“Susan Sontag Tells How It Feels to Make a Movie,” by Susan Sontag, was originally published in the July 1974 issue of Vogue.
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Filmmaking is a privilege and a privileged life. Filmmaking is nitpicking, anxiety, fights, claustrophobia, exhaustion, euphoria. Filmmaking is feeling almost undone by sentimental goodwill toward the people you re working with part of the time, feeling misunderstood or let down or betrayed by them the rest of the time. Filmmaking is catching inspiration on the wing. Filmmaking is flubbing the catch, and sometimes knowing the fool that s to blame is yourself. Filmmaking is blind instinct, petty calculations, smooth generalship, daydreaming, pig-headedness, grace, bluff, risk.
That the sense of risk which accompanies making a film is so much steeper than the one that goes with writing seems, as professional secrets go, disconcertingly well-known. When I tell friends I ve finished a story or an essay or a novel, no one inquires solicitously: "Are you pleased with it?" And: "Did it come out the way you hoped?" But this is just what I am usually asked when I ve finished a film. The implication is that to write means taking a direct route between one s plans and their execution. A writer s intentions and hopes have no place to go except to end up, clearly reflected, in the finished writing. At any rate, if they don t, it is not the writer himself or herself who is likely to be aware of the lag. But with a movie, everyone (including people who have never watched one being made) supposes that the path between the filmmaker s intention and the completed film is strewn with implacable hazards and dingy pressures, that any film is the more or less damaged survivor of an appalling obstacle race.
People aren t mistaken. Writing means knowing what s in your head that s interesting, having the craft to get it out, having the patience to sit long enough at a table to get it down. (And having the judgment to know when it could be better. And the tenacity to keep revising until it s as good as you can make it.) Writing is between you and your demons; between you and that quaint nineteenth-century machine, the typewriter. It s an inside job, essentially: an act of the will. But willpower will never take you all the way in making a film. Directing a film means trying to be smart not just about oneself and the world and our glorious English language, but being dependent on and trying to be smart about uncontrollable capricious elements, like actors and machinery (twentieth-century stuff) and weather and money—more likely than not to get out of hand. Where everything can, it often goes wrong. Orson Welles was scarcely exaggerating the matter when he said, "A director is someone who presides over accidents." Yet for someone like myself, addicted to the ascetic solitude of writing, it is a welcome release to get out there and do battle with the accidents, trying to "preside" over them. However dismaying is the gap between your idea prior to the shooting, and what you finally have in the can, you have to feel gratitude for what providence has brought as well as bad luck has spoiled. It s relief to hear other voices than my own. It s good to be a bit battered and bruised by that reality over which one suspects, sometimes, one has gained easy ("willful") victories alone at the typewriter.
Of course, there is a big difference between making films with actors, armed with a script—"fiction" films—and films that require plunging, unarmed, into a reality. But it is not necessarily the expected difference. Having made two fiction films, both in Sweden (Duet for Cannibals in 1969 and Brother Carl in 1971), I anticipated a much less personal kind of filming when I arrived i Israel with a small crew during the recent Arab-Israeli war to make a so-called documentary. The result, a feature-length color film which I finished editing this spring and has just had its world premiere in New York in June, surprised me. Though a "documentary," Promised Lands is the most personal film I have made. It s not personal in the sense that I appear in the film (I don t) or that there is, as in most documentaries, a "voice-over" narration (there isn t) which I wrote. It s personal because of my relation to the material in the film—found, not devised by me—and because of that material s uncanny fit with themes in my writings and other films. The complexity of the reality that I found in Israel, when I was filming in October and November of last year, sums up certain of my persistent preoccupations better than the two scripts that I had written and filmed in Sweden.
That a war was on, or latent, or menacing during the whole shooting period set the quixotic mood in which most of the obstacles were confronted. All events became converted into risks, and escapades, whether it was the chance that my heroic French producer might never find the money to finance the film I was already shooting or the chance that one of us might get hurt or killed—according to a warning yelled after us by soldiers ("Watch out for mines!")—while filming at the front in the Sinai Desert.
