Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Maybe Despair never takes off because Stoppard and Fassbinder differ from Nabokov in a key area: both are extraordinarily fast workers. ("Rainer Werner Fassbinder is thirty-one" the Welles Theater's notes tell us, "and his film credits already outnumber his years"). Once they have this great idea, they don't take the time to figure out how to use it. Herman tells us that he's a movie actor, but a movie actor isn't autonomous. He should be a director, attempting not only to control how we see him, but how we see everything. Often we see Herman...
...Nabokov, with his witty, self-conscious prose and playful pokes at literary form and point-of-view, and you have a threesome so finely tuned that they practically exclude the rest of us. Add Dirk Bogarde, one of Britain's most mannered, fastidious actors, and it's no surprise Despair is impenetrable...
...Despair is quite an undertaking for a film artist. Herman Hermann is so disatisfied with messy, imperfect reality that he concocts a work of art--the perfect murder--and attempts to immortalize it in the ordered, finite world of a novel he writes. Stoppard's great innovation is that he sees the story not from its uniquely literary angle, but from its general artistic one: Is not cinema an art form, too? Can't movies also be perfectly ordered? And can't movie director, if he chooses, be as selective about the details he presents to the viewer...
...filmmaker sees it, that the film director should use every cinematic resource to present his vision visually and aurally to to the viewer in such a way that the viewer has no choice but to experience it emotionally. If you accept this line, Despair, with its struggle between life and art, real reality and film reality, could be the quintessential film, almost an apotheosis of cinematic form. Well...
Nabokov's novel indicates that Herman can't possibly turn life into art, because life is messy and disordered, and it's got to intrude on his perfect vision--a fitting reason for "despair." Nabokov conveys the idea that Herman's plump wife is having an affair with her puerile cousin without the narrator even being aware of it. And when Herman violently proclaims to have found his "perfect double," a tramp named Felix whom he encounters on a path (in a glass funhouse in a movie), we have our nagging doubts that what Herman tells us he sees really...