In Notes on Sontag, his refreshingly ambivalent consideration of Susan Sontag’s life and work, Phillip Lopate devotes a concise section to her film essays. Sontag was known for going to the movies nearly every day, but, as Lopate points out, her tastes changed in her final decade:
For Sontag, watching a movie had become too easy; it lacked agon. With a few exceptions: “Syberberg’s unprecedented ambition in Hitler: A Film from Germany is on another scale from anything one has seen on film. It is work that requires a special kind of attention and partisanship; and invites being reflected upon, reseen. … As was said ruefully of Wagner, he spoils our tolerance for the others.” Sontag’s championing of extra-long German films can be traced to her growing appetite for Gesamtkunstwerk on the Wagnerian scale (the Ring itself, and Robert Wilson’s productions, such as Einstein on the Beach, which she boasted of having sat through more than a dozen times). About Hitler, she wrote: “Its length is suitably exhaustive—seven hours; and, like the Ring, it is a tetralogy.” Even more “suitably exhaustive” was Fassbinder’s fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz. She seemed to rate an artwork in direct proportion to the number of hours it took to experience it. She was demonstrating, as she said about Artaud, a “taste for spiritual and physical effort—for art as an ordeal.” She had become the Queen of Sitzfleish.*
*A Yiddish word meaning the ability to apply one’s posterior to the seat for as long as it takes.
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