Word: humanistically
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...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...
Tomas himself leaps hungrily for each morsel of interpretation: (1) Bauer is dying, (2) Francesca is hopelessly insane, (3) He himself is engaged in a Manichaeistic battle of will with the Doctor (i. e. Faust convention), etc., etc. All of these roles are consummated purely in Tomas' (and our) humanist consciousness, which sustains his faith in comprehending, sympathizing with, relating to, perceiving all the depths of Bauer as a human individual. Instead of succeeding, he confronts an elusive set of surfaces which remain opaque, as in the scene where Francesca hides an orgy with her husband by covering a window...
WHEN INGRID gets into the sex action too the Bauers destroy the basis of the young couple's relationship, which is the metaphysical conventions of humanist love: "trust," "belief," "basic human goodness," sentimental associations, and other banalities. In trying to understand and participate, the innocents are seduced in over their heads, as Robbe-Grillet explains...
...been this skillfully manipulative (or this frustrating), using pure surfaces to arouse "dangerous emotions," and then refusing to purge them. In perhaps overemphasizing Sontag's aesthetics I've neglected to mention how extremely disquieting the film is emotionally, with respect to familiar personal relationships. I'm speaking of monogamy-humanist love-which is crumbling these days anyway, whose foundations Duet for Cannibals digs up mercilessly to expose. Anti-humanism seems somehow progressive, but I'm politically distrustful of this kind of manipulation, which is almost an unconscious, emotional dialectic, primarily destructive (even if it may ultimately be liberating). Sontag goes...
...starts speaking to us where we are right now, in our present state of outmoded emotional and intellectual consciousness (and not in some futuristic state when we may actually be interested in Robbe-Grillet's descriptions of objects), in order to take us in, to wreck that corrupt humanist tranquillity in which we once thought we existed. If Duet for Cannibals were pushing a Marxist line, an ideological "content," by equally subversive means, we could call it insidious propaganda, pure Stalinist instrumentation of policy formulated in isolation from the masses. But it doesn't push any "meaning" whatsoever, and hardly...