TS: Susan Sontag vs. Pauline Kael

Excellent book. I finally read Against Interpretation a couple of years ago, liked it a lot (sometimes reminded me of...Kael), and read her photography and cancer books years ago. I haven't read a lot of her film criticism, except what's in Against Interpretation. In any event, my vote is obvious.

Sontag's screen test is my favourite after Dylan's.

Had a little debate in my head whether it'd be you or Alfred who'd comment first in this thread.

What's so good about this book?

Well, I can think of two things right off the bat.

Seriously though, among other things, it's a great in-real-time representation of the internal canonizing battle between objectivity and subjectivity, between respect and love, between enlightenment and thrill.

And then add to that pile the obligatory diva worship.

I haven't read the book since publication. At the time it read like two discrete halves, with Seligman's affinity to Kael at times interfering with his analysis of Sontag. Lots of stray insights though.

Hmm...well I've read a fuck load of Sontag and a little Kael (must remedy this, says for the 100th time).

I don't know if I'm looking for worship rn.

Xp

I don't remember if the tone was worshipful, but at times it felt like confessions from a coterie member.

I have never read anything by Sontag. I assume In America is a good place to start?

Against Interpretation or her book on illness as a metaphor.

'On Photography' might be my favourite

Idk abt Sontag as a film crit. Her concentration on certain films is good but there is a lot of certainty.

Could she review Showgirls, is what I'm saying.

noooooo

I won't say she disliked pop culture but she mistrusted it.

Have read the book. I get that the two subjects trigger the same impulses in the author, but I don't see Sontag & Kael as being very similar at all in interests, approach, personality etc. Obv they were both interested in film, but coming from much different angles. Yes, the book deals with those differences, but it does get a little fan-ish. I tore through the book on a beach vacation once and while it's light enough for a beach read it also felt a bit thin and repetitive by the end. Not recommending against it though, I can see how people might respond to it.

Sontag didn't really like pop culture - I mean she didn't grow up with TV.

That's ok because of the other work she was doing and people she was writing about, except it then gets complicated wrt film. It's a problem if she couldn't review Showgirls.

post…in other words, as a compare & contrast thought piece, putting these two subjects together feels a bit random and mostly has to do with the author's fandom. Which is fine if that's what you want to read.

It is.

Dug that book as well.

Always have time for a Sontag foreword

I won't say she disliked pop culture but she mistrusted it.

What's not to mistrust?

Kael thought De Palma was a great filmmaker, Sontag appeared in Zelig. I'm not voting, but the choice is clear.

lol

It's a problem if she couldn't review Showgirls.

It's a problem for a film critic but that's not what Sontag was.

Kael is more interesting, tho I disagree w her a lot and the Kane thing is p unforgivable (and fresh in my mind after finishing My Lunches with Orson)

I know you know that of course but it's not a problem, is it?

Xp to me

Sontag's range was wider than a film critic's but film criticism was one of the things she did. I suppose most film writers have read her essays on Godard, Persona and so on. Her focus was narrow, not a problem if you are only doing arthouse cinema, but then again it led to that Death of Cinema piece, which does point to a problem.

Sontag's range = I mean that she wrote on a lot of non-film critics did.

Sontag's range = I mean that she wrote on a lot of non-film critics did.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, 9 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

trying to fix this :)

I wish Kael had written literary criticism. Her lapidary remarks on James, Forster, Woolf, etc are terrific.

in an old review of this book in the atlantic, despite an extended introduction covering the physical appearance of sontag and kael that includes the sentence "One of the most penetrating and suspicious critics of the allure of photography, she still gives terrific head shot", i thought this was worth thinking about:

Sontag takes it for granted that the Bresson films she cherishes and the literature that has made her are there for all time. So, of course, one re-reads, and goes in for subsequent viewings. And as one grows older, so the works change; new doors open within them. But Kael lived by this diktat: Don't see a movie, even one you love, again—in other words, don't let it grow, don't let yourself grow old, don't let movies pass into the cultural bloodstream except as sudden and shocking injections. And in a way, that was both the cross Kael elected to bear and the most interesting problem her career raises. Are films for keeps, or are they chance epiphanies that shine light on the moments of our lives?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/07/odd-couple/302993/

I admit that this is thing that I understand the least about Kael. Doesn't stop me from loving her, of course, but the presumption of infallibility is undoubtedly what so many people hate about critics when they (overwhelming) misinterpret their function.

