David Denby has a good piece in the
New Yorker this week, the rather self-explanatorily titled "The Moviegoer: Susan Sontag's life in film." He of course begins by discussing Sontag's 1995 essay, "A Century of Cinema," in which the late critic bemoaned not only the decline of international art cinema but the decline of cinephilia as a necessary intellectual and social endeavor in general. From there Denby jumps backwards, tracing the development of Sontag's thinking with regards to art and politics as it appears through the lens of the movies she championed.
In this passage, Denby hits on what seems to me to be a particularly acute observation about directors in general while discussing the artistic failures of Sontag's own two features,
Duet for Cannibals and
Brother Carl:
"Sontag had run afoul of a banal but inescapable problem. A critic-aesthetician may campaign for the dissolution of realism in narrative, but there's no getting away from the glory and curse of the movies: cinema is a photographic medium in which people appear to be moving through real space in real time. That, of course, is an illusion, but the medium, apart from the genre of poetic experimental films, poses an immediate demand for authoritative representation that no other art is burdened by. The camera remorselessly revealed Sontag's inadequacy to represent anything at all. Watching
Duet for Cannibals, with its clumsy sexual fantasias and its possible dream sequences, one understands that to be a good fantasist one first has to be a good realist."
Comments (4)
Where'd you guys go? No more posting?
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posted by michael @ 9/21/2005 11:34 AM
Scott, I've liked Denby's reviews in years past when I've read them. But this article, especially read on-line, was turgid, laborsome and cryptic. At any rate it never explored Sontag as a filmmaker. It tried to talk about some obscure intersect between her critic role and her documentary flops. However, it didn't work out either way. The part about the realist and the fantasist is not developed, though I think this is your (interesting) point here re. directors. It's kind of funny because it reminds me of William Burroughs (referenced in Denby's article) I think (this is totally from memory so could be wrong) saying in that book "Junky" that the most serious junkies or escapists are the most boring and mundane of people ! Cheers, Philippa
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posted by @ 9/21/2005 6:00 PM
Hi Philippa,
I'm not the hugest Denby fan, actually, but this one paragraph from the piece popped out as an interesting point about directors in general. Like a lot of stuff posted here, it struck me as something not so much about the subject at hand (Sontag), but as something relevant to me when I'm looking at the scripts of younger directors, especially ones trying to push the boundaries of film realism. His observation here struck me as a good explanation of why some are able to pull it off and others not.
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posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/25/2005 2:43 PM
Scott, From what you are saying, it sounds like some young directors would repeat Sontag's mistakes if able to get their scripts approved and sold - trying out flights of fancy before she had the substance of realism down as a craft.
I think Denby actually commends one of her political documentaries but I wondered how she managed to get her films made at all.
I also wonder about artists' use of realism (across genres) today and whether students of film would best learn how to be realists by making documentaries before attempting other kinds of storytelling. Seems to make sense..
Philippa
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posted by @ 9/25/2005 6:41 PM
