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.