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 Out

1.32GB | 1h 26m | 716×537 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/34CF168F96E2ADB/Promised_Lands_(Susan_Sontag_1974).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Susan Sontag – Promised Lands (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

1.82GB | 1h 33m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/593487F481CAB90/Brother_Carl_(1971).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Susan Sontag – Bröder Carl (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.”

A university professor (Gosta Ekman) and his wife (Adriana Asti) hire a young man (Lars Ekborg) to help the professor arrange his papers for publication. The young man comes to live with the couple and leaves his mistress (Agneta Ekmanner) to take the position. The young man discovers very quickly that things are not quite right with the dysfunctional duo. He suspects the wife of trying to poison the professor, who mistreats and degrades his wife by humiliating her in front of the young man. The wife and the young man end up having sex while the professor goes after the young man’s mistress. Soon the men swap partners and the blur between reality and fantasy continues in this erotic and confusing feature.

3.40GB | 1h 45mn | 960×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/75B858B5A7F4322/Susan_Sontag_-_(1969)_Duet_for_Cannibals.mkv

Language:English, Swedish+commentary
Subtitles:English

The post Susan Sontag – Duett för kannibaler AKA Duet for Cannibals (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

There’s nothing wrong with a gossipy account of a full, glamorous life, and “Regarding Susan Sontag” provides that, in some measure. Anecdotes and observations are provided by a large cast that includes Ms. Sontag’s sister, Judith Sontag Cohen, and representatives of her impressive roster of girlfriends: Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Eva Kollisch, the choreographer Lucinda Childs, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. Frequent excerpts from her writing, read in voice-over by Patricia Clarkson, give a feel for her style if not her substance. And Ms. Sontag herself, with her striking good looks, heavy mane of hair and gravelly voice, is a presence throughout, having been among the most filmed and photographed of serious writers.

But there’s also something reluctant, slightly scolding and oddly funereal about the film, which begins with her saying, “I love being alive,” and ends with an account of her death from cancer at 71, in 2004.

The news that Ms. Sontag won a National Book Award (for the novel “In America”) is followed by someone saying, “Sometimes awards are given in recognition of a career as much as the merits of a particular book.” We’re told how bad her first novel was and how bad her first film was. When her body of work is directly addressed, it’s with faint praise like: “She had an unbelievably good sense of what was important,” and “It’s mannered and stylized, but that’s part of the fun of the package of Susan Sontag.”

You’re left with the feeling that Ms. Kates was drawn to Ms. Sontag as a personality and a sexual and political symbol but didn’t really take seriously the work she devoted her life to. That’s a defensible position, but it would have been better to take it head-on, the way Ms. Sontag would have.

https://nitro.download/view/40C4450D7284D2E/HBO.Documentaries.Regarding.Susan.Sontag.2014.HDTV.x264-BATV.mkv

Language(s):English, French
Subtitles:none

The post Nancy D. Kates – Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

““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.

This conversation aired 35 years ago as “To Tell a Story,” an hourlong episode of Channel 4’s Voices, “a forum of debate about the key issues in the world of the arts and the life of the mind.” Though Berger and Sontag surely agreed in life on more than they disagreed (“not since [D.H.] Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience,” the latter once said of the former), they here enter into a kind of debate about storytelling itself: why we do it, how we do it, when we can do it. Berger, for his part, characterizes all fiction as “a fight against the absurd,” against “that endless, terrifying space in which we live.”

Sontag, in the words of Lily Dessau at Berger’s publisher Verso, “considers the storyteller as inventor, in control of the material, out of which the ‘people come.’ Berger conversely takes the form of the story as the result of the language coming out of the people — but he does characterize their differing views as arriving at the same place — the scene of the text.” While both of them wrote fiction as well as essays, “Berger considers the story and essay in one breath, both as a form of struggle to model the unsayable,” while “for Sontag the two are entirely separate, although the struggle persists in both.”

Or, as Berger puts it in highlighting another aspect of the difference in their perspectives, “You say you want to be carried away by the story. I want the story to stop things being carried away into oblivion, into indifference.” The many tributes already paid to him, especially by influential creators formed in part by the influence of his work, indicate that Berger’s legacy hardly finds itself now on the brink of an indifferent oblivion. Now that his long life has reached the end of its final chapter, well, perhaps we can begin to read, and to tell, his story.”

https://nitro.download/view/FD73F55488BC587/John_Berger_and_Susan_Sontag___To_Tell_A_Story_(1983).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Berger and Susan Sontag – To Tell A Story [Voices] (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.