David Brodie's A
Beautiful Idea: Nabokov's Animating Painting and its
Retributions: "Something nagged at
me...a revival of the age-old tableau vivant, in which actors come to assume the
poses of a famous work of art, reminded me that I'd dropped a thread some years
before when reading Vladimir Nabokov's novel Laughter in the Dark.
There, a character daydreams about animating an old master painting, "movement and gesture graphically developed in complete harmony
with their static state in the picture." The imagined film would bring to
life...the final interpolation ...culminating in the original painting itself
(or rather, in a photographic image of it). We can say, then, that Laughter
postulates a limit-case tableau vivant...Laughter doesn't simply refer to paintings and films, it
transmutes their formal properties into text...In Nabokov's other novels
frequent references to painting and film function as metaphysical invocation;
Laughter in the Dark's proposal to turn an old master painting
into a cinematic entertainment, a cartoon, threatens to drag high art into low
places, and this seems to call forth, even more, a sort of ontological
retribution.... the book ends with the pathetic tableau in question, the
precisely arranged death scene which struck me as being compelled by the
idea of an animated painting introduced at the book's very
beginning.[...]
JM: Some time ago I watched
Seurat's "tableau vivant" in Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George"
and was not particularly impressed *, but David Brodie managed to reawaken my interest in the theme.
However, here we have, at least, a linguistic problem to solve.
It belongs to the category of formulation that finds its analogy in what the
French name "nature morte" and the English "still life." For there's no adequate translation of "tableau vivant"
into English. Literally, it means a "living picture" and Brodie's
arguments that "the book ends with the pathetic tableau
[vivant!] in question, the precisely arranged death
scene..." struck me, at first, as
being relatively contradictory in connection to the achieved
verbal painting that finally became a "still life/dead
nature," or a "tableau vivant."
If the amusing idea of a "living death-scene" is
what Brodie indicated as "a sort of ontological retribution," he was perhaps
almost too discreet. It took me several hours before I finally reached
my overdue "Laughter in the Dark" and I only began to worry about its irony
much later (I still don't think that "dying is fun",
though).
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* - I prefer the idea that's been put
forward in "Mrs Henderson Presents," a 2005 British
comedy film, directed by Stephen Frears. It stars Judi Dench, Bob
Hoskins...(wiki:The film is based on the true story of the Windmill Theatre in
London... Eccentric 70-year-old widow Mrs Laura Henderson purchases it as a
post-widowhood hobby...In 1937 they start a continuous variety review called
'Revudeville', but after other theatres in London copy this innovation, they
begin to lose money. Mrs Henderson suggests they add female nudity similar to
the Moulin Rouge in Paris. This is unprecedented in the United Kingdom.
The Lord Chamberlain reluctantly allows this under the condition that the nude
performers do not move so it can be considered art.)