Alone in the Dark
Alone in the Dark 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 autobiog...
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| Format: | Online |
| Language: | English |
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Punctum Books
2024
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| Online Access: | https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89825 |
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| _version_ | 1869516839904608256 |
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| author | Dibbern, Doug |
| author_browse | Dibbern, Doug |
| author_facet | Dibbern, Doug |
| author_sort | Dibbern, Doug |
| collection | Directory of Open Access Books |
| description | Alone in the Dark 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.
The book opens with the American premiere of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s harrowing, eight-hour-long magnum opus Sátántangó 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.
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 Ordet, 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, Only Angels Have Wings. |
| format | Online |
| id | doab-20.500.12854ir-136436 |
| institution | Directory of Open Access Books |
| language | eng |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publishDateRange | 2024 |
| publishDateSort | 2024 |
| publisher | Punctum Books |
| publisherStr | Punctum Books |
| record_format | ojs |
| spelling | doab-20.500.12854ir-1364362025-07-18T09:46:58Z Alone in the Dark Dibbern, Doug cinema;memoir;experimental criticism;cinephilia;cinematography;Béla Tarr;Carl Theodor Dreyer thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism Alone in the Dark 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. The book opens with the American premiere of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s harrowing, eight-hour-long magnum opus Sátántangó 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. 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 Ordet, 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, Only Angels Have Wings. 2024-04-16T04:07:07Z 2024-04-16T04:07:07Z 2024-04-15T07:45:56Z 2024 book https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89825 9781685711603 https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/136436 eng open access image/jpeg Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/89825/1/0475.1.00.pdf Punctum Books 10.53288/0475.1.00 10.53288/0475.1.00 9528137b-bd0f-4bee-8262-f1c8096922a3 9781685711603 157 Brooklyn, NY open access |
| spellingShingle | cinema;memoir;experimental criticism;cinephilia;cinematography;Béla Tarr;Carl Theodor Dreyer thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism Dibbern, Doug Alone in the Dark |
| title | Alone in the Dark |
| title_full | Alone in the Dark |
| title_fullStr | Alone in the Dark |
| title_full_unstemmed | Alone in the Dark |
| title_short | Alone in the Dark |
| title_sort | alone in the dark |
| topic | cinema;memoir;experimental criticism;cinephilia;cinematography;Béla Tarr;Carl Theodor Dreyer thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism |
| topic_facet | cinema;memoir;experimental criticism;cinephilia;cinematography;Béla Tarr;Carl Theodor Dreyer thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNC Memoirs thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism |
| url | https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89825 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT dibberndoug aloneinthedark |