black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             
Master’s Blueprint, Born of Revolution

‘The Tragedy of Mister Morn’ by Vladimir Nabokov

The Russian Revolution upended the lives of Vladimir Nabokov and his family. Leaving behind an aristocratic world of colossal wealth and privilege (a world about which he could speak of “the smallest and oldest of our gardeners”), Nabokov would become an exile in Berlin, where he supported himself as a tutor, teaching French, English and tennis. On March 28, 1922, his father, a liberal politician, was shot and killed at a Berlin lecture while trying to protect another man from an assassin — a loss that would reverberate throughout Nabokov’s life and fiction. Loss and death are the two electrical currents that run beneath his polished, magical prose, and those themes — as well as the subject of revolution and its consequences — are the animating forces behind the play “The Tragedy of Mister Morn,” his first major work, written in the winter of 1923-24, when he was only 24.

“And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.”
Chekhov

“I am most concerned with television as the key symbol primarily of the media representation of violence, and more generally of a greater crisis, which I see as our collective loss of reality and social disorientation. Alienation is a very complex problem, but television is certainly implicated in it. We don’t, of course, anymore perceive reality, but instead the representation of reality in television. Our experiential horizon is very limited. What we know of the world is little more than the mediated world, the image. We have no reality, but a derivative of reality, which is extremely dangerous, most certainly from a political standpoint but in a larger sense to our ability to have a palpable sense of the truth of everyday experience.”

“The world your films describe seems catastrophic. There is the family suicide of Der siebente Kontinent, the violence of Funny Games, the image of the media in Benny’s Video, the collapse of meaning in Code Unknown, the tragedy of La Pianiste.”

“I’m trying as best I can to describe a situation as I see it without bullshitting or disingenuousness, but by so doing I subscribe to the notion that communication is still possible, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this. I cannot make comedies about these subjects, so it is true the films are bleak. On the subject of violence, there are an increasing number of modalities with which one can present violence, so much so that we need to reconceptualize the whole concept of violence and its origins.

The new technologies, of both media representation and the political world, allow greater damage with ever-increasing speed. The media contribute to a confused consciousness through this illusion that we know all things at all times, and always with this great sense of immediacy. We live in this environment where we think we know more things faster, when in fact we know nothing at all. This propels us into terrible internal conflicts, which then creates angst, which in turn causes aggression, and this creates violence. This is a vicious cycle.”

Michael Haneke | Kinoeye

©2011 Kateoplis