Nick Harris
10/10/2024
A Century of Cinema Revisited
According
to Philip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag, Susan Sontag’s most successful work
was possibly her early writings on film. She challenges film viewers and
critics alike with the heralding of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 60s,
the campiness of slapstick, and an inherent sense of feminine ownership. Her
later essay (1995) “A Century of Cinema” encapsulates her views by centering on
a few important films to her theory of what film could be to contemporary culture.
These films include, though not in a major fashion, Antonioni’s L’Avventura
from 1960 which I have commented on in my early blogs in this venue. I am
always quick to point out the influence of Sontag to my thinking in terms of
ethics applied to art, whatever the medium. This was especially true in my
comments on L’Avventura, wherein I spoke of image as symbol creating a
visceral reaction from the viewer. These blood-churning reactions to images as
they reflected on large screens in dark halls enhanced Sontag’s view of film
criticism, making her aesthetic one both of popular shouts and whistles and of
critical mind-bending philosophies.
Sontag writes seriously of cinema and its
loss of meaning to contemporary movie-goers.
She attacks the concept that cinema-as-art and cinema-as-entertainment
should be separate considerations as they are in the contemporary world (“A
Century of Cinema” 1090). What she terms “Cinephilia,” or love of film as
artistic beauty, is not a part of most contemporary movie-going experience
because movie viewers of today do not agree with the basic tenet of
film-as-beauty. “For by the very range
and eclecticism of its passions, cinephilia cannot help but sponsor the idea of
the film as, first of all, a poetic object”
(1096). Sontag is seriously
investigating the meaning of film viewing; if the “movie viewers of today” were
to do the same thing, Sontag’s position most likely would be their reluctance
to go any further than film as metaphor or catch-phrases such as “This film
stands for freedom.”
The irony of her attitude is that Sontag is a
herald of postmodernism. The film movements
she mentions prominently in her essay include those of the mid 1950s wherein
the financial accreditations of
Hollywood were aschewed by a new wave of Italian and French diretors. The
social films of Italians such as Bertolucci and Rossellini and the French New
Wave films of Godard and Trufaut and, an especial favorite of Sontag’s,
Brossard. These were stark black-and-white films made on small budgets using
crude plots, often from dime novels, to show a reality that Hollywood had been
running away from for decades and which was running the studio system of
Hollywood into oblivion (see “A Century of Cinema” 1094). But Sontag saw these
films as heralds of an era. It was the 1950s European experiments with surreal narrative
and complex realism that created an atmosphere wherein “going to movies, thinking
about movies, talking about movies became a passion of university students and
other young people” (1094). Experimental forms with narrative were a herald of
modernism, but in these films, that modernism began to take on a new
perspective, one which turned against the commonplace Hollywood cinema and its
obsession with “greatness” and more toward the gritty yet surreal lives of
everyday people caught in harsh situations that defied the faux-worlds of
Hollywood.
Her seminal work “Against Interpretation”
argues that traditional modernist views miss the point of artistry by concentrating
on obscure concepts of content and not celebrating visceral reactions to form
(3-4). Even in this early work Sontag
relies heavily on cinema. Making her
point in respect to the filmmaker Alain Resnais, she says, “But the temptation
to interpret Marienbad (Last Year at Merienbad, 1963) should be
revisited. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable,
sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions
to certain problems of cinematic form” (9).
Hers is a serious postmodernist viewpoint.
In
her 1963 innocence, Sontag became not so much an attacker of modernism as a
foreteller of postmodernism (MacFarquar par. 6). Later in the Sixties she would
interpret the films of Godard with phrases like “rapid turnover of styles and
forms”, “daring efforts at hybridization”, “insouciant mixtures of tonalities,
themes and narrative methods” (Sontag, 1968 236). With these words Sontag could have been
defining her own brand of postmodernism.
In “A Century of Cinema” she explores the history of film and film’s
beauty by such a mixture of tonality, theme and narrative, and thus confirms
the characteristic postmodernism of her writings.
Sontag’s
viewpoint of the moviegoer, therefore, is not one of condescension, as her
attitude might suggest, but rather a call to action of the power of the viewer.
In “A Century of Cinema,” the reader
discovers a message on film aesthetic that speaks to the casual viewer. True art is not dependent on any relationship
with a cheesy metaphor but comes about through an independent process based on
the comfort of one’s own attitudes.
Critics such
as Larissa McFarquar describe Sontag as peculiarly ambivalent, loving pop
culture, but for loftier philosophical reasons (MacFarquar par 4). Even in “A Century of Cinema” she presents a
quick overview of a popular idiom but does so by calling forth its most
esoteric elements, foreign to the pop culture of many contemporaries, including
her readers. But she seriously investigates the love of film and defining a
film aesthetic that reflects a societal aesthetic. Her postmodernism encompasses the range of
pop culture and complex aesthetic philosophy. Film is a pop phenomenon and a
serious means toward poetic statement, and this is not, as McFarquar would have
it, a negative criticism.
References.
Lopate, Phillip. Notes
on Sontag. Princeton University Press, 2009.
MacFarquar,
Larissa. “Premature Postmodern” Nation Oct. 16, 1995 261:12 432-36. review of Liam
Kennedy Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion.
retrieved on 12/03/07 http://galenet.galegroup.com.proxy.tui.edu/servlet/GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=D ataType&n=10&l=d&c=2&locID=vol_m761j&secondary=false&u=CA&u=CLC&u=DL B&t=KW&s=1&NA=Sontag&TX=postmodernism
McGowan, Jack.
“Postmodernism” in Johns
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation” in Against
Interpretation & Other Essays NY: Farrarr, Strauss & Giroux 1963 3-14.
“A
Century of Cinema” in Norton Reader Peterson and Brereton, eds. 11th
edition NY: Norton 2004
1090-1096 (Originally written for the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in 1995.)
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