Summary provided by the publisher:"This work offers critical studies of films that adapted works by Vladimir Nabokov. One of the most screened twentieth century authors (with over 10 books adapted for cinema), his works are full of quirky and forbidden romance, and his writing is renowned for its cinematic qualities. A final chapter compares the similarities between Nabokov and Jean-Luc Godard" and a list of its chapters:
Humbert between dignity and romanticism : Lolita by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and Adrian Lyne (1997) --
Going blind in swinging London : Laughter in the dark (1969) by Tony Richardson --
Nabokov, or the logic of late capitalism : King, queen, knave (1972) by Jerzy Skolimowski --
Escape into a different person, escape into a different reality : Despair (1978) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder --
Rememberance of things unspoken : Mademoiselle O by Jérôme Foulon --
Duel in contemporary Estonia : An affair of honor (1999) by Valentin Kuik --
Nabokov as a gentle feminist : The Luzhin defence (2000) by Marleen Gorris --
From b-movie script to Greek tragedy : "The assistant producer" by Vladimir Nabokov, and Triple agent (2004) by Eric Rohmer --Vladimir Nabokov and Jean-Luc Godard.[Cf. Nabokov's cinematic afterlife ]

"True lies are given an historical spin in Eric Rohmer's invigoratingly ambitious Triple Agent. A period tragedy in the vein of the octogenarian French New Wave director's The Lady And The Duke, it's very loosely based on the true story of White Russian Army general Fyodor (Serge Renko) who played a triply duplicitous role as a spy in 30s France, deceiving not only Marxists, Soviets and Fascists but also his long-suffering wife Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou) until the forces of history finally caught up with him.The year is 1936 and Europe is in turmoil. Caught in the middle of the clash between Fascism and Communism are a group of aristocratic Russian exiles who've fled to France from Stalin's Russia. Among them is Fyodor, a soldier turned pen pusher who's rumoured to be "very well-informed". A secretive, duplicitous man he's an enigma even to his Greek wife Arsinoé who slowly begins to realise that he's actually a spy. Triple Agent was originally planned as a formal companion to The Lady And The Duke, with Rohmer planning to insert his characters into 1930s newsreel footage much as that earlier film used digital technology to put the protagonists into 18th century paintings. Sadly, the idea proved too expensive and unwieldy and Triple Agent instead uses the newsreels in a more conventional form - as a backdrop to Arsinoé's relationship with her husband.
As with all Rohmer's films, its words not action that count. Triple Agent delivers a heady thrill as characters pick over the events of the period, chattering about 30s politics, the joys of Cubist art and the gathering storm that would tear Europe apart over the course of the next decade. Focusing in on Fyodor and Arsinoé, Rohmer manoeuvres the espionage theme through sitting room and bedroom, distilling the tumultuous events of 20th century history into an intimate drama about the psychology of trust and deceit. Director and Writer: Eric Rohmer Stars: Katerina Didaskalou, Serge Renko, Cyrielle Claire, Grigori Manukov, Dimitri RafalskyGenre: Drama, Cinema: 29 October 2004 .":

"It is a notorious, and notoriously unresolved, tale of espionage: a one-time White Russian general, in exile in Paris, connives with both the Soviets and the Nazis in the mid-1930s. Hoping to use a day out with his wife, once a popular singer in her homeland, as his alibi, he slips away from her for a brief time, during which he oversees the kidnapping of another general, his superior at the White veteran association he belongs to. That general is never seen again. The triple agent, confronted with a note in which his victim confides of misgivings about his colleague and the meeting he arranged, slips away from his would-be captors. He, too, is never seen again. Seeking a scapegoat, the authorities pounce on the agent's wife, who is convicted and dies in prison.
When Vladimir Nabokov adapted the story of General Miller (the victim), Nicholas Skobline (the agent), and Nadine Plevitskaia (the wife), for one of his short fictions, he actually cast it in the form of a film, a melodrama by turns florid and tawdry and sometimes rife with that quality, poshlust, which Nabokov so beautifully elaborates on in his study of of Gogol. (If you haven't read that study, by all means do; in any case, for our purposes here, let's say that poshlust stands for "aspirational kitsch.") "Tonight we shall go to the movies," its mysterious narrator of "The Assistant Producer" says at the beginning, before lavishing some rueful contempt on the singer he refers to as "La Slavska." *
"The producer is a mere assistant because Russian history has begotten a stream of B-pictures that are in their way as distorted as the monstrous jokes perpetrated by Soviet revisionists," the ever-astute Nabokovian Arthur Appel, Jr., notes in his wonderful book Nabokov's Dark Cinema. Discussing the story's cinematic antecedents and analogs, he notes that the story's "bit players are as accomplished as Akim Tamiroff and Mischa Auer." He mentions Lewis Milestone's The North Star, released in the same year that "The Assistant Producer" was published, 1943.

