Susan Sontag Shows Her 1970 Film, Rejects 'Obsessions' in Earlier Works

Susan Sontag, novelist, essayist and film maker, brought her 1970 film "Brother Carl" to the Carpenter Center last night and told her 400-person audience after the showing that she "would not make this film now."

"In my work of the 1960s, I gravitated toward showing situations of anxiety and my works were machines for producing further anxiety," Sontag said. "Now I am developing reactions to grotesqueness other than showing it."

Energy Over Anxiety

In the novel and film script she is currently writing, Sontag said, "I am evolving a style aimed at giving energy and less toward creating anxiety."

Sontag said that as an objective observer of her own work she observes relationships between the two novels, short stories and two films she produced in the last decade. "The themes of withdrawal, silence, and the temptation of silence are very present in my work."

Sontag, who came to prominence in the middle 1960s as a radical critic of culture and advocate of the New Sensibility, denied that her films were influenced by the work of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. "It is the Swedish tonality of the films that causes this reaction in viewers," she said. Both "Brother Carl" and "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) were produced in Sweden.

Sontag said her third film, a documentary produced during a trip to Israel last October, will open in New York in June.