Word: sontag
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...must admit that I really fail to understand what could possibly have motivated Susan Sontag to release Promised Lands, a documentary shot in Israel last year from about the middle of October to the middle of November. Her reasons for making it are clear enough. She told the Jerusalem Post that she was sitting in New York worrying about Israel during the first few days of the war when she spoke to her friend Nicole Stephane in Paris (the producer of the film), who convinced her that they should go to the Holy Land to see for themselves what...
...answer lies in what I consider the major flaw in the film, namely Sontag's almost complete ignorance of the realities of Israeli politics. She doesn't tell us anything because she doesn't really know anything. Her quick montage shots are feeble attempts at providing authenticity through naturalistic detail...
...issue. Spending only about a month there, as anyone who has been there will tell you, is absolutely insufficient unless one is a Middle East scholar who is in touch constantly with not only the immediate political but the long-range historical issues as well. Smart as she is, Sontag simply does not fill the bill...
...pretty easy to reconstruct what happened. After being wined and dined by the Israeli intellectual and academic elite (who were well aware of how important a good word from Sontag would do in stopping the drain of support for Israel on the American left), she seems to have classified Israelis into two groups, the hawks (here represented by Harkavi) and the doves (much more favorably represented by Kenan), a division which may make sense in an American context, but not in an Israeli one. By including both in her film, she could honestly say that, despite her disagreements with...
...Promised Land, a new documentary by Susan Sontag, takes a look at Israel just after the Yom Kippur War. Sontag has been serving her film-making apprenticeship for a long time, and with this film her efforts come to fruition. It's playing at the Central Cinema...