Written over the span of forty years (from the late 1970s to the present) and on various occasions (collaborations in magazines, participation in conferences, etc.), the texts in this volume serve as documents of a lifelong, passionate relationship between a viewer-reader and the divine darkness of the cinema: from Borges of Bertolucci and Conrad of Coppola to the solitary and eternal cinematic journey of Andrei Tarkovsky.

From decay and death in the films of Sam Peckinpah or the narratives of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais to the geometric spaces of Wim Wenders' films, the circles of Hitchcock and the horizon lines of Ford, from the noirs of Chabrol and the cosmogonic Citizen Kane of Welles to the pretentiously humble Word of Dreyer and the modestly pretentious Kenji Mizoguchi, as well as from Dimitris Mavrikios and Nikos Panayiotopoulos to Tonya Marketaki and Frida Liappa.

With generous panoramas or sparing close-ups, Achilles Kyriakidis dissects the cinematic language, the codes, and the symbolic arsenal of beloved filmmakers and films, exploring the characteristics of cinematic genres as well as the relationships between cinema and literature or the related arts of imagery (painting, photography).

Thirty-five transparent critiques structured by the pen of a versatile creator (writer, translator, screenwriter, filmmaker), focusing on the art of cinema, all of them pieces of an endless still mural puzzle about this marvelous adventure called art – or human life.