Duet for Cannibals
All-Time Favorites
•
1h 45m
Directed by Susan Sontag | 105 mins | 1969
In the late ’60s, a Swedish studio invited essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag to make her directorial debut in Stockholm. The resulting film, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an arrogant ex-revolutionist German intellectual exile, his elegant wife, their Swedish student secretary, and the earnest secretary’s bride-to-be, is a roundelay of partner-swapping that gradually drifts toward uncharted territory, gamesmanship that broaches the surreal and violent. Defying literal-minded interpretation, Duet for Cannibals is both an illustrative companion to Sontag’s criticism and an introduction to a startlingly original filmmaker.
A Metrograph Pictures release.
Up Next in All-Time Favorites
-
The Reflecting Skin
Directed by Philip Ridley | 96 mins | 1990
A word-of-mouth sensation at Cannes, Philip Ridley’s debut feature is a macabre, magic hour-tinted work of Prairie Gothic—a Lynchian riff on “Days of Heaven,” spiked with intimations of the supernatural. Eight-year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) becomes c... -
By the Stream
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 111 mins | 2024
In his 32nd feature, one of modern cinema's great artists achieves new modes of expression. Hong Sangsoo's "By the Stream" continues a career-long trend of making it look easy and achieving a-ha effects that never seemed possible, all couched in a seemin... -
A Vanishing Fog
Directed by Augusto Sandino | 77 mins | 2021
For Colombia’s Indigenous Muisca people, Sumapaz Páramo, a tropical plateau located high up in the Andes, was a sacred realm. It is here that Augusto Sandino sets his haunting, mystical debut—the first film to have ever been shot in this now-endangered...
