Camera obscura

No matter how beautiful the image in the camera obscura is, it is only an inverted picture of the real world. Nabokov's great novel, many of whose ideas were developed in "Lolita" written twenty-two years later. One of the key themes of this novel is the depiction of life. And one of the main means of depicting life is art, and first of all, since we are talking about the 20th century, cinema. Art critic Bruno Kretschmar, a successful connoisseur of painting and a respectable head of a family, meets Magda Peters, a poor young girl who works part-time as an usher and dreams of a career as an actress, in a cinema hall. The passion that flares up in him seems like a breath of fresh air, the only real feeling in a world of eternal lies, dogmas, conventions and rules. But, in fact, this is only an illusion, a distorted and inverted image of reality in the camera obscura. And Bruno will have to pay too high a price for this knowledge. The era of great illusions gives unlimited opportunities for contemplation and fantasy, but sooner or later the magical movie show ends, the beam of the film projector goes out, and the audience is left in complete darkness.