Event

Duet for Cannibals

Wed Jan 08: 7.30pm
Sat Jan 11: 4.30pm, 7.00pm
Sun Jan 12: 4.00pm, 7.00pm

Susan Sontag
Sweden
1969
1h 45m
About
** New 2K restoration! **

Essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Sontag made her directorial debut with this definition-defying, dryly funny psychological serio-comedy, the result of a Swedish studios invitation to her to make a film in Stockholm. The result, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an arrogant ex-revolutionist German intellectual exile, his elegant wife, their Swedish student secretary, and the earnest secretarys bride-to-be, is a roundelay of partner-swapping that gradually drifts towards uncharted territory, gamesmanship that broaches the surreal and violent. Defying literal-minded interpretation, Duet for Cannibals is both an illustrative companion to Sontags criticism, and introduction of a startlingly original filmmaker.

Description and images on this page courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.

Contemporary praise for Duet for Cannibals:

A work of art Duet for Cannibals is a witty, bone-dry, serio-comedy that fascinates and disturbs in turn. Frederic Tuten, Vogue Magazine
Fascinatingly compelling, visually inventivevery funny, indeed. Richard Roud, Sight and Sound

Review quotes from the films 1969 release:

Cannibals is as explicitly sexual as even the new moral codes allow, sexier than I Am Curious. It is also a thinking persons enigma. Frankly, I didnt understand it all, but I was intrigued. Liz Smith, Cosmopolitan

The situations themselves are original and surprising, funny and even revolting, but they are never shocking or disturbing. Miss Sontag is faithful to the principle she has admired in Bresson preserving the integrity of human mystery. Miss Sontags style is her own deliberate, direct, dispassionate, a vehicle for the measured orchestration of her ideas Molly Haskell, The Village Voice