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Susan Sontags 50 Favorite Films

(and Her Own Cinematic Creations)
in Film| December 4th, 2013 2 Comments

Susan Sontags fans would each describe her a little differently:

many would call her a writer, of course, though some would opt for
more specificity, calling her a novelist if they like her fiction or a
critic if they dont. Others, speaking more grandly, might prefer to
simply call her an intellectual. Under this wide umbrella Sontag
produced a variety of works for the page, the stage, and even the
screen. Between 1969 and 1983, she made four films: 1969s Duett
fr kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals), 1971s Broder Carl (Brother
Carl), 1974s Promised Lands, and, above, 1983s Unguided Tour,
also known as Letter from Venice. Sontag adapted the Italian-
language feature from her story of the same name, originally
published in 1977 in the New Yorker. Promised Lands, her only
documentary, meditates on Arab-Israeli relations at the end of the
Yom Kippur War. The Bergmanesque, symbolism-filled Brother
Carl takes place, suitably, at a Swedish island resort.

And her debut Duet for Cannibals, according to Dangerous Minds,

embodies or, if you like, cinematizes her touted distaste for the
interpretation of artworks. Sontag, they say, sought to liberate art
from interpretation (which is a bit ironic, of course, for someone
who was essentially an exalted critic). When it came to her own
film, she made something that intended to
deliberately confound the notion that there was any sort of
underlying meaning beyond exactly what the audience was seeing
on the screen directly in front of them.

Sontags famous 1966 essay Against Interpretation counts here as

essential reading, not just before you watch her own films, but also
before you watch through her list of favorite films. Richard Brody,
posting in the New Yorker, recommends accompanying it with The
Decay of Cinema, which Sontag wrote three decades later in
the New York Times, and in which she declares that you hardly
find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic
love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films
(grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as
possible of cinemas glorious past).

Reading over the top fifty films she considered the greatest back in
1977 (and published in her volume of journals As Consciousness is
Harnessed to Flesh), we find plenty of evidence Sontag herself,
unsurprisingly, had such a cinephilic love of and vast appetite for
movies, especially for European filmmakers but also the
best-known Japanese ones of the day:

1. Bresson, Pickpocket
2. Kubrick, 2001
3. Vidor, The Big Parade
4. Visconti, Ossessione
5. Kurosawa, High and Low
6. [Hans-Jrgen] Syberberg, Hitler
7. Godard, 2 ou 3 Choses
8. Rossellini, Louis XIV
9. Renoir, La Rgle du Jeu
10. Ozu, Tokyo Story
11. Dreyer, Gertrud
12. Eisenstein, Potemkin
13. Von Sternberg, The Blue Angel
14. Lang, Dr. Mabuse
15. Antonioni, LEclisse
16. Bresson, Un Condamn Mort
17. Gance, Napolon
18. Vertov, The Man with the [Movie] Camera
19. [Louis] Feuillade, Judex
20. Anger, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
21. Godard, Vivre Sa Vie
22. Bellocchio, Pugni in Tasca
23. [Marcel] Carn, Les Enfants du Paradis
24. Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai
25. [Jacques] Tati, Playtime
26. Truffaut, LEnfant Sauvage
27. [Jacques] Rivette, LAmour Fou
28. Eisenstein, Strike
29. Von Stroheim, Greed
30. Straub, Anna Magdalena Bach
31. Taviani bro[ther]s, Padre Padrone
32. Resnais, Muriel
33. [Jacques] Becker, Le Trou
34. Cocteau, La Belle et la Bte
35. Bergman, Persona
36. [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder, Petra von Kant
37. Griffith, Intolerance
38. Godard, Contempt
39. [Chris] Marker, La Jete
40. Conner, Crossroads
41. Fassbinder, Chinese Roulette
42. Renoir, La Grande Illusion
43. [Max] Ophls, The Earrings of Madame de
44. [Iosif] Kheifits, The Lady with the Little Dog
45. Godard, Les Carabiniers
46. Bresson, Lancelot du Lac
47. Ford, The Searchers
48. Bertolucci, Prima della Rivoluzione
49. Pasolini, Teorema
50. [Leontine] Sagan, Mdchen in Uniform

She was wrong, Brody writes of Sontags epitaph for her kind of
enthusiasm for film. Cinephilia was there, but, for certain practical
reasons, it was relatively quiet. Its not quiet anymore, and great,
distinctive movies were issuing from around the world. As ever,
the narrative of nostalgia for a lost golden age is really one of the
writers own nostalgia for youth but in her youth as well as
afterward, Sontag saw some astonishing movies indeed.

Find a wide range of avant-garde films in our collection, 1,150 Free

Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

via The New Yorker

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and

Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and
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