DISTRESSED IMAGE FROM REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG

A passion for living, for provocation, and for prose: Nancy Kates steers the way through the life and work of Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was a pubic intellectual and cultural icon who was also a private person. She never "came out" as a lesbian despite living in love with women for much of her life. She didn't want to be type-cast. She was glad to be given her stepfather's name and drop the very obviously Jewish one of Rosenblatt: she didn't identify as Jewish either. She may be the greatest American essayist of the last half of the twentieth century. Her paragraphs (and the sequences of them) are marvels of interlocking structure, works of art (almost) as beautifully made as a Bach suite. Though their lasting value may be uncertain and in later life she herself dismissed them, some of these writings are clearly seminal texts of American cultural history, as well as models of prose style: the "Notes on Camp," "Under the Sign of Saturn"; the essay-books On Photography, the somewhat misleadingly named Illness As Metaphor (about how illness should not be used as metaphor), and the somewhat coyly named Regarding the Pain of Others (about whether photographs can be used to prevent war: probably not). Her four novels (of which she told Charlie Rose she wish she'd written more) are widely debunked. In the late-Eighties movie Bull Durham Kevin Costner tells Susan Sarandon a core belief of his is that Susan Sontag's novels are "self-indulgent overrated crap." But later Sarandan replies, "Susan Sontag is brilliant!" She is, and that's why this film is worth watching.

My mother may have agreed with Sarandon (I would have): at least my mother had a quote on her refrigerator door from Sontag's The Volcano Lover about escaping from exile into the elsewhere of a book. Like Sontag, my mother loved books and reading and saw them as life's saving grace. Like her novels, Sontag's films (those four in number too) also tend to be dismissed; she just said she thought the critics were wrong. But she's a polymath, a multi-hyphenate, and glamorous as well as provocative and bold.

No better example of provocation and boldness than Sontag's declaration in The New Yorker in response to what the majority of the American pundits were saying after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. "This was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world,'" she wrote, "but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions." This has been said later, but Sontag dared to write it barely two weeks after the event. Kates cites this moment early on, as if to get it out of the way. It is obviously something Sontag-haters will bring up right away. Later, there is a clip showing William Buckley and his guest James Dickey dismissing Sontag on Buckley's "Firing Line."

In her film documentary Regarding Susan Sontag Nancy Kates does a remarkably smooth and deft job of taking viewers through Sontag's life and her work, slipping seamlessly back and forth from seminal essays and public appearances to lovers and the 29-year battle with three different cancers. These are the usual talking heads, including Susan's younger sister Judith, along with many, many clips and images of the much-interviewed and much-photographed Sontag. More of her prose and her ideas and less of her striking mane with the famous big streak of white -- handsome though the mane is -- would have been nice. And I am frankly not at all thrilled, after the first couple of times, with this film's repeated use of its own thematic interludes of parallel film collages of distressed archival images, which are too arty and too distracting. Nor does using the voice of the actress Patricia Clarkson whenever Sontag is quoted really work. The voice isn't strong enough, and Clarkson's readings create a sentimentalizing, reductive effect on the magisterial prose. The real Sontag never pleads for attention or sympathy. She assumes and demands it.

But this is a skillful condensation of a life that dazzles and arouses admiration and envy, even if the life is not at every moment admirable. Sontag was a sort of diva, and she put herself first. But would we rather she had stayed at home with her older academic husband, Philip Rieff, whom she'd married at 17, to take care of little David, instead of going to Oxford at 24, and then soon after switching to the University of Paris and living in Paris with her lesbian lover, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling? Somehow, not explained, she became fluent in French -- but not surprisingly, since for much of her life she spent half the year in Paris. Perhaps the love of Sontag's life, whom she lived with in the Seventies, was French, Nicole Stéphane, who starred in two of Jean-Pierre Melville's films and was the heiress daughter of the Baron de Rothchild. But she also had a Cuban lover, who'd been Zweerling's, Irene Fornés, and a German one, Eva Kollisch, who like Zwerling, is heard from on camera (Stéphane is dead, but her sister speaks). (All this and more will seem like gossip, but some literary lives are the stuff of scandal.)

