Susan Sontag
Birthday:
16 January 1933, New York City, New York, USA
Birth Name:
Susan Rosenblatt
Height:
175 cm
Born in New York City, raised in Arizona and California, educated at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne, Susan Sontag constitutes a veritable challenge for any biographer. A novelist, philosopher, essayist, movie director and playwright, over the past thirty years she has been a controversial figure, too snobby for many of ...
Show more »
Born in New York City, raised in Arizona and California, educated at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne, Susan Sontag constitutes a veritable challenge for any biographer. A novelist, philosopher, essayist, movie director and playwright, over the past thirty years she has been a controversial figure, too snobby for many of her critics, but always ready for a veritably "down to earth" engagement wherever and whenever human free expression is at stake (Vietnam, communist China, Bosnia).Among her essays, which are by far her most complete aesthetic achievement, many are devoted to Film, either to single movies (like Bergman's "Persona", Godard's "Vivre sa vie", Syberberg's "Hitler, a Film from Germany", but also Chaplin's "The Dictator" and Kubrick's "Doctor Strangelove"), directors (Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Leni Riefenstahl), or genders (Science Fiction). Her own films are deeply inspired by modernist style. The first two, Duett för kannibaler (1969) and Bröder Carl (1971), both shot and produced in Sweden, bear clear influences of Bergman's reflections about the impossibility of human communication. Unguided Tour (1983) is an elegiac documentary of a mental tour of melancholia, while "Promised Lands" is a shocking documentary about Israel/Palestine that managed to outrage both the pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians at the time of its release in the mid 1970's. Since she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1975 (which she eventually overcame during several years of treatment), she has been involved in thinking and writing about the role of disease (TB, cancer, AIDS) in contemporary Western society. Show less «
Cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms
Cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms
Perhaps no work of art *is* art. It can only *become* art, when it is part of the past
Perhaps no work of art *is* art. It can only *become* art, when it is part of the past
I think it was rock&roll the reason I got divorced. I think it was Bill Haley and the Comets and Chuck Berry that made me decide to get a di...Show more »
I think it was rock&roll the reason I got divorced. I think it was Bill Haley and the Comets and Chuck Berry that made me decide to get a divorce and leave the academic world Show less «
The youngest of the arts is also the most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, resurrect the be...Show more »
The youngest of the arts is also the most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, resurrect the beautifil dead; present, intact, vanished or ruined environments; enbody without ironu styles and fashions that seem funny today; solemnly ponder irrelevant or naive problems. The historical particularity of the reality registered on celluloid is so vivid that practically all films older than four or five years are saturated with pathos Show less «
One of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to th...Show more »
One of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there Show less «
The white race is the cancer of human history.
The white race is the cancer of human history.
I think what happened on September Eleventh was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that...Show more »
I think what happened on September Eleventh was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that I feel that way. But I do feel that the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy. Show less «
I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this e...Show more »
I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this enemy - it is an enemy and I'm not a pacifist. Show less «
On art: Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
On art: Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
