Word: despairingly
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Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark...
...Nabokov, with his witty, self-conscious prose and playful pokes at literary form and point-of-view, and you have a threesome so finely tuned that they practically exclude the rest of us. Add Dirk Bogarde, one of Britain's most mannered, fastidious actors, and it's no surprise Despair is impenetrable...
...Despair is quite an undertaking for a film artist. Herman Hermann is so disatisfied with messy, imperfect reality that he concocts a work of art--the perfect murder--and attempts to immortalize it in the ordered, finite world of a novel he writes. Stoppard's great innovation is that he sees the story not from its uniquely literary angle, but from its general artistic one: Is not cinema an art form, too? Can't movies also be perfectly ordered? And can't movie director, if he chooses, be as selective about the details he presents to the viewer...
...filmmaker sees it, that the film director should use every cinematic resource to present his vision visually and aurally to to the viewer in such a way that the viewer has no choice but to experience it emotionally. If you accept this line, Despair, with its struggle between life and art, real reality and film reality, could be the quintessential film, almost an apotheosis of cinematic form. Well...
...when the Harvard football team meshed as completely as the dreams of the most partisan fan. It was a taste of invincibility for those who have believed all along in the deceptive talent of this squad. It was the 285 seconds that at first evoked hope, then despair as the rest of the game failed to do it justice...