Word: hermans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FICTION: Adjacent Lives, Ellen Schwamm∙Faeries, Brian Fraud and Alan Lee∙Short Stories, Irwin Shaw∙Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever∙The World According to Garp, John Irving War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk...
FICTION: Adjacent Lives, Ellen Schwamm ∙Faeries, Brian Fraud and Alan Lee ∙Secret Isaac, Jerome Charyn ∙Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever ∙The World According to Garp, John Irving War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk...
Another problem: In the book we feel strangely close to the admittedly despicable Herman; we perceive him crumbling, and we experience a violent shock when reality and the law close quickly in on him at the end. But the movie keeps its distance. This detatchment could be Bogarde's fault: maybe he's too prim to pull us in the way someone like Alan Bates might have. Or maybe Fassbinder and Stoppard work so hard at distancing us from him physically, framing him, blocking him, giving us a sense of deliberate camera placement, that they forget about bringing him closer...
Fassbinder has composed Despair beautifully. His technique includes various witty framing devices, quirky angles and long-shots, and inspired fooling around with light sources (especially neat when Herman talks with Felix in a dark hotel room, and swings the hanging lamp so that each of them is lit in turn while the other goes dark). The director cleverly conveys the crack-up of Herman's perfect work of art by placing him beside a shattered mirror, which fragments his image...
...INTERVIEW reprinted by the Welles Theater, Fassbinder discusses Herman's mid-life crisis and "painful search for something that moves." It sounds great on paper, but I don't see it in the movie. I see an elegant, poorly thought-out but often very fascinating film of Despair. Nabokov pulled off a miracle in his novel: we stood outside Herman Hermann and still felt his pain; we experienced his warped vision and still perceived pieces of reality. But neither Nabokov's lucidity nor his despair have made it to the screen...