REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. The documentary explores Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words, read by actress Patricia Clarkson. From her early infatuation with books and her first experience in a gay bar; from her marriage in adolescence to her last lover, REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism still resonate today. More than any other thinker of her day, Sontag was watched, viewed, photographed and stared at. She was gazed at, and she looked back, very carefully, particularly at language and metaphor and at photography and what she called “the ecology of images.” REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG gives viewers the chance to watch Sontag while she examines the world. REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG has been made in partnership with HBO Documentary Films and will be broadcast beginning on December 8th on HBO, HBOGO and HBO ON DEMAND.

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Quote of the week:

“Let the atrocious images haunt us. … This is what human beings are capable of doing– may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.” – Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003

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“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

– From a 1968 Esquire article

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

From the 2004 speech “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”