Nancy Kates’s documentary on one of the most influential women in contemporary culture features interviews with Susan Sontag and her contemporaries, and rare footage documenting her life and the life of the New York intellectual scene of the 1960s to the 1980s.
A brilliant author and essayist, one of the key twentieth century thinkers to have written on literature, art, politics, and women’s rights—in the documentary by Nancy Kates, Susan Sontag is an almost monumental figure, equally passionate in her private and public life and ready to defy many social taboos. As much as it is a biography—tracing Sontag’s development from a young author, through early marriage and the invention of the term ‘camp’, to a mature author and openly bisexual political activist—it is also an overview of her ideas on death, sexuality, and discrimination of women. Apart from Sontag herself, the film features appearances by Andy Warhol, choreographer and actress Lucinda Childs, director Agnès Varda and Sontag’s partner during the last fifteen years of her life, photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Sontag’s key collections of essays Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977) Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), as well as two volumes of her journals and notebooks—Reborn and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh—have been published in Russian by Garage and Ad Marginem Press.
Regarding Susan Sontag
Dir. Nancy Kates, 2014, USA, 100 min
16+
