Despair

Glasgow-based artist Stephen Sutcliffe's film Despair (2009) is inspired by and titled after the 1934 Vladimir Nabokov novel, a story of mistaken physical resemblance, murder and identity theft. Nabokov's themes of power and delusion, doubling and gameplay are anchored in Sutcliffe's collage through a prismatic treatment of visual material and sound. Sutcliffe quotes a parade of society portraits, photocopied handouts from a lecture series entitled 'Theories of Montage,' and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 adaptation of the novel in a dense sequence punctuated by baroque music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully for the seventeenth century French king, Louis XIV.