- Born
- Died
- Birth nameSusan Rosenblatt
- Height1.75 m
- 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, Duo pour cannibales (1969) and Bröder Carl (1971), both shot and produced in Sweden, bear clear influences of Bergman's reflections about the impossibility of human communication. Giro turistico senza guida (1984) 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.- IMDb mini biography by: Francesco Spagnolo Acht <101716.3115@compuserve.com>
- SpousePhilip Rieff(January 3, 1951 - 1959) (divorced, 1 child)
- She became an honorary citizen of Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia.
- Longtime companion of photographer Annie Leibovitz (from the mid 1980s until Sontag's death).
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 28th Venice International Film Festival in 1967.
- Spent much time in Bosnia during the 1990s. She directed "Waiting for Godot" in a theatre in bombed Sarajevo.
- She is interred at "Cimiterie Montparnasse" in Paris, France located in [Plot: Division 2, Section 2, 1 East, 28 North, concession number 3PA2005].
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content