Nabokov's Dark Cinema

by Alfred Appel

334 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 1974

About the author

Alfred Appel Jr. was an American professor, author and journal editor noted for his investigations into the works of Vladimir Nabokov, modern art, and jazz modernism. He edited The Annotated Lolita, an edition of Nabokov's Lolita. He also authored four other books about Nabokov, literature and music.

As a student at Cornell University, Appel took a course from Nabokov. His education was interrupted by a stint in the Army, after which he completed his undergraduate education and PhD in English Literature at Columbia University in 1963.

After teaching at Columbia for a few years, he joined the faculty of Northwestern University, where he taught until his retirement in 2000. He died of heart failure. Appel was married until his death to Nina Appel, dean of Loyola University Chicago's law school from 1983 to 2004. They had two children, Karen Oshman and television writer and producer Richard Appel.

Reviews

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"... While scripting Lolita in Hollywood, the Nabokovs attended a dinner party at David Selznick's luxurious house. Billy Wilder was there, and Gina Lollobrigida, too.
"She speaks excellent French," says Nabokov.
"It wasn't that good," interupts Mrs. Nabokov.
They were also introduced to a tall, rugged fellow.
"And what do you do ?" inquired Nabokov.
"I'm in pictures," answered John Wayne ..."

Alfred Appel's 1974 "Nabokov's Dark Cinema" has been out of print for some time, but it's well worth a look. Getting lost in the pages of a book like this one would have been the delight of my college years; but only if it wasn't a required read for the curriculum, which of course would have tamped the urgency to read it in the first place, and could have dispelled any magic that might have been lingering. But on a curricula-shirking clandestine basis .... oh yes.

Attempting to lash together the developments in the Modern Novel and the rise of Cinema as artform, Appel has enlisted Vladimir Nabokov as official interpolator, second-story-man, executive chef and concierge. Which he amongst very few others is credentialled to do, having interviewed Nabokov numerous times since his own college days, taking literature courses from Mr N. at Cornell.

Packed with very well selected film stills, the book explores relations between the Silents, Radio, Newsreels, the 'Funnies', Serials, Comicbooks, Studio Features, and the way that they are distilled and mirrored in Nabokov's satirical view of pop culture. Appel leads with a nice historical buildup, with Movies democratizing the classes, winning the wars, and enduring the depression; he has a very good grasp of the cinema period that would have been Nabokov's hunting grounds, during his era. The German expressionism of Lang, Murnau, Lubitsch, the detectives & 'underworlders', along with the visceral comedic works of Harold Lloyd, Chaplin, and the very-favored Laurel & Hardy.

All along, Appel brings his considerable understanding of Nabokov as literature to bear upon the devices and stratagems of both fictive worlds, whether celluloid or printed-page. His deep research into the Nabokov oeuvre is always on tap, noting the layers, lists, shadows, overlays and inlays that appear throughout Nabokov's work.

It's hard to know if this is a history of Cinema that uses a revered modern author to articulate it's points, or an in-depth cross-study of Nabokov's writing as based on his deft rendering of pop-culture in film. So a very meandering volume, really, in spite of the constant rush of apparitions and unbounded bloom of ideas.

In Appel's defense, there is much to support his non-thesis; Nabokov's work is laced through with millions of pop-culture threads, half of them related to the worlds of the Cinema. Appel explores a few million of them. But there is little or no navigation here, not any kind of path through the woods, enchanted though they may be. Confusing, maybe, Appel would say, but isn't unreliability and uncertainty part of the very grain of 'the modern' ?

One distinct thread worthy of mention is the idea of Émigré Literature, it's unique vantage & voice. This line of inquiry suits the Nabokov canon to the ground, in that Mr N was dislocated from his Czarist Russian background, then from Berlin, then from Paris and all the way to California by the circumstances of history. And most notably for this book, to Hollywood.

There are good chapters on Nabokov's Lolita the novel and Nabokov's Lolita the screenplay, versus Kubrick's Lolita the shooting-script and finally, his finished film. My recommendation is that Appel's The Annotated Lolita should be read as a preparation for all this, but regardless of the complicated provenance, any study of Nabokov & Cinema will regard this as central.



Like big-city directions for reaching the theater on foot, Nabokov once wrote, "Tonight we shall go to the movies. Back to the Thirties and down the Twenties and round the corner to the old Europe Picture Palace..." And while getting lost in Appel's considerations of these matters, the reader will tend to agree; the violent, technicolor drama of the 20th century was mirrored, if not accurately reported, by the movies. Nabokov savored the disconnect of that particular fracture.

Finding this on a semester break in a city bookstore, smuggling it back to a snow-drifted room on campus in the distant mountains, would have been nirvana for the film student of the seventies. Something this engrossingly elaborate would have been a long winter's night's perfect companion, along with a nice pipe of something exotic to smoke....

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

oh shut up