Word: nabokovs
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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...
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark...
...Stoppard loves playing around with dramatic from: the characters in his plays see themselves as figuratively or literally on a stage. Fassbinder displays a similar interest in form, and a feeling for intricate vision detail to match Stoppard's verbal relish. Match this pair with 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...
...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...
...When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation," said Vladimir Nabokov, "the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines...