Preface: what flies at dusk.- Part 1 - Film and Film: Spirituality and comparative cinema.- Chapter 1 - On the cin?philia of Paul Schrader's First Reformed.- Chapter 2 - Elective Affinities of Krzysztof Kieślowski's 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; Polański 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-Dong's Burning.- Chapter 11 - Ruins in literature and film.