Cinematic Techniques in Nabokovs Laughter in the Dark Essay -- Movie

Cinematic Techniques in Nabokovs jest in the Dark Vladimir Nabokovs Laughter in the Dark takes the movies for its style as well as its subject matter. In recounting the farcical calamity of director Albinus and starlet Margot, Nabokov imports a wide variety of techniques and imagery from the cinema into the novel. merely Nabokovs cinematic style is not analagous to that of a screenplay the polished prose is always tinged with the novelists earmark irony. Gavriel Moses notes that Nabokovs most consistent reaction to popular films in their public mise en scene is his awareness that the film image... is overwhelming in its insistent claim to battlefront and, as a consequence, to truth. But in formula films perceived uncritically or absorbed inertly, film works to displace... what is really important in spiritedness and to impose its own schematic simplifications upon lifes teaming and idiosyncratic details. (62) Virtually all the characters in Laughter in the Dark t ake their understandings of life from the film industry. Their ideas and impressions, therefore, tend to be rather banal, predictable, and superficial. Nabokovs people never surprise the reader, never consider unusual thoughts, never reveal unexpected depths. In contrast to the tortuous psyches found in Tolstoy and Chekhov, for instance, Albinus, Rex, and Margot are cartoons, with speech balloons floating above their heads. Indeed, point their thought processes resemble the interior monologues of characters in Hollywood films. So, for example, when Nabokov transcribes Albinuss silent thoughts, he employs a standard voice-over template Albinus, his queer emotions riding him, thought What the dickens do I care for this fellow... ...chcock Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. bran-new York An Anchor Book, Doubleday, 1992. Originally published by Hopkinson and Blake in 1976. Works Consulted Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. naked York Vintage Books, A Division of Random Ho use, Inc., 1999. First published 1955. Raguet-Bouvart, Christine. tv camera Obscura and Laughter in the Dark, or, The Confusion of Texts. Translated from the French by Jeff Edmunds. Seifrid, Thomas. Nabokovs Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kameraobskura. copyright 1996 Board of Trustees of Davidson College. Originally published in Nabokovs Studies 3 (1996). http//www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/seifrid1.htm Simon, John. Vladimir Nabokov The Russian Years. From The red-hot Criterion Vol.9, No.6, February 1991. http//www.newcriterion.com/archive/09/feb91/nabokov.htm