This book comprises what may be called exercises in comparative cinema. Its focus on endings, near-endings and late style is connected with the authors argument that comparative criticism itself may constitute an endgame of criticism, arising at the moment at which societies or individuals relinquish primary adherence to one tradition or medium. The comparisons embrace different works and artistic media and primarily concern works of literature and film, though they also consider issues raised by the interrelationship of language and moving and still images, as well as inter- and intra-textuality. The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kielowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Polaski, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

Paul Coates is an Emeritus Professor in the Film Studies Programme at Western University, Canada. He also taught at McGill, Georgia and Aberdeen. His books include studies of the novel, Symbolist poetry, Polish and German cinema, colour, the double, and the face in film.

Preface: what flies at dusk.- Part 1 - Film and Film: Spirituality and comparative cinema.- Chapter 1 - On the cinéphilia of Paul Schraders First Reformed.- Chapter 2 - Elective Affinities of Krzysztof Kielowskis Red: Curzio Malaparte and Naomi Kawase.- Part 2 - I would like to escape this story: creative betrayal.-Chapter 3 - Some thoughts on adaptation.- Chapter 4 - Bergman and Sophocles; Polaski and Euripides.- Chapter 5 - Persona in the mirror of literature.- Chapter 6 - Ghosts of dramas past.- Chapter 7 - The pre-modernist moment: I would like to escape this story.- Chapter 8 - System and structure in The Crying of Lot 49 and How one sees.- Part 3 - Imagination and disaster.- Chapter 9 - Imagination and disaster: The Sweet Hereafter of Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan.-Chapter 10  - Modernist metaphors: love and fire in Lee Chang-DongsBurning.- Chapter 11 - Ruins in literature and film.