A Second Look: Susan Sontag’s ‘Promised Lands’

If there is one aspect of Susan Sontag’s multifaceted life that has resisted enshrinement, it is her film career. Sontag was not primarily a film critic — having avowed more than once that she valued her fiction over her essays, she might even have contested the notion that she was primarily a critic.

But she was a central figure in film culture. The essays she published on movies — her first collection, “Against Interpretation,” included pieces on science fiction and Jean-Luc Godard — paved the way for intellectuals to take the art form seriously. Her final piece of film criticism, “A Century of Cinema,” was a lament for what she considered a declining art, but Sontag remained a devoted film buff, a fixture at New York City’s repertory theaters, until her death in 2004.

In between the novels and plays and essays on art and literature and politics, Sontag made a few movies herself, all of which have become exceedingly difficult to see. Her first two efforts, “Duet for Cannibals” (1969) and “Brother Carl” (1971), are fiction films, both made in Sweden and somewhat under the sign of Bergman. Her final film, “Unguided Tour” (1983), is a Venice travelogue, adapted from her own short story.

The third, “Promised Lands” (1974), also took her abroad, to Israel in fall 1973, in the final days of the Yom Kippur War. New to DVD this week from Zeitgeist/KimStim, it is Sontag’s only documentary and her best-regarded movie; she also considered it her most personal film.

In a piece she wrote for Vogue about the making of “Promised Lands” (included in the liner notes), Sontag resisted the term “documentary,” fearing it too restrictive. Instead she proposed several other “literary analogues”: “the poem, the essay and the lamentation.”

The most striking thing about “Promised Lands,” given who made it, is how little the film depends on words. There are a couple of talking heads in it, who provide some semblance of political and historical context, but Sontag’s familiar voice is entirely absent — there are no titles and no voiceover — or rather, it has been transformed entirely and with surprising success into a cinematic voice.

Sontag was a skilled dialectician — she once said, “The very nature of thinking is but” — and “Promised Lands” does not advance a polemic so much as it dramatizes opposing points of view. The main interviewees are Yuval Ne’eman, a Zionist physicist who pioneered Israel’s nuclear technology program, who delves into the deeply entrenched roots of Arab anti-Semitism, and Yoram Kaniuk, a liberal writer who supports Palestinian rights, who bemoans the rise of consumerist culture and describes the endless cycle of conflict as a tragic impasse: “We were right, and they were right.”

Political arguments aside, “Promised Lands” makes its strongest impression through sounds and images. The approach to editing is also dialectic, founded on rhythmic juxtapositions, as with the Soviet silent style; the opening montage of Jerusalem rooftops matches television antennae with religious iconography. The sound design, as intricate as it is unexpected, pieces together footsteps, prayer chants, radar beeps, far-off explosions and machine-gun fire.

The film’s observational passages take in daily life on the streets, prayers at the Wailing Wall, a service at the war cemetery, a wax museum that memorializes Israel’s often violent history and, most memorably, the aftermath of the desert combat. Sontag ventures into a psychiatric ward for shellshocked veterans to document an experimental treatment that re-creates battlefield sounds, driving the traumatized patient to cower under his bed. Surveying the surreal landscape, her camera pauses on the wreckage of incinerated tanks and blackened corpses surrounded by flies.

It goes without saying that Sontag wrestled with the moral responsibility of bearing witness to these horrors. “Anything about any war that does not show the appalling concreteness of destruction and death is a dangerous lie,” she wrote in the Vogue piece. Sontag wrestled with the moral quandaries of photography and photojournalism in her seminal volume “On Photography.” In her final book, “Regarding the Pain of Others,” she revisited the same dilemmas, and arrived at some modified conclusions, which apply to much of what we see in “Promised Lands.”

“Let the atrocious images haunt us,” she writes. “The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.”

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