The Impact of Ernest Hemingway on the Global Fame of the Sanfermines

The main person responsible for the fact that the Sanfermines are known everywhere and that the images of their confinements are seen from India to Polynesia, is the North American writer Ernest Hemingway. He arrived in Pamplona for the first time in 1923. By then he had established himself in Paris as a writer and journalist and decided to take a few days off. Hemingway took advantage of these vacations to send chronicles about the Sanfermines and its bullfights to the Canadian newspaper The Toronto Star Weekly. The writer was so fascinated by the parties that he, over time, would end up becoming an expert.

Hemingway set his novel Fiesta precisely in San Fermín and his chronicles, published in newspapers all over the world, seduced readers from all countries who, since then, have wanted to visit Pamplona and live the experience of the running of the bulls. The writer would end up returning to Pamplona up to eight more times. Numerous Hollywood stars can be seen in the photos of illustrious party visitors. Stars like Gregory Peck, Sean Connery, Ava Gardner, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Deborah Kerr or Lauren Bacall, to name just a few.

One of the most assiduous, and also a great fan of bulls like Hemingway, was Orson Welles. Welles shot his version of Don Quixote in 1945, a film that remained unfinished and could not be seen until 1992, when Jesús Franco collected and edited all the material shot by the director. In his version, the nobleman gentleman was transferred to the 20th century and in some scenes Sancho, who had separated from his lord, was looking for him in Pamplona and ended up running a bull run by accident.

American cinema has shown the Pamplona festivities in several films. Films like Holiday in Spain with Peter Lorre or Carnival of Thieves in which Stephen Boyle, the Messala of Ben-Hur, took advantage of the noise to rob a bank. But undoubtedly the best Hollywood film about the Sanfermines is Fiesta, an adaptation of the Hemingway novel that Henry King directed in 1957 with Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Erroll Flynn and Mel Ferrer in the main roles. It told the story of a group of American friends who meet at San Fermín and the atmosphere of joy, bullfights and alcohol serves as a backdrop to a story of jealousy and impossible love. The film generally contains quite accurate descriptions of the festival and its traditions. Fiesta, actually, was not filmed in Pamplona but in Mexico. Only a team came to the Navarrese capital to record resource plans and none of the actors came to set foot in the city. The American public didn’t notice the big change, but Hemingway did, and he was very upset. Especially for one thing. The writer said that the bulls were so small that he suspected that they had been put on fake horns to shoot the film.

But there are also other American films that deal extravagantly with the Pamplona festivities. In City Cowboys, three forty-year-old friends, led by Billy Cristal, were looking for new experiences and at the beginning of the film they were running a bull run. Race that ended with a goring to Billy’s rear. As in Fiesta, neither did the City Cowboys actors go to the Navarrese capital, not even its director, since the person in charge of filming the pertinent documentary inserts was Fraser Heston, Charlton Heston’s son.

Much more absurd is Night and Day, a 2010 film starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Díaz. Part of the action takes place in Spain. A little sign tells us that we are in Seville. A group of young men dressed in white and with a red scarf around their necks dance and sing through the streets. From there begins a confinement and a delirious chase through the streets, which are actually from Cádiz, with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz riding a motorcycle and Jordi Mollá, who plays the villain of the film, in a sports car hot on their heels. . Persecution that gets into the middle of the confinement, dodging morlacos and runners.

Much more serious and respectful of the Sanfermines is the film Americano, released in 2003, which deals with three Americans on vacation in Pamplona. The film has the merit of having filmed one of the best running of the bulls sequences that have been seen in the cinema and doing it not with extras but with real runners. In fact, the protagonist, Joshua Jackson, without a specialist to dub him, had to put himself in front of the horns in quite risky scenes. An Indian film titled You Only Live Once is also curious, which became the most popular and grossing Bollywood film in 2012. The last part of the film took place in Spain and the protagonists first went to Buñol’s “la tomatina”. and then to San Fermín.

Logically, it is Spanish cinema that has shown the party the most times in its images. In A Corner to Love Each Other, a 1967 film with a script by Rafael Azcona, a newly married couple decided to spend their honeymoon in Pamplona. But of course, at this time, it was impossible to find free accommodation. In Pedro Lazaga’s Luna de verano, two French students on their way to San Sebastián accidentally arrived in Pamplona and also ended up running the bull’s-eye. And in Rafael Gil’s film Tú y yo somos tres, an adaptation of a comedy by Enrique Jardiel Poncela, the protagonist had to go to San Fermín on medical prescription to cure a psychological problem in this way.

La trastienda in which the Sanfermines were the backdrop for a story of adultery between an Opus Dei doctor and his nurse is from the breakout film era. The film is remembered, above all, because in it María José Cantudo showed the first complete nude in Spanish cinema, but it also includes images of the dramatic montonera that occurred at the entrance to the bullring in 1975 and in which there were numerous injuries and a deceased. We also find images of the Sanfermines in more recent films such as Perdiendo el Este, in which Julián López had to travel to Pamplona to recover his Chinese girlfriend.

In reality, none of the films that we have mentioned fully reflects the spirit of the festival and filming a real confinement in a fictional film is almost impossible, since part of the route would have to be cut for days and it is difficult to put a camera inside to film the protagonist That is why most of the films include documentary inserts in those scenes and it has been the documentary cinema that has best reflected the Sanfermines. This is the case of Encierro, by director Olivier Van Der Zee, a 3D documentary film that recounts the development of this tradition and what the runners feel who every morning stand in front of the bulls through the streets of Pamplona during the festivities. This past June 23, H was released, the first feature film by Carlos Pardo Ros that tells of the death of his own uncle in a bull run in 1969.

With cheating or not, there is no doubt about the visual impact that San Fermín has. Impact that has allowed him to serve as a background in the cinema to tell such varied stories.

2023-07-07 16:31:45
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