Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
Susan Sontag's Promised Lands
by Jeanette Samyn
In an essay written for Vogue in 1974, Susan Sontag attempted to explain the impetus behind her latest film. She wrote: "This is what I tried to do in Promised Lands: represent a condition, rather than an action. Having that purpose in mind doesn't mean that the film isn't concrete. On the contrary, it has to be—particularly since part of my subject is war, and anything about any war that does not show the appealing concreteness of destruction and death is a dangerous lie." This idea of representing a condition rather than an action, rather than an event, is potentially problematic, yet it touches on a tension that underlies Sontag's film. For if the impulse behind Promised Lands is meant to be above all universal (for some, "apolitical"), it has more to say about a specific history than about war as a general "condition."
Shot in Israel at the close of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Promised Lands (1974) is Susan Sontag's third film, and her only documentary. Here, two Israelis—the physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who equates calls for Palestinian rights with hopes to rid Israel of all Jews; and the writer Yoram Kaniuk, who outlines a tragedy of two justified powers in an irresolvable conflict—elaborate their views on Israel's relationship with its neighbors. Sometimes, we watch Kaniuk and Ne'eman speak; otherwise, Sontag presents us with images of their Israel: charred bodies, young soldiers amongst tanks, men and women at the wailing wall, a gruesome wax museum presentation of Israeli history.
These images tend to walk the line between the beautiful and the grotesque. In so doing, they resonate with, yet diverge from, the images familiar to contemporary viewers. For if Sontag watches the grotesque and the beautiful converge, more familiar today are the two in polarized form: our stock images are of Palestinians reduced to subhuman conditions behind an "apartheid wall", on one hand, and Israelis flourishing in a fertile land bounded by a "security fence," on the other. So the modern Israeli supermarket we see in Promised Lands is today a more expansive and vibrant commodity culture; the line of Palestinians being searched has grown longer, or has simply become that of the caged Palestinian home; and a sublime new wall between Israel and the West Bank now vies for attention with the Wailing Wall we see in Sontag's film.
Sontag develops no clear narrative out of these pregnant images and voice-overs, and Promised Lands is ultimately tied together more by its themes than by any coherent worldview. In fact, Sontag's primary contribution here lies in her exploration of a series of (loosely historical) transformations: in terms of sound, her narrators stress how a population's homecoming becomes another's displacement; meanwhile, her camera lingers on the physical alterations wrought on the landscape by war and influxes of capital. Most poignant is the way in which the cooperative dream of a Zionist utopia segues into the camaraderie of the Israeli military "family." This theme is most fully developed by the liberal Kaniuk, who describes the Six Days War as a/the turning point for socialist dreams of a Jewish state. Overnight, he argues, the country became stronger, wealthier, more American—socialist hopes were superseded by the lure of commodity culture and capital. At this point, Sontag shifts to shots of high-rises and supermarkets, images that jar with the otherwise exoticized images she has presented us with thus far.
Tracing the beautiful and grotesque with characteristic good taste, Promised Lands documents the inscription of ideological, political, and economic transformations onto space, not just in wartime, but in its aftermath as well. In doing so, the film avoids being overly elliptical, even against Sontag's efforts to engage with war "in general." She presents her subject in terms of a recurring dialectic between hope and bloodshed, utopianism and possession, inclusion and exclusion, but does little either to press the relationship between the filmmaker/viewer and the apolitical voyeuse, and this is ultimately why the film is widely considered "apolitical." Yet in the end, it is not the film's world-view (which is wishy-washy, at best), but its unwitting historicizing impulse that makes it worth viewing.
Promised Lands compensates for not having a concrete "take" on Israel, and only middling insights on the "condition" at hand, with its archival impulse. But as a document it is more perhaps important than any film Sontag could have made on war "in general." In 1974, critics complained that Promised Lands revealed nothing new about Israel. Today, however, when the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and occupation are considered equally "tricky," Sontag's film allows its viewers to reconsider the conflict as an ongoing event with a modern history, and that, to say the least, is an achievement.