Sontag on Film

Sontag on Film

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Summary

Widely regarded as one of America's most important contemporary thinkers, Susan Sontag had a particular gift for reflecting on the meaning and influence of the visual, and On Photography became a seminal work for all those concerned with the interplay of images with the world.

Now, more than thirty years after On Photography was first published, comes Sontag on Film: a collection of her writings and musings on films and cinema, gathered together here for the very first time by critic David Thomson and producer Tom Luddy. Inspired, vigorous and enlightening, the collection includes lucid discussions of the intersection between film and literature; in-depth studies of films and directors; and other such delightful and illuminating fragments as a list of Sontag's top-ten films taken from a 1982 issue of Sight and Sound.

Sontag on Film is set to become a key work on the importance and significance of cinema in the modern world.

Praise for Susan Sontag:

'What ultimately matters about Sontag . . . is what she has defended: the life of the mind, and the necessity for reading and writing as "a way of being fully human"' Hilary Mantel, Los Angeles Times Book Review

'Intellectually and imaginatively gifted to an extraordinary degree, she used her fearless intelligence to illuminate some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary life' John Gray, New Statesman

'Complex and contradictory . . . one of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer

About the author

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others and At the Same Time. She was also the author of four novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America, as well as a collection of stories and several plays. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, and received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.
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