Mines indeed! I asked a soldier where they were. "They re all over. Buried a few inches in the sand," he said. "You can t see them." We set off anyway on foot, for our closer look at the Egyptian Third Army. (Good footage, and a scoop; it ended on the cutting-room floor.) Lugging Nagra and Arriflex and tripod, we felt less brave than silly—more like Dietrich in the final scene in Morocco, setting out to follow Gary Cooper, her Foreign Legionnaire lover, across the Sahara in spike-heeled shoes.
Shooting consisted of five exhausting weeks, often fifteen hours a day. At the hotel each night, after sometimes chugging back and forth over most of that small country in our rented diesel-engine minibus in a single day, I could spend the insomniac hours making notes on the film that was emerging in my head. My idea was to make a truthful "documentary" (if that s what it has to be called) with as much care—or artifice, if you like—as a fiction film. In making fiction films, I could construct a script— lay out how people moved, devise lines for them to speak—and then coach the actors and crew how to execute what was already written down. But here events were hap- pening before the camera first; being written down, constructed into a script, after. Reality was something you didn t invent. You ran after it, often tripping—because you were lugging a heavy tripod. And yet, in the end, what got on film was mostly the reality that I already understood, that corresponded to the images and rhythms I already had in my head. Being rather tuned into sadness, to the tears in things, I put a lot of that in Promised Lands. Alas, it s not just in my head. It s what Israel does seem to me, at this moment, to be about.
The reason I cavil at the term "documentary" to describe nonfiction films is that it s too narrow. "Documentary" suggests that the film is a document. But it is. or can be, much more. As fiction films do something analogous to what is done in prose forms like the novel and the short story, so nonfiction films can have a broad choice of nonfiction literary models. Journalism is only one: the film as reportage. More analytical kinds of writing are another model: for instance, the film as essay. (Possible literary analogues to the film discourse of Promised Lands, I suppose, are the poem, the essay, and the lamentation.)
Fiction films, using actors, are necessarily concerned with developing an "action" (or plot). The job of nonfiction films is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions. This is how Bertolt Brecht defined the aim of epic theater. But it is hard to envisage how the theater, which must always use actors (whether professional or nonprofessional) could really ever get away from an "action." But movies—at least nonfiction films—can.
This is what I tried to do in Promised Lands: represent a condition, rather than an action. Having that purpose in mind doesn t mean that the film isn t concrete. On the contrary, it has to be—particularly since part of my subject is war, and anything about any war that does not show the appalling concreteness of destruction and death is a dangerous lie. It is a film about a mental landscape—as well as a physical and political one. Old people pray. Couples shop in a market. A Bedouin woman chases her goat in a nomadic encampment. Palestinian schoolgirls saunter down a street in the Gaza Strip under the watchful eye of an Israeli patrol. Soldiers lie unburied on the battlefield. Bereaved families weep at a mass burial held just after the cease-fire. In a military hospital outside Tel Aviv a shell-shocked soldier attempts clumsily to bandage a cooperative male nurse, reenacting the unbearable moments when he dragged his already dead comrade out of their burning tank and tried to give him medical aid. In a hotel room, a melancholy sabra in his forties muses over the paradoxes of the historical destiny of the Jews. Modern buildings go up in the impassive lunar desert.
Why these moments, and not others? That s the mystery, the choice, the risk. In a nonfiction film, the director doesn t invent. Nevertheless, one is always choosing—what to film, what not to film. In the end, one sees what one has eyes (and heart) to see. Reality must not be approached servilely, but piously.
In answer to my friends, I ve said. "Yes, I m pleased with the film." "Yes, it did come out pretty much as I hoped." That s not altogether true. It came out better than I hoped. Luck was with me; accidents happened. I "presided." Tears (mine, the producer s, crew members ) flowed. And the camera rolled, the Nagra recorded. The resulting hour-and-a-half of film is true to what I experienced there, and to things that I had always known and am still trying to say. Promised Lands hardly tells all the truths there are about the conflicts in the Middle East, about the October War, about the mood of Israel right now, about war and logs and memory and survival. But what the film does tell is true. It was like that. To tell the truth (even some of it) is already a marvelous privilege, responsibility, gift.