Susan Sontag

A marked advance on Sontag’s first two films (Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl) in terms of imagination and cogency, this personal essay about contemporary Israel reflects much of the same passion and intelligence to be found in her non-fictional prose. Addressing itself to tragic and contradictory elements in the state of Israel itself rather than a broader consideration of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it intermittently suggests the influence of Russian documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov in its use of sound and grasp of visual syntax. But while many of Vertov’s works are songs of celebration, Promised Lands – through statements by a novelist, physicist, psychiatrist, and a harrowing final sequence of a soldier being ‘treated’ for shock – is closer to the feeling of a scream. Like some of Sontag’s other work, it may suffer from an attraction to morbidity that detracts from a wholly lucid exposition. – Time OutRead More »

Two women, Karen (theatre director) and Lena, visit an island, a Swedish resort, where Lena’s ex-husband, Martin (choreographer), lives in comparative seclusion with a mentally disturbed ballet dancer named Carl. Carl is brother by guilt rather than blood, for Martin is somehow responsible for his breakdown.Read More »

The directorial debut of famed American writer, philosopher, and political activist Susan Sontag is an intriguing tale of two couples involved in academia and politics. Artur is a professor living in exile in Sweden with his enigmatic wife Francesca. He hires young Tomas to help prepare a compendium of his works, but Tomas soon suspects that there is an erotic side to his new assignment. New York Times critic Vincent Canby described Duet as “intriguing, surprising, witty and sinister to the end.”Read More »

NY Times website:
“Regarding Susan Sontag,” a documentary Monday night on HBO, will fill you in on a lot of the details of its subject’s life: her precocity, her travels, her illnesses, her lovers. (Particularly her lovers.)

What it won’t give you is any strong sense of her work. The famous essays and collections of criticism and analysis — “Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation,” “On Photography,” “Illness as Metaphor” — are used as mile markers, along with the less famous novels and films. But rather than tackle Ms. Sontag’s ideas or their value head-on, the director, Nancy Kates, continually deflects the discussion along other lines: Ms. Sontag as closeted bisexual, serial heartbreaker, liberal provocateur, narcissist, celebrity, camera subject, Jew, cancer survivor.Read More »

““Somebody dies,” says John Berger. “It’s not just a question of tact that one then says, well, perhaps it is possible to tell that story,” but “it’s because, after that death, one can read that life. The life becomes readable.” His interlocutor, a certain Susan Sontag, interjects: “A person who dies at 37 is not the same as a person who dies at 77.” True, he replies, “but it can be somebody who dies at 90. The life becomes readable to the storyteller, to the writer. Then she or he can begin to write.” Berger, the consummate storyteller as well as thinker about stories, left behind these and millions of other memorable words, spoken and written, when he yesterday passed away at age 90 himself.Read More »