First session (13:00-15:00) | Back to programme
By Annie van den Oever
Laughter in the Dark (1938) is written by a film enthusiast, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1979), and it evokes some of his early cinema-going experiences in Petersburg in the 1910s; and Berlin in the 1920s: he was known to roar with laughter in the Berlin “cinemonkeys” [small neighborhood cinemas] of those day. Indeed, there is good reason to follow his example and laugh out loud when reading this novel. However, its original title, Camera Obscura (1932) also points at another option, an alternative reading strategy, evoking a much darker, grotesquely distorted (camera) image of the world “upside down”. In this paper, I will use the technical hypothesis of the grotesque as a starting point for some reflections on the early cinema-going practices of the 1920s and the radically different reading and value-attribution strategies invited by the novel.
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