Monday, November 19, 2012

'Vladimir Nabokov: Life and Works'

An engaging documentary on the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov. It contains a lot of archival footage of interviews with the man himself and covers topics from lepidoptery to Lolita.  The narrator Stephen Smith interviews Martin Amis and contemporary literary critics to identify the character of the man and the underlying moral message of his Magnum opus.  Though I enjoyed it, I'm not quite sure if Nabokov would have approved: there is a heavy strain of criticism as psychoanalysis, art as didacticism throughout the film.