I was very interested to read David Rieff's scathing remarks, quoted in a recent New York Times review of his new book, about Annie Leibovitz's final photographs of his mother, Susan Sontag: "carnival images of celebrity death" that "humiliated" Sontag posthumously. When the massive coffee-table book containing those photos was released in 2006, Leibovitz was given saturation star treatment by the media, including PBS, which should have known better. Although I was a longtime Sontag critic, I was appalled by the lack of protest against Leibovitz's blatant exploitation, which included Newsweek's splashing of Sontag's tarted-up corpse photo on its Web site.
Where were all the voices from the elite literati who had rushed to produce smarmy Sontag obituaries advertising their great intimacy with her (which too often consisted of seeing her preside at parties)? When I returned to Salon, after a five-year hiatus to write a book, I weighed in, but I continue to feel that this deplorable episode is symptomatic of a strange cultural vacuum in the U.S.
Speaking of Sontag, I recently viewed (via Netflix) Luis Buñuel's film "The Phantom of Liberty," which I hadn't seen since 1975, a year after it was made. To my great surprise, one amusingly surreal sequence features the seductively mysterious Italian actress Adriana Asti, playing a double role. I first saw Asti in Sontag's directorial debut, "Duet for Cannibals" (1969), which was filmed in Sweden. In 1973, when Sontag came to speak at Bennington College, where I was teaching, I privately praised Asti to her and was gratified by her warm and even libidinous response. (The general debacle of that visit is chronicled in my essay "Sontag, Bloody Sontag" in "Vamps & Tramps."
I had no idea at the time that Sontag and Asti were an item (or that Asti was married to director Bernardo Bertolucci). According to Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's biography, "Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon" (2000), Sontag called Asti "the love of her life" and directed her in a 1979 Italian stage production of Luigi Pirandello's "As You Desire Me," into which lesbian overtones were injected.
Buñuel put Asti on glorious full display in "The Phantom of Liberty." There's a phenomenal scene where, except for black net stockings, Asti is seated nude at a piano as she vigorously plays Brahms' "Rhapsody." What wit and aplomb! And one can admire that sleek, sensuous form from every angle. Sontag sure got the goods.
Another classic film I recently ordered from Netflix was "The Sorrow and the Pity" (1972), Marcel Ophuls' four-hour documentary about the Nazi occupation of France. It's an extraordinary compilation of wartime newsreels and interviews with surviving members of that generation. With its long, sober takes in grainy black-and-white, the film accumulates power as it goes, showing the compromises and accommodations made by a majority of French citizens to the Nazi presence. Veterans of the Resistance testify too, but the overall effect is unsettling and unsavory. "Paris was a fun and crazy place," recalls an ex-Nazi of those bygone days under the swastika flag. Meanwhile, as a witness relates, France had the only government in Europe that collaborated with the Nazis and passed laws even more racist than Germany's.
A quite different film that I've recently enjoyed re-seeing and studying is "Revenge of the Sith" (2005) from George Lucas' "Star Wars" saga. The climactic light-saber duel between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi on the volcano planet of Mustafar (with footage of actual explosions and lava flows at Mount Etna in Sicily) is nearly mystically sublime in the High Romantic sense. The convulsive, manly passion between the two tortured Jedi is hyper-sustained by John Williams' powerful music. Then there's Anakin's shocking mutilation and Wagnerian immolation, leading to the grisly Frankenstein surgery that turns him into Darth Vader and that is cross-cut with a parallel hospital sequence, as Anakin's wife, Padme, dies while giving birth to the twins Luke and Leia.
It's amazing how much primal emotion Lucas is able to generate from such scenes. The finale of "Sith," with an adoptive couple tenderly cradling the infant Luke (separated from his sister) as they stand before a brilliant sunset, is reminiscent of "Gone With the Wind," produced at a time when Hollywood could speak in universal emotions (rather than cheap irony) to a mass audience. I began wondering whether only epics, with their action and drama, can now get away with deep emotion -- as "Titanic" (1997) also did, thanks to Kate Winslet's brilliant performance, for which (I cannot miss any opportunity to bang this gong) she so richly deserved -- but did not win -- the Academy Award for best actress. My eternal motto: Helen Hunt, give back Kate Winslet's Oscar!
Mitchell Lichtenstein's film "Teeth," which he wrote and directed, premiered in late January after making a sensation at last year's Sundance Film Festival, where it won an award. It's a satirical feminist horror flick. The screenplay was inspired by remarks I made in class about the ancient myth of the vagina dentata ("toothed vagina") when Mitchell was my student at Bennington in the 1970s. I loved the film, which I found extremely amusing as well as impressively produced, from photography to sound (such as the eerie atmospherics of tribal drums). I wrote some special lines for the scene in which Dawn (superbly played by Jess Weixler) surfs the Web for information on her exotic anatomy. Audiences are routinely screaming and cheering at the film's colorful castrations.
Query: I am seeking help from Salon readers in identifying a pizza parlor in New York's Greenwich Village that I visited as a small child in the early to mid-1950s. It was presumably within a few blocks of 10th Street at Bleecker, where relatives by marriage ran a grocery store. The restaurant entrance might have been a few steps below street level. One thing is certain: a narrow entrance hallway lined with harlequin-patterned wallpaper -- Commedia dell'arte figures framed in diamond shapes, as on playing cards.
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
About the writer
Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems."
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