On Susan Sontag�s Promised Lands

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I have just finished watching Susan Sontag�s 1974 documentary, Promised Lands, which examines the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur War and its impact on Israeli society.  Now, before I go any further, I want to address the first question that struck me about this movie, �Wait, Susan Sontag made a movie?� And the answer is, uh, yeah, apparently she did.  Four of them, in fact.  The first two, Duet for Cannibals(1969) and Brother Carl (1971) are Swedish productions which IMDB says �bear clear influences of Bergman's reflections about the impossibility of human communication.� Promised Lands came out in 1974, and then in 1983 she made Letter from Venice, which�again, I defer to IMDB�is a �mental tour of melancholia.� So those are Sontag�s four films.

Susan Sontag, writer and filmmaker.

It�s always a dubious proposition when an artist who has established him or herself in one medium attempts to work in another medium.  They risk being accused of dilettantism (I�m looking at you, James Franco, and your fucking short story collection with the Gary Shteyngart blurb, which you only got because he was your fucking creating writing professor) and even when they�re in earnest, the results are often mixed.  I think the best example of a good transition is that of Paul Bowles, who was an established composer before he made the switch to writing fiction, where he proved himself to be a master.  By contrast, look at the plays of Henry James (or, try to, at least, although you�ll be hard-pressed to find them).  For whatever reason, the master novelist and short story writer decided that he needed to be successful on the London stage, and so he wrote a series of plays that were universally hated and which have since sunk into obscurity.  James himself was aware that he�d failed, but luckily he always had the fiction business to fall back on, and that�s how we remember him today.  There are also a few examples with which I�m not very familiar, but which sound interesting: there is the German Alexander Kluge, who has maintained a parallel career in literature and cinema; they both appear to be �primary� pursuits for him, in that he can�t really be said to be a writer dabbling in cinema, or a filmmaker dabbling in literature either.  Also, apparently the Criterion people will be releasing an Eclipse Collection later this summer called The Films of Norman Mailer.  They sound�to put it delicately�awful, but his entry into cinema seems to coincide with that of Sontag, so perhaps there was just something about the early seventies which convinced American literati that they needed to make movies.

And Sontag�s approach to making movies�if I may pretend to have access to her inner thoughts, which I don�t�but it must have been predicated first and foremost on her own experience as both cinephile and film critic and theorist.  Once could argue that she would have approached the making of movies in the same way that the Cahiers du Cin�macrowd of French New Wavers (Godard, Truffaut, etc.) had done in the late-fifties, which is to say that they were critics before they were filmmakers, which surely must be a factor in how you go about making a movie.  As Sontag herself said (somewhere, in the recently published second volume of her diaries, which is entitled As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, which I�ve paged through at Barnes and Noble, and which I�m not sure I want to buy, but that�s neither here nor there); I say, in this diary of hers, she observes that the French New Wavers and the other filmmakers who came of age around that time (circa-1960) were probably the first filmmakers to be really aware of the history of cinema.  Now, let�s say you�re F. W. Murnau, and it�s the 1920�s, and you�re making movies: to what extent are your films influenced by other films? Oh, but they must be, you must have learned your craft somewhere.  But what about the styles of other filmmakers? (There�s no auteur theory yet, after all).  Certainly, you can�t pull a Godard (and later a Tarantino) and fill your movie with references to other films.  Because it�s the 1920�s, you�re too busy makingthe films to be citing the films; everything in your medium is still so new as to be almost ahistorical. (I don�t know how much I actually buy this notion I�m advancing here; even by the time Griffith comes out with Birth of a Nation (1915), you already have over twenty years of movie history, and you can recognize Griffith�s technical achievements because you�re aware of that history).

Let�s not worry about it.  I do feel more comfortable talking about what we�ll call citationality (and that�s not my original term, but I don�t remember where it�s from, so, ironically enough, I can�t cite it).  Murnau, in making his films, isn�t citing other films.  Godard is.  Truffaut is.  And Susan Sontag, who knows her film history and sees films within their historical context (both within the context of the medium and within the context of the broader realms of culture and politics), won�t be able to avoid it.

So, let�s look at Promised Lands.  When the time came for this essayist-film critic to make her movie, what did she do?  There are three different approaches that Sontag utilizes in this film, two of which are interwoven through the major body of the film and the third of which serves as something of a coda.  The first strand can be described as �un-narrated scenes of Israeli life,� or perhaps �Israeli tableaux� or what have you.  In these scenes, Sontag films burnt out tanks and personnel carriers�reminders of the recent fighting�as well as Arab pastoralists, market scenes, religious Jews at the Wailing Wall, neighborhood scenes in what I took to be Jerusalem; there�s no overarching explanatory voiceover here.  What Sontag has done is to establish an accretion of images and juxtapositions, which she hopes will accumulate into self-evident meanings.  If I were to hazard a guess as to who is being �cited� here, I would suggest that it is the Soviet masters of silent montage, Eisenstein, Vertov, and co. (It was Vertov who sought to completely divorce cinema from the trappings of language and present it as a purely visual medium in his seminal Man with a Movie Camera, the opening titles of which boast that the film will contain no intertitles.  And technically it doesn�t, but there are still several instances of the camera zooming in on street signs and shop signs to establish context.  So Vertov cheated).  We can also see here echoes of the charged and careful compositions of Jean-Luc Godard and Agn�s Varda.

Well here's a lovely shot from Promised Lands.  It looks like something from one of Kurosawa's later color epics.

