Susan Sontag's Trip to Israel: Promised Lands
5-10 February 2010 - 7PM*
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003
$9
The rare re-release of a film directed by Susan Sontag (1933-2004), her third, and her first and only documentary. Sontag fashioned herself a storyteller, but it was her non-fiction--criticism and essays--which set her apart. Susan Sontag was a great cinephile, and her writings on cinema remain today some of the most incisive of the 20th century. She famously declared the death of cinephilia in 1996, as well as cinema's both decadence and decay. Fourteen years later, it's hard to argue, and at times no longer seems worth it to try.
In 1968 Sontag wrote the great essay "Trip to Hanoi" (released as a monograph in 1968, and collected a year later in Styles of Radical Will), about her own conflicts as an American intellectual--and sympathizer with third world liberation--being an invited guest of North Vietnam. One of the themes of many of the Red Channels screenings has been this idea of "revolutionary tourism," as filmmakers take their cameras to far-away lands to try to capture and later broadcast some truth--for themselves, for the audience, and perhaps even for their subjects. It is from this place we should look at Sontag's Promised Lands, the filmed document of her "Trip to Israel" in 1973, during and after the Yom Kippur War.
In lieu of the discussions Red Channels normally tries to have after our screenings, we will be inviting a number of people to write about Promised Lands in a new online magazine we are launching as part of our project.
--Promised Lands - Susan Sontag, 1974, 87 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes | BetaSP Projection
Curated, distributed, and presented by Jake Perlin and the Film Desk.
Anthology Film Archives
The Film Desk
*Additional showtimes:
Friday February 5 - 7:00@ & 9:00PM
Saturday February 6 – 5:00, 7:00# & 9:00PM
Sunday February 7 – 5:00, 7:00 & 9:00PM
Monday February 8 - 7:00% & 9:00PM
Tuesday February 9 – 7:00 & 9:00PM
Wednesday February 10 - 7:00 & 9:00PM
@ Introduced by critic Melissa Anderson
# Introduced by critic Ed Halter
% Introduced by artist Paul Chan