Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nightgown being lifted. Despair is, in fact, a light and lavender comedy about a crazed Russian émigré named Hermann Hermann, who watches in amazement as his mind splits like his name, into two equal parts. The film is set in Berlin. Based on a 1936 novel written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov, it is hopeless in mood, but most cheerfully so. Nabokov once pointed out in print that the novel is devoid of message, ideas or Freudian "Wiener schnitzel dreams." The despair of the title therefore may only have been that of the penniless young ex patriate author...
...only a Jew, but a Russian. Though his parents took him from czarist Russia to America in 1913 when he was only ten, his origins were of immense significance to his art. He treated painting with the moral seriousness that Russians traditionally assigned to music or the novel. By art, he hoped, one is set free. The only art that could provide a model for life was the sublime. In that sense, Rothko was the last romantic painter, the heir to Turner or Caspar David Friedrich...
...easily shocked circle populated by his mother and her friends. The other possessed his imagination: total friendship, passionate, uninhibited and free, with a like spirit. Artistically, Forster did not want to choose, to become simply a novelist of manners or a poet of pleasures. The motto of his fourth novel, Howards End (1910), captured both the dilemma and the hope: "Only connect...
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...
...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...