Susan Sontag would not have been happy about Regarding Susan Sontag. “I have no illusions that she would like this film,” said Nancy Kates, the doc’s director, at a screening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. “Susan didn’t believe in biography, so she would say the whole enterprise is nonsense.”
Still, anyone who, like me, has ever had flutters of an academic crush on Sontag will appreciate this account, which will air on HBO in fall 2014. Eight years in the making, Regarding Susan Sontag is as much a camp-filled romp as it is a solemn, clear-eyed take on the life of an outspoken public intellectual. Clips from Gremlins 2 and Bull Durham that name-drop the figure share the screen with authorities explaining why Sontag’s writings––on culture, photography, illness, and terrorism—remain hugely relevant today.
“[Sontag] wrote about low culture from a position within high culture,” says Kates in a director’s statement. The film supplies “visual metaphors for [Sontag’s] ideas” through stylized graphics and mash-up picture collages. To put it another way, the movie may be “a serious film about a serious person, but don’t be afraid to laugh,” she said while introducing the work at a screening Monday night.
In spending respectful time with Sontag’s philosophical, literary, and political works, the film champions her causes. Her strongly worded argument that 9/11 came about in response to US foreign policy lingers and hovers on the screen in bold writing. A media montage illustrates her prescient thoughts on image overload in modern life.
“[Sontag] was a total icon/role model for me,” said Kates, and the film also doesn’t shy away from the writer’s swoon-worthiness by at times, making her out to be the thinking person’s pinup.
The doc tells a mostly linear story: beginning with 6-year-old Susan scribbling away and feeling transcendent, like she’s “enlisting an army of saints” through her writing. Then it follows a life lived at a lightning pace: college at 15, marriage at 17, a child at 19. Sontag remembers “milk with vanilla flavor in it and peanut butter crackers” in childhood and escaping the “feathered nest” of domesticity to study philosophy at Oxford. She said she never liked being young and that she felt “more than enjoyment” at being alive—she felt happiness.
Cancer, war, the early loss of an already-lost father, bad reviews, and broken affairs punctuate the film. Sontag endured any life’s share of suffering, but she also experienced great loves, had rapturous sex, wrote penetrating criticism, maintained radical political commitments, and produced a son along with 20 books in her 71 years.
Sontag might not have believed in biography, but Kates “[likes] to think that if she came back from the grave, she would at least be respectful of the work we’ve put into it,” she said. The director acknowledges that the picture is incomplete (a discussion of fascist aesthetics didn’t quite make the cut), but “we couldn’t make a mini-series,” she said. “Or an opera, which is really what I think is called for.”
See more of Opening Ceremony's Tribeca coverage HERE![]()
Photo by Andy Ross, Courtesy of HBO
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Still, anyone who, like me, has ever had flutters of an academic crush on Sontag will appreciate this account, which will air on HBO in fall 2014. Eight years in the making, Regarding Susan Sontag is as much a camp-filled romp as it is a solemn, clear-eyed take on the life of an outspoken public intellectual. Clips from Gremlins 2 and Bull Durham that name-drop the figure share the screen with authorities explaining why Sontag’s writings––on culture, photography, illness, and terrorism—remain hugely relevant today.
“[Sontag] wrote about low culture from a position within high culture,” says Kates in a director’s statement. The film supplies “visual metaphors for [Sontag’s] ideas” through stylized graphics and mash-up picture collages. To put it another way, the movie may be “a serious film about a serious person, but don’t be afraid to laugh,” she said while introducing the work at a screening Monday night.
In spending respectful time with Sontag’s philosophical, literary, and political works, the film champions her causes. Her strongly worded argument that 9/11 came about in response to US foreign policy lingers and hovers on the screen in bold writing. A media montage illustrates her prescient thoughts on image overload in modern life.
“[Sontag] was a total icon/role model for me,” said Kates, and the film also doesn’t shy away from the writer’s swoon-worthiness by at times, making her out to be the thinking person’s pinup.
The doc tells a mostly linear story: beginning with 6-year-old Susan scribbling away and feeling transcendent, like she’s “enlisting an army of saints” through her writing. Then it follows a life lived at a lightning pace: college at 15, marriage at 17, a child at 19. Sontag remembers “milk with vanilla flavor in it and peanut butter crackers” in childhood and escaping the “feathered nest” of domesticity to study philosophy at Oxford. She said she never liked being young and that she felt “more than enjoyment” at being alive—she felt happiness.
Cancer, war, the early loss of an already-lost father, bad reviews, and broken affairs punctuate the film. Sontag endured any life’s share of suffering, but she also experienced great loves, had rapturous sex, wrote penetrating criticism, maintained radical political commitments, and produced a son along with 20 books in her 71 years.
Sontag might not have believed in biography, but Kates “[likes] to think that if she came back from the grave, she would at least be respectful of the work we’ve put into it,” she said. The director acknowledges that the picture is incomplete (a discussion of fascist aesthetics didn’t quite make the cut), but “we couldn’t make a mini-series,” she said. “Or an opera, which is really what I think is called for.”
See more of Opening Ceremony's Tribeca coverage HERE
Photo by Andy Ross, Courtesy of HBO