For myself, Nabokov's literary mise-en-scene is rather evocative of von Sternberg:
"And then, in traditional contrast, pat comes a mighty burst of music and song with a rhythmic clapping of hands and stamping of booted feet and we seen General Golubkov's staff in full revelry—a lithe Georgian dancing with a dagger, the self-conscious samovar reflecting distorted faces, the Slavska throwing her head back with a throaty laugh, and the fat man of the corps, horribly drunk, braided collar undone, greasy lips pursed for a bestial kiss, leaning across the table (close-up of an overturned glass) to hug—nothingness, for wiry and perfectly sober General Golubkov has deftly removed her and now, as they both stand facing the gang, says in a cold, clear voice: 'Gentlemen, I want to present you my bride'—and in the stunned silence that follows, a stray bullet from outside chances to shatter the dawn-blue windowpane, after which the roar of applause greets the glamourous couple."**

There are no scenes of such vulgar exuberance in Triple Agent, the imagining of the Miller/Skobline/Plevitskaia affair that Eric Rohmer made in 2004. The Skobline figure, here named Fiodor and played with oft-disturbing intensity by Serge Renko, is never even seen in uniform, let alone celebrating with his troops. No, the film is set entirely in Paris, opening with the 1936 election of the Popular Front. It eschews action quite deliberately; everything you might expect to see in a film with the title Triple Agent is left off screen. Which is not to say the film is without suspense, or a form of action. In perhaps the most crucial departure from the known facts of the case, Rohmer completely changes the wife's identity. Rather than a fellow Russian, and a popular singer of gypsy songs, Fiodor's wife is a shy, beautiful painter of Greek origin named Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou). Not very much seems to happen in the film's first quarter. Arsinoé makes the acquaintance of the couple upstairs, who are Communists; she and Fiodor and the neighbors have some intriguing conversations about art and politics, and figurative versus abstract art. These don't move the plot along a bit, but contribute a resonant thematic element. We are given the impression that Fiodor and Arsinoé have a relatively quiet life, but are passionately attached to each other. But as political events ramp up, Fiodor's perversity begins to reveal itself. His allegiances seem to be all over the place, and when it's pointed out to him, he launches elaborately improvised self-justifications. And when he's not doing that, he almost waxes smug about his duplicity. At a lunch with a cousin, a former Russian royal looking for work with Fiodor's organization, and right in front of his wife, he taunts the young man: "Sometimes it's wiser to be truthful than to lie, so you won't be believed. Don't you believe me?" And then fixes on him the gaze that we see in the screen cap at top.Then follows one of the most extraordinary series of shots in Rohmer. Not at all known for quick cutting, he almost jumps from the medium closeup at top to the one below, and then cuts three more times in less than five seconds, thusly:
"Can't you decide?" he asks his wife, coldly. The quick cuts work like a glass of cold water thrown in one's face; it's a turning point in the film, and in the characters' marriage. By the time the climax is at hand, Fiodor has got Arsinoé so confused that she breaks down in tears of joy when he emphatically tells her that he's not a Nazi. And he's not, probably. But what is he, exactly. Against a backdrop of political intrigue, Rohmer presents a moral tale of how people make themselves unknowable not only to each other but to themselves. Nabokov, on the other hand, examines role-playing, and, as always, the gap between reality and perception, and wrings a peculiar poignancy out of a scenario into which he has injected very little of what you might call the "human element." "The story brilliantly inverts life and art," observes Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd, "[E]vents appear to be purloined from movieland, but in fact come straight from life—which itself seems to have imitated bad art."..."If 'history' means 'a written account of events'...then let us inquire who actually—what scribes, what secretaries—took it down and how qualified they were for the job," Nabokov said in an interview with Phillip Oakes in 1969. "The Assistant Producer" serves up "history" twice removed, not just as a movie, but as a Hollywood movie (as La Slavska arrives at Golubkov's camp, the audience is shown "a plain littered with bodies somewhere in Ventura County) out of Nabokov's imagination. It was the first short story he wrote in English, three years after coming to America from Paris...where he had been a neighbor of General Miller.
(Posted at 12:23 PM in Auteurs, Great Art, Literary interludes | Permalink )

* - Don B.Johnson works over Mascodagama's last act and a Crimean dancer - which are perhaps distantly connected to the "La Slavska" pastiche and some spying "multiple agents" - in his article "Ada’s Last Tango” in Dance, Song and Film
Abstract "Van’s brief stage career as a maniambulist concludes with a London performance in which he dances a tango with a female partner from the Crimea. The unnamed song to which they dance, mostly widely known as “The Last Tango” is one that was very popular in Europe in the period before and after WWI. The Russian version, “Poslednee Tango,” supplied the plot for a 1918 Russian film adaptation starring Vera Xolodnaya whose work was well known to both VN and his “Tamara” from their furtive afternoon trysts in wintry Saint-Petersburg cinemas. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Nabokov heard the song in his Crimean stay (if not before), and likely saw the film. Nor was this VN’s only filmic experience in the Crimea. In Drugie berega, he describes a bizarre encounter with the leading movie star of the day—Ivan Mozzhukhin—in what is described as a rehearsal scene for a movie loosely based on Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, later released under the title Der Weiss Teufel. The paper examines the role of these musical and cinematic elements as they are interwoven into Ada and Speak Memory. The talk is accompanied by a recording of “The Last Tango” and fragments of the eponymous film, as well as the Mozzhukin feature." (Ada 's “Last Tango” in Dance, Song and Film - Cycnos

revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1045 -)

For example, as we read in "Ada": "Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War) — three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent) — had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed ‘Chunnel.’ "

Nabokov was not as impervious to music as he makes one think. In a quote by Andrew Field from VN's review of Sartre's La Nausée, Nabokov mentions that he has "taken the trouble to ascertain that in reality the song is a Sophie Tucker one written by the Canadian Shelton Brooks" (VN is observing on Sartre's having attributed a lot of importance "to an American song on the café phonograph. Roquentin would like to be as crisply alive in this song, which "saved the Jew [who wrote it] and the Negress [who sang it]")

** - One item with disguised references to theatrical distortions, spying and garbled information, from ADA, related to Nabokov's "The Assistant Producer" now described as typical of "von Sternberg's style":

"Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in.... the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat."