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

Cinematic Techniques in Nabokovs Laughter in the Dark Vladimir Nabokovs Laughter in the Dark takes the movies for its dah as wellspring as its subject matter. In recounting the farcical tragedy of director Albinus and starlet Margot, Nabokov imports a wide variety of techniques and imagery from the cinema into the novel. But Nabokovs cinematic style is not analagous to that of a screenplay the polished prose is always tinged with the novelists trademark irony. Gavriel Moses notes that Nabokovs most consistent reaction to popular films in their public context is his awareness that the film image... is overpower in its insistent claim to presence and, as a consequence, to truth. But in formula films perceived uncritically or absorbed inertly, film tends to displace... what is actually important in look and to impose its own schematic simplifications upon lifes teaming and idiosyncratic details. (62) Virtually all the characters in Laughter in the Dark take their unde rstandings 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 think unusual thoughts, never reveal unexpected depths. In bank line to the complex psyches found in Tolstoy and Chekhov, for instance, Albinus, Rex, and Margot are cartoons, with speech balloons floating above their heads. Indeed, even 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 devil do I care for this fellow... ...chcock Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. New York An establish Book, Doubleday, 1992. Originally published by Hopkinson and Blake in 1976. Works Consulted Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1999. First publis hed 1955. Raguet-Bouvart, Christine. 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 New Criterion Vol.9, No.6, February 1991. http//www.newcriterion.com/archive/09/feb91/nabokov.htm