Afterglow

I read Vladimir Nabokovs' Lolita sometime last year and I was enthralled by it's intoxicating use of lyrical descriptions and long, uninterrupted tangents of thought. I only wanted to watch the film after I had finished reading it to see how Director Stanley Kubrick had envisioned this controversial love affair between Literary scholar Humbert Humbert and his 12 year old step-daughter Dolores "Lolita" Haze. The 1962 version incorporates a screenplay written by Nabokov himself, sustaining the genuine nature of the classic novel without ever compromising it's content for theatrical pleasure.


The movie was highly enjoyable though it did occur to me that it was a quick skim through a intensely rich and, at times, traumatic love affair between Humbert and his divine 'nymphet', omitting crucial scenes that developed both the story and the emotional arc in which Humbert would be pulled through in order to prove his infatuation and loyalty. Converting a novel to film format obviously requires careful deliberation, sometimes requiring dramatic changes to the story. What works in a book may not necessarily work onscreen and vice versa. But in this case, it was a carefully constructed and beautifully executed projection.

Film Count: 94 out of 365

Afterglow