Also, Kael did not follow her own rule to the letter.

I think she clarified in interviews that she might go back and see a movie again after the review was written, or after 5 or 10 years. But she did seem to suggest that her opinions seldom changed.

The notion that she wouldn't let movies grow old doesn't ring true. She wrote historical pieces too.

Kael often mentioned offhandedly her coming across a certain movie on TV and watching it, so Eric otm.

It's a dumb rule to even formulate in the first place so well done her for ignoring it?

I'm not sure she meant anything other than she didn't watch things twice for review.

Obviously anyone who's watched the same film at 20 and 40 notices it doesn't change, you do.

unless it's star wars or bladerunner lol

These days I treat Kael as one of the 20th century's best essayists and prose stylists, not so much an arbiter of taste.

I'm not sure she was ever more widely regarded as the inverse.

Kael definitely reviewed Sontag (Duet for Cannibals); I'm sure it's detailed in Seligman's book, but I can't remember whether Sontag ever wrote about Kael.

Seligman's defenses of Kael's attitudes toward homosexuality in cinema are rather too strenuous, and he really puts his foot in his mouth when, attacking a critic who wonders if Kael didn't also want blacks on film to eat watermelon and tap dance, he admits in an aside (I paraphrase, "I like tap dancing."

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol wow

I don't buy it.

Missed this poll. Would have voted Kael.

That's not very dilettantish.

The results don't surprise me. People generally love or hate Kael's writing--I'm guessing there are some Sontag votes driven by dislike of Kael but not the reverse.

I'm going to reread Seligman now that I've finished Benjamin Moser's lively, annoying Sontag bio. As an exercise in growing to recoil from your subject, it's fascinating though.

I wrote a long review which also serves as a reconsideration of Sontag's role in my development if anyone's interested.

The Janet Malcolm review of the Moser biog is really great, as expected

there's an upcoming james wolcott piece on sontag in the LRB, which i am looking forward to hate-reading lol

The Janet Malcolm review of the Moser biog is really great, as expected

― xyzzzz__,

agree

Thanks for the heads up xyzzzz, didn't know about the Malcolm piece. This sentence made me lol:

“They had sex on several occasions, in hotels. She had no problems telling me that,” Greg Chandler, an assistant of Sontag’s, had no problems telling Moser.

tbf tbf tbf the james wolcott piece is better than i expected: more fondly affectionate than disdainfully glib and quipping (his usual exhausting setting) and actually not bad on what a genuine complex and often misguided figure SS was (it doesn't really tackle the rights and wrongs of many of her aesthetic judgments, which i wd expect JW to be not great at, ftb disdainfully glib and quipping

recent AO Scott piece was p good in NYT Mag

I don't think many of the reviews have done much of this is what she was/wasn't good at, in terms of judgement. iirc Merve Emre said she was no big deal at one point, but just sorta left it there.

hey, I'm reading The Case of Comrade Tulayev at her rec.

Her essay on Serge is very good on all this. I got a lot from it in terms of Sontag at her best, and possibly at her worse.

i stan for her historical bodice-rippers and one day i will read them possibly: "the flowery adulation she received from the volcano lovers led to another eruption of ego. She vaporised the Israeli writer David Grossman for the unpardonable faux pas of praising her essays. ‘My essays?’ she spat. ‘Juvenilia! Have you read Volcano?’"

The biography records a moment (maybe the one you noted, mark) when she insisted on being called a novelist, not an essayist.

Still waiting for that Kael documentary to show up here.

a full 25 yrs between the bodice-rippers and her earlier unfunny* fiction (death kit etc): VMIC for her to have insisted on this twice imo

*no i haven't opened these either, they're on the shelf next to bloom's SF masterpiece

I just finished The Benefactor, which is fascinating as a study of human behavior as if by an Earthsea sociologist.

Kael doc opens in NYC around Christmas, expect rollout early next year.

Her writing excerpts in it are voiced by Sarah Jessica Parker.

The doc's fine, nothing to get enthusiastic about, but it's nice to watch it in a theater.

Remember when she accepted the Jerusalem Prize after Edward Said asked her not to https://t.co/8i9Z9nbogQ

— fuck “latinidad” 🇵🇸 (@ytnessisdeath) August 17, 2024

Kael is probably more of a go to for me. Sontag I have a lot of affection for though, but feel like I need to go to graduate school before I get the great majority of her stuff.

Re Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others” is my favorite of her books.