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Re: CHW to SS, MR, JM's recent posts
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JM:Does anyone remember who said: "images are eminently fascist"?
CHW : Google suggests to me that this idea can perhaps be found in Walter Benjamin’s 1935
essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
JM:Charles, thank you for suggesting Walter Benjamin. Sleep helped me to remember John Fowles ( both novel and involuting movie "The French Lieutenant Woman") but I could not get to his sentence. There was another, though, under "fascism or the majority":
"Above all I loathe the drift (a kind of fascism of the majority) that would so homogenize, suburbanize, and `democratize' life as to make it lose all it varieties and roughnesses, make it, like margarine, `easy to spread. '', that is very distant from the homogenizing power of the image and the destruction of the written word as we find denounce3d in Truffaut's movie. This sentence, though, still helps as a commentary to "Fahrenheit 451"...
VN's irradiating words make it hard for screen-writers and talented directors ( such as Fassbinder, A.Lynne,Kubrick, Marlene Gorris) turn out good movie adaptations from his novels. Recently we read Dmitri Nabokov speak about filming "ADA". While it is possible to select one story among the various distinct arguments present in VN's book, I cannot imagine how ADA's complex plots could be faithfully transposed into the world of images and sound. A "surrealist" production, perhaps, with transforming pumpkins, flying carpets and magic tricks, plane accidents, sea drownings and passionate love making among butterflies and swamps?
CHW, on surrealism, Buñuel and Nabokov: The passage I mentioned earlier, Gordon’s appearance in sudden successive changes of bathing attire, would seem to translate especially well to film. Another surrealistic example that comes to mind is his short story A Visit to a Museum --- if I’ve remembered the title correctly.
JM: All those secret passages taking us across time and space suggest a kind of surrealistic images, but so do Sci-Fi stories. Nabokov often uses movie resources while writing ( the slow motion steps when ADA crosses the hall at the Three Swans, the long shots or the camera proggressing into a close, etc) but I wonder if the reverse is as successful as VN's movielike written achievements.
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CHW : Google suggests to me that this idea can perhaps be found in Walter Benjamin’s 1935
essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
JM:Charles, thank you for suggesting Walter Benjamin. Sleep helped me to remember John Fowles ( both novel and involuting movie "The French Lieutenant Woman") but I could not get to his sentence. There was another, though, under "fascism or the majority":
"Above all I loathe the drift (a kind of fascism of the majority) that would so homogenize, suburbanize, and `democratize' life as to make it lose all it varieties and roughnesses, make it, like margarine, `easy to spread. '', that is very distant from the homogenizing power of the image and the destruction of the written word as we find denounce3d in Truffaut's movie. This sentence, though, still helps as a commentary to "Fahrenheit 451"...
VN's irradiating words make it hard for screen-writers and talented directors ( such as Fassbinder, A.Lynne,Kubrick, Marlene Gorris) turn out good movie adaptations from his novels. Recently we read Dmitri Nabokov speak about filming "ADA". While it is possible to select one story among the various distinct arguments present in VN's book, I cannot imagine how ADA's complex plots could be faithfully transposed into the world of images and sound. A "surrealist" production, perhaps, with transforming pumpkins, flying carpets and magic tricks, plane accidents, sea drownings and passionate love making among butterflies and swamps?
CHW, on surrealism, Buñuel and Nabokov: The passage I mentioned earlier, Gordon’s appearance in sudden successive changes of bathing attire, would seem to translate especially well to film. Another surrealistic example that comes to mind is his short story A Visit to a Museum --- if I’ve remembered the title correctly.
JM: All those secret passages taking us across time and space suggest a kind of surrealistic images, but so do Sci-Fi stories. Nabokov often uses movie resources while writing ( the slow motion steps when ADA crosses the hall at the Three Swans, the long shots or the camera proggressing into a close, etc) but I wonder if the reverse is as successful as VN's movielike written achievements.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm