Word: herman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...area: both are extraordinarily fast workers. ("Rainer Werner Fassbinder is thirty-one" the Welles Theater's notes tell us, "and his film credits already outnumber his years"). Once they have this great idea, they don't take the time to figure out how to use it. Herman tells us that he's a movie actor, but a movie actor isn't autonomous. He should be a director, attempting not only to control how we see him, but how we see everything. Often we see Herman from his "own" point-of-view, standing outside himself, and often we appear...
SELF-CONSCIOUS. Dirk Bogarde's Herman Hermann watches every move he makes through an invisible movie camera. He's constantly framed by windows, doorways, odd rectangular objects. He poses, preens, acts for us. About to make love to his moist, hefty wife, he makes sure that the door of his room is wide open, glancing down the hall where the camera sits. But he never looks into it. He's too professional. Or maybe it isn't there. Or maybe it is. Or maybe this is a screwy movie...
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...
Nabokov's novel indicates that Herman can't possibly turn life into art, because life is messy and disordered, and it's got to intrude on his perfect vision--a fitting reason for "despair." Nabokov conveys the idea that Herman's plump wife is having an affair with her puerile cousin without the narrator even being aware of it. And when Herman violently proclaims to have found his "perfect double," a tramp named Felix whom he encounters on a path (in a glass funhouse in a movie), we have our nagging doubts that what Herman tells us he sees really...
...PLACE the film in Weimar Germany just as the Nazis are gaining popularity? Herman's movie consciousness is slightly anachronistic if he's living in 1930, and the film might just as easily have been set in the present time. Perhaps Stoppard presents these Nazis as a counterpoint to Herman: they also dream of an ordered, perfect world; they also must cruelly destroy to attain it; they also, ultimately, find that there is no final solution in a chaotic universe. Or perhaps they are merely placed in the film as an irritant, imposing further on Herman's vision...