A key moment is the publication of Sontag's long 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," which pointed straights the way to a wider, more complicated sense of what makes art. Her view of kitsch was more gay, more amused, more accepting, clearly than Nabokov's frequent, sometimes delighted, references to poshlust. Kates quotes the "Camp" essay: "The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony." This she skillfully presents as an example not only of Sontag's brilliance and originality but also of her domineering tone: it's laid down as if to say, "this is the way it is, take it or leave it." And maybe it's not the way it is. Nonetheless this essay made Sontag a literary celebrity who knew things, who was cutting edge.

More durable truths may be found in Sontag's later short book, On Photography, which (as Kates shows) points out how "Today everything exists to end in a photograph" -- a situation that has metastasizedd into current lives dominated by media, mainstream and social, and instant smartphone photographs, videos that go viral, Warhol's 15 minutes of fame (and he's shown photographing Sontag) replaced by a million hits. Interestingly, it's recounted here that when she'd finished On Photography, though she knew it might be her masterpiece, Sontag lamented "It's not as good as Walter Benjamin." Ah, Walter Benjamin: he was Sontag's idol, and as she looked over her life, this film tells us, she didn't think she'd lived up to her idols.

Fran Lebowitz is heard from only twice, but typically, she is sharp and to the point. She scorns those who criticize Sontag for not "coming out," saying that at their age it was often not even safe to. Then, she scorns Sontag's going to Sarajevo during the bombing. You don't end a war by directing Waiting for Godot, Fran says. Notably, Sontag had earlier gone to Hanoi, at the invitation of the North Vietnamese, while that war was on. But Sontag's activism seems mostly cosmetic, merely very rough tourism, though she did take stands.

The last chapter of Sontag's life, really a long one, is her 29-year battle with three different cases of cancer. The way she fought them, the last along with her final passionate friend, the photographer Annie Leibovitz, shows just how great was her rage to live, something that runs through this story and helps explain the verve and variety of Sontag's work and her many loves. (Her son David is heard from only briefly, speaking about her final illness. Her German girlfriend Eva Kollisch thinks when she was raising him, she "treated him as an equal" a little too early.)

Even skimming over the novels and barely landing on the films (two of the latter, the first and Promised Lands, she does touch on), Kates can't really do justice to all Sontag's ideas, though ultimately ideas are what she was and is about. This may be inevitable. Kates wasn't making an instructional film. She's gearing it to the intelligent art house or HBO crowd, to the same audience that likes magazine pieces that hold reader attention by spending as much time on how scientists or IT geniuses dress and talk and eat as on their work. But Regarding Susan Sontag goes deeper than a magazine profile, and Sontag's life is, in a way, one of her best works.

Still, the public personality of Susan Sontag can become cloying after a while, a fact this film takes account of. Waynes Koesterbaum ("poet and critic") points out that Sontag's seriousness and grandiosity are a little comic at times, but says that's part of the fun. This film is fun, but also cloying. The best remedy for this is to go and read Susan Sontag. Not the "over-rated crap," if there is some. The great essays.

This is a long review, but I've forgotten one of Sontag's lovers who appears on screen here, the New York dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs (when not in Paris Sontag lived in New York); the Wikipedia article mentions several others, Jasper Johns, Paul Thek, and Joseph Brodsky, so her bisexuality gets a bit skimmed over here. In a May 2000 Guardian interview Sontag mentions having loved in her life nine times, "Five women, four men." Kates just may possibly have a feminist and gay bias, though no one is shown here chastising Sontag for being herself.

Armond White hails Kates' record of Sontag's artistic humanism and contribution to gay culture in his Out magazine review.

Regarding Susan Sontag, 100 mins., debuted at Tribeca April 2014, and has shown at 18 other festivals according to IMDb. It will be shown on HBO TV Monday, 8 December 2014.


Iconic SS photo originally on cover of I, Etc.
according to Regarding Susan Sontag


Susan Sontag on Vanity Fair
cover 1983, photo by Irving Penn

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.