The other strand consists of face-to-face interviews with two Israeli intellectuals, the novelist Yoram Kaniuk and the physicist Yuval Ne�eman, who represent respectively the peace-minded desire for rapprochement with the Arabs and the notion that peace with the Arabs is impossible. Sometimes their testimonies are superimposed as voice-overs on the various scenes from the first strand, and sometimes the juxtapositions are quite effective (Kaniuk discusses the horror of seemingly endless war while the camera zooms in on the charred corpses of dead soldiers) but at other times the effect is less discernible.  Of these two strands�the accretion of imagery and the interviews�considered by themselves, I generally think that the interviews �came off� more successfully.  I am generally sympathetic to the impulse to film things�to get everything on camera, to accumulate and preserve�but one gets the impression that Sontag sometimes doesn�t know what�s worth filming.  Or she doesn�t quite know how to organize it.  The interviewee�s testimonies, however, are quite engaging, especially Kaniuk�s (Ne�eman mostly just said, �The Arabs have fought us for fifty years and they�re prepared to fight us for hundreds more; talk of peace is delusional.� He also speaks with open contempt about the �rights of the Palestinian people.� So he didn�t do much for me).  Kaniuk presents a sensitive and nuanced understanding of Israeli history and of the conflicting claims of Jews and Arabs, both of whom have his sympathy.  This is because Kaniuk is a compassionate human being, and evidently doesn�t have it in him to collectively dismiss a whole swath of humanity.  To Ne�eman�s credit, �[o]ne of his greatest achievements in physics was his 1961 discovery of the classification of hadrons through the SU(3) flavour symmetry, now named the Eightfold Way,� according to Wikipedia.  I�m not quite clear on what this is, but at least Ne�eman made some contributions to humanity in general, and they were of so broad a nature that he couldn�t exclude the Arabs from them even if he wanted to. 

Kaniuk, peace-advocate and solid humanist.

But yes, what would have made for a really effective movie would have been a focus on Kaniuk, coupled with a better conceived juxtaposition of imagery.

James, what was the third �approach� that you mentioned, the one that you said constituted a coda?� Ah, yes, that.  Well, after the imagery accretion and the interviews, Sontag takes us to an Israeli psychiatric hospital, where soldiers are being treated for the traumas they experienced in the recent war (I�m hesitant to say �for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, because even though it�s evident that that�s what they have, I don�t know how prevalent the term was at the time).  We meet a doctor who talks about his treatment method, which involved injecting traumatized soldiers with some substance (I don�t believe that they explain what it is) that puts them in a semi-conscious, trance-like state and in which they tend to relive their traumatic war experiences, with help from the medical staff.  And the film shows one such regression session, and Jesus, is it disturbing.  The soldier writhes around on his bed and tries to hide his head in his pillow while the doctor plays combat noises on a cassette player, and whistles to simulate the whistling of bombs about to detonate somewhere, and they bang on the bed and rattle the drawer of his nightstand to simulate machine gun fire, and he groans and convulses, and finally crawls under the bed to hide, and he�s still got the pillow wrapped around his head, as if he wants to tunnel into it somehow, and then he starts sobbing and groaning out some lament in Hebrew (the Hebrew and Arabic in this movie are left untranslated; Kaniuk, Ne�emen, and the doctor all give their interviews in English) and as he�s lamenting it carries over in voice-over to slow-motion images of Israeli soldiers loading into tanks and driving off, and then cue the end credits, but we can still hear him, and I�m not sure if my not understanding the Hebrew makes it more or less disturbing, but either way, these are the universally human sobs of a man destroyed by war, and that�s how the movie ends, after the credits the screen fades to black, and for several more seconds we still hear his sobs.

And they�re something that I won�t forget, and I think they serve to justify Sontag�s documentary.  Promised Lands is sometimes ineffective, but it�s not for lack of trying, and I hate to fault Sontag for trying to make a compassionate and complex film about a complex subject.  And for all of the apparent uncertainty that she demonstrates over the course of much of the film, Sontag�s conclusion is pitch-perfect, although I am a bit troubled about the ethics of filming and preserving this soldier�s trauma, and I suspect Sontag�author of a monograph entitled Regarding the Pain of Others�would have been as well.  If one seeks to justify it from a moral perspective, I suppose one could say that it�s the sort of thing that people need to see.  At the very least, the supporters of war (whoever they may be at any given time, and whoever it is that they want to kill) need to see this sort of thing.  They need to understand that war doesn�t just kill people (although they need to understand that too, that it kills people, because I think a sizable portion of the American public who so cavalierly support the devastating drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen do so because they see the victims, whether they�re aware of it or not, as somehow less than fully human), I say, war doesn�t just kill people, but it also destroys them while they�re still alive, be it mentally (the screaming Israeli soldier) or physically (use your imagination; or look at the latest edition of Smedley Butler�s War is a Racket, which includes a section of photographs called �the Faces of War� which show people who have had large portions of their faces blown off but who nonetheless still live; or look up �keloid scars� on Wikipedia and understand that that�s what American military power did to children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Or maybe don�t, because it�s potentially quite disturbing).

I hate to conclude this on such a dark note.  Let�s say one more thing about Sontag.  The seriousness with which she approached this project, and the intermittent success that she achieved with it, indicate that she is far more than a dabbler in cinema, and although I can�t testify to her other films, I can say that Promised Lands at least deserves to be considered with the best of her literary output when evaluating her artistic oeuvre.