc, can all be exchanged for ANY modernising environment in developing countries, and the novel will still be of British origin, yet not British.

No
t surprisingly, it became a huge success as a film internationally because of this interchangeable social quality, which is due to British film director, Jack Clayton’s and British actor, Laurence Harvey’s faithful rendering of Braine’s superb writing. Both the novel and film, ‘Room At The Top’, though totally rooted in a British environment, represent a definition of culture that is broader than the confines of local British nationality; this is achieved because of the specific merit of this novel and film as artistic works which evoke a wider and more meaningful human experience than is usually presented in a specific national context.