Browsing by Author "Dibbern, Doug"

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Open Access
Alone in the Dark: Cinephilia and the Heroic Imagination
(punctum books, 2024-04-15) Dibbern, Doug
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.
Open Access
Cinema's Doppelgängers
(punctum books, 2021-06-17) Dibbern, Doug
Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema – or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, and thus a world in which Sergei Eisenstein never made movies and German filmmakers like Fritz Lang never fled to Hollywood, a world in which the talkies were invented in 1936 rather than 1927, in which the French New Wave critics didn’t become filmmakers, and in which Hitchcock never came to Hollywood. The book attempts, on the one hand, to explore and expand upon the intrinsically creative nature of all historical writing; like all works of fiction, its ultimate goal is to be a work of art in and of itself. But it also aims, on the other hand, to be a legitimate examination of the relationship between the economic and political organization of nations and film industries and the resulting aesthetics of film and thus of the dominant ideas and values of film scholarship and criticism.