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EDITOR'S NOTE. Sandy Klein sends us the item below from the NYTimes. New
York Nabokovians will want to watch for the date of the showing of
Fassbinder's film of VN's _Despair_. The full text of the article may be
found at
"http://search.nytimes.com/web/docsroot/yr/mo/day/artleisure/19canb.html">
______________________________________________________________________
By VINCENT CANBY
he year has just begun, but it's safe to predict that the Museum of Modern
Art's Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective, opening Thursday night and
running through March 20, will be remembered as one of the most
exhilarating cinema events of 1997.
"Despair" (1977) is something of an aberration in the Fassbinder
career: an English-language film starring Dirk Bogarde, with a script by
Tom Stoppard based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel. The film's concerns are
Nabokov's, filtered through the antic Stoppard imagination, about Hermann
Hermann (Mr. Bogarde), a man in the last stages of a fatal breakdown. The
comedy is pure Stoppard. Says Hermann when his buxom wife (Andrea Ferreol)
enters their bedroom wearing a black teddy and high heels: "How dare you
come in this room partially clothed? Off with it! Have you no sense of
indecency?"
The film respects Nabokov and Stoppard, but there is no question about
who's calling the shots off screen. The camera is madly lyrical: it
glides, it swoops, it delights in crazy compositions, it never sees a
single image if it's possible to see the image reflected in one or more
mirrors or through layers of glass. The camera, which can't sit still,
uses Hermann's nutty behavior as an excuse to act up on its own.
York Nabokovians will want to watch for the date of the showing of
Fassbinder's film of VN's _Despair_. The full text of the article may be
found at
"http://search.nytimes.com/web/docsroot/yr/mo/day/artleisure/19canb.html">
______________________________________________________________________
By VINCENT CANBY
he year has just begun, but it's safe to predict that the Museum of Modern
Art's Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective, opening Thursday night and
running through March 20, will be remembered as one of the most
exhilarating cinema events of 1997.
"Despair" (1977) is something of an aberration in the Fassbinder
career: an English-language film starring Dirk Bogarde, with a script by
Tom Stoppard based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel. The film's concerns are
Nabokov's, filtered through the antic Stoppard imagination, about Hermann
Hermann (Mr. Bogarde), a man in the last stages of a fatal breakdown. The
comedy is pure Stoppard. Says Hermann when his buxom wife (Andrea Ferreol)
enters their bedroom wearing a black teddy and high heels: "How dare you
come in this room partially clothed? Off with it! Have you no sense of
indecency?"
The film respects Nabokov and Stoppard, but there is no question about
who's calling the shots off screen. The camera is madly lyrical: it
glides, it swoops, it delights in crazy compositions, it never sees a
single image if it's possible to see the image reflected in one or more
mirrors or through layers of glass. The camera, which can't sit still,
uses Hermann's nutty behavior as an excuse to act up on its own.