The Books of My Life: Lolita

When I was a teenager and a twentysomething lover of cinema, Stanley Kubrick was one of the great auteurs of the cinephilic world. I have long had a kind of comme ci comme ça relationship with the films of Stanley Kubrick. On the one hand, I recognise the incredible beauty and studied composition of the Kubrick cinematic image and frame. Kubrick was once a photographer after all. On the other hand, I have long thought that Kubrick's characters were too stereotypical and cliched and that he (and most of his collaborators) could not write well rounded female characters to save their lives. In Kubrick films women are femme fatales, pin up girls, screamers, or the objects of male hatred. Finally, I have never quite been able to look past the studied and unleavened misanthropy of Kubrick's films and their often far too sophomoric humour.

Richard Corliss's monograph for the BFI Film Classics series on the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film Lolita (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1994), offers an interesting exploration of that film through a series of related fragments. Corliss explores the adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from novel to film, gives readers a brief biography of both Nabokov and Kubrick, explores the visual qualities of the Kubrick film, explores how the adaptation of Lolita by Kubrick fits with the themes of Kubrick's other film work, explores the casting of the film, explores acting in the film, and engages the issue of censorship, which limited what Kubrick could do in his film adaptation of Lolita.

Corliss's monograph is an interesting study of a film seems to have been caught in the no man's land of that era just before the censorship regime of Hollywood broke down under the impact, at least in part, of foreign cinema in the US. I recommend it to anyone interested in Kubrick and Nabokov.