Word: duet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...REVOLUTION isn't coming soon," says Dr. Arthur Bauer, Marxist-intellectual-in-exile of Susan Sontag's Duet for Cannibals. If this is so, the role of the alienated cultural vanguard-both necessary and sufficient-must lie in assaulting the ruling culture, in destroying the primacy of bourgeois humanism. Godard has undertaken this task politically by creating dialectical confrontations with the mystified, "larger than life" Hollywood image. He launches a direct, ideological attack, using the cinema as a two-dimensional "blackboard" to counter the "in-depth," "universal" presentation of classless "Man" in bourgeois films. The technological advent of sophisticated, depth...
...isolation from social relations altogether? These are important questions for the Cultural Revolution to consider, which I won't try to answer now for Godard and Robbe-Grillet, Instead, I want to talk about Susan Sontag, who unites certain elements of the two, and examine her answers apparent in Duet for Cannibals...
...simply denounces the interpretation of art as well as works of art which necessitate it. Bazin's doctrine of metaphysical suggestion in portraying "content" is a dead end, then, for radical formalism. Form itself must become the subject, the "content," continually renewing itself in order to transform outmoded consciousness. Duet for Cannibals attempts this, by taking up outmoded conventions and destroying them, each in turn. In "Against Interpretation" (1964) Sontag makes a case for interpreting interpretation (at this time in history) as a social force of repression against new forms, as a purging of "dangerous emotions" (like Aristotelian tragedy...
...goes on to criticize those artists who invite interpretation, Bergman, for example, whose "lame messages about the modern spirit" and "callow pseudo-intellectuality" contradict "the beauty and sophistication of his images." Sontag's first experience as a film director, however, indicates a reappraisal of the concrete cultural situation. Duet for Cannibals openly invites the interpretations that are inevitable anyway and uses them as traps, frustrating slaps in the face with each contradiction designed to break us of our interpretive habit (and of our humanist consciousness...
...long duet, long enough to allow the drummers to go through many changes, but it doesn't drag; it's not an interlude in a song, but an important part of it, a part that has no notes, only beats. The noteless music gets faster, more and more abstract, more and more supported by the rhythm in the listeners' minds that is added to the sounds coming in through their ears, until the music peaks, and with a nod to the rest of the band from both drummers, the drums roll out a lead-in, and the Dead play together...