Thoth distribution@thoth.pub 20260826T224605

urn:uuid:33d0a518-f82b-46e0-939b-bb4c7b9fb62f 03 01 01 urn:uuid:33d0a518-f82b-46e0-939b-bb4c7b9fb62f 15 9781685711610 06 10.53288/0475.1.00 00 EB E107 10 Creative Commons License 02 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 01 01 Alone in the Dark Cinephilia and the Heroic Imagination 1 A01 21 0000-0002-0459-450X Doug Dibbern First edition. 01 eng 00 156 03 B2 Autotheory 10 BIO026000 12 BM 93 DNC 12 APFA 10 ART057000 93 ATFA B2 Cultural Studies+Critical Theory B2 Moving Image 01 06 03 00 <p><italic>Alone in the Dark</italic> is an experimental memoir – or perhaps, more accurately, an anti-memoir or fabulist memoir, some unruly combination of essay, prose poem, and floating reverie that examines the relationship between one’s cultural heritage and one’s aesthetic devotions. Unlike a traditional autobiography that details the chronological events of a person’s life, the book begins with the obsessive moviegoing of Dibbern’s early years in New York and then unfurls as a fevered rumination on the role that an excessive love of art plays in shaping ideas about one’s identity.</p><p>The book opens with the American premiere of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s harrowing, eight-hour-long magnum opus <italic>Sátántangó</italic> in 1998 as an emblematic cinephile experience. Dibbern then frames the book by asking, why would anyone devote the bulk of their waking hours to such a compulsive pursuit of a seemingly passive experience of art? Sitting alone in a darkened movie theater, he suggests, is not a passive, but a creative act: developing an aesthetic taste, after all, is central to defining our identities. And taste is the product of two contradictory impulses: the will to simultaneously embrace and escape the values of our cultural backgrounds that made us who we are.</p><p>With these conjectures as the jumping-off point, the book commences its discursive explorations, wending and weaving between topics as diverse as Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s <italic>Ordet,</italic> old family photo albums, nineteenth-century immigration to North Dakota, the actress Gena Rowlands’s histrionic mental breakdowns, the self-portraits that the Mandan chief Mato-Tope made in the 1830s, and the dizzyingly joyful suicidal games in Howard Hawks’s film about aviation,<italic> Only Angels Have Wings.</italic></p> 20 00 Open Access punctum books 01 punctum books Earth, Milky Way 04 01 20240415 2024 06 15 9781685711603 06 15 9781685711610 09 punctum books 29 Publisher's website: download the title https://books.punctumbooks.com/10.53288/0475.1.00.pdf 99 01 09 punctum books 02 Publisher's website: web shop https://punctumbooks.com/titles/alone-in-the-dark-cinephilia-and-the-heroic-imagination/ 99 01