Technology
Film adaption
Relying on Nabokov's controversial book -Lolita, the famous film director Stanley Kubrick created the first "visible" Lolita. The film adaptation is a visual display of the original novel, and it is also a kind of technical form and extension of the preservation of the novel. The remake of a film is just an example of widespread use, which can be said to be the spread of the image of Lolita. It is precise because of Nabokov's use of words that he can describe desires without the erotic effects that photography inevitably produces (Naremore 2014, 104). However, the production of the movie is the opposite of the text.
Techniques used in the film adaptation
The 1996 Lolita film was mainly based on black and white tones. Many lens languages were used in the film to express the visual image of the characters in the book. Take Humbert's first encounter with Lolita as an example. The camera slowly shifted from Humbert to Lolita, giving Lolita a close-up (Watts, 2001). The lens falls on Lolita's beautiful body. Due to the blessing of shadows and highlights, Lolita's whole body is very alluring. The conversion and movement of the camera make Lolita's image sexy.
The visual presentation is more impactful than the text. The audience might combine the image of Lolita in the movie with the Lolita in the book. This caused the audience's view that the young girl's body evoked the desire for sex in the middle-aged Humbert. The lens techniques used in the movie have affected the audience's understanding of the book's content to a certain extent, leading the audience to think that the novel is a selfish pedophile fantasy.