Director: Nancy Kates | USA | Documentary | 2014 | 101 mins
Film source: The Film Collaborative
Sponsor: Judy Gerber
“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” Susan Sontag remained attentive and eager throughout her life and career as one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. Investigating Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words, read by actress Patricia Clarkson, the documentary is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism still resonate today. More than any other thinker of her day, Sontag was watched, viewed, photographed and stared at. She was gazed at, and she looked back, attentively and eagerly, particularly at language and metaphor and at photography and what she called “the ecology of images.”