THE MOVIEGOER.(Susan Sontag's movie criticism)

In late 1995, Susan Sontag, a devoted and often impassioned moviegoer, sorrowfully summed up the state of the art. "A Century of Cinema," an essay written for the Frankfurter Rundschau, and reprinted (in abridged form) in the Times, was an outraged lamentation for a hundred-year-old art form that was in "ignominious, irreversible decline." Setting out the reasons for the fall, Sontag mentioned the consumption of TV-size images at home replacing the awed reception of light by "kidnapped" strangers in darkened theatres; the catastrophic rise in movie-production costs in the nineteen-eighties; the tipping of the old balance between art and commerce "decisively in favor of cinema as an industry." All these forces, she wrote, were producing a "disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention." More than that, moviegoing itself had changed: the blessed state that Sontag called "cinephilia" had faded. Young people no longer arranged their emotional and intellectual lives around an art that was "poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral--all at the same time." They no longer fed their passions in blissfully uncomfortable revival houses with ill-sprung seats and dank odors.

The 1995 article was Sontag's last published piece on movies; in retrospect, it was her farewell to film criticism. Renunciation, along with such reverberant partners as epiphany, retraction, and reaffirmation, was one of her familiar dramatic modes. She brought a certain histrionic (i.e., Parisian) quality into American intellectual life--position-taking as existential drama--and, if you regard her seriously, the portentous turning points of her journey have to be endured. What she renounced, of course, was nothing like regular movie criticism. Sontag wrote only a dozen or so articles about film. Yet all of them were substantial, both as intellectual performance and as a challenge to conventional assumptions about movie form and routine reviewing. Available in her essay collections, the pieces remain events today--a limited, idiosyncratic, rather arrogant contribution to the short list of great American film criticism that includes the writing of James Agee, Robert Warshow, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris.

In Sontag's case, the movie criticism can be understood only as part of a life-long obsession. In her forty years as a writer, she published fiction and plays; she wrote about literature, theatre, painting, music, and dance; she altered the discourse of illness and debated the aesthetics and morality of photography. She wrote fourteen books in all, and she had, in the last third of her life, an intermittent but much debated public presence as a political moralist and oracle. Yet the preoccupation with movies was there from the beginning, and it went deep. As a young woman, Sontag had done a little acting and worked as a movie extra. When she moved to New York, in 1959, at the age of twenty-six, her apartment was reportedly papered with movie stills. Her essay "Notes on 'Camp,' " which brought her amazingly wide notice when it was published, in 1964, in the small-circulation Partisan Review, was filled with references to classic and pop movies as well as to the other arts. Here was an ambitious literary intellectual who was equally at ease with "artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio" and a minor camp favorite like the green-eyed blonde Virginia Mayo. She did a lot of the homework for "Notes on Camp" at Daniel Talbot's revival house, the New Yorker, at Eighty-eighth Street and Broadway; copies of "Camp" and other Sontag essays were later distributed free at the theatre.

That year, Sontag also sat for one of Andy Warhol's silent screen tests. Girlishly pretty at the age of thirty-one, she appears rattled by the requirement that she not speak. She's too self-conscious to engage the movie camera directly (as she engaged the photographer's lens in the devastating portraits of her that appeared on her book jackets), and she smiles shyly and casts her eyes up and down. It's an unnerved, coltish encounter. Later, with greater ease, she appeared as the subject of a German documentary, and as an articulate figure in social-issue documentaries (on feminism and on the imprisonment of Cuba's gay writers and artists). She also turned up, as herself, in Woody Allen's "Zelig," commenting in her cathedral tones on Allen's fictional creation. She worked for film-festival selection committees, and served on festival juries. And, bravely and foolishly, she put her movie love into practice, making four movies of her own. Why did film matter so much to her? What was it that she missed--and so sternly memorialized--in 1995?

In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Sontag, browsing at a newsstand just off Hollywood Boulevard, bought her first copy of Partisan ...