Réjeanne Padovani - une réflexion sur l’état actuel de la civilisation
Quand j’ai commencé mon métier de cinéaste, c’était la grande vogue du cinéma direct. Et le direct, qui a ses limites, poussé à bout, conduit à des conclusions politiques : si vous êtes dans la rue, avec des gens, vous ne pouvez pas éviter de poser des problèmes politiques. Mon premier film débouchait sur une accusation virulente de l’industrie du textile et de son exploitation au Québec. Le deuxième prenait pour thème les élections au Québec en 1970. Les deux ont gêné l’Office national du film, une boîte aux facilités techniques énormes, administrée par des fonctionnaires. L’Office a préféré ne pas sortir mon premier film – ce qui a provoqué, comme on dit, une « affaire ». Il y a eu une sorte de mini-répression, douce bien sûr, puisque nous sommes dans un pays anglo-saxon.
Je me suis retrouvé alors dans un cul-de-sac. Tout ce qu’on me permettait pratiquement de faire, c’étaient des films sur le sports. Alors, je me suis tourné vers l’industrie privée et j’ai réalisé La Maudite galette et Réjeanne Padovani.
Réjeanne Padovani, c’est un film sur un financier tout-puissant de la région de Montréal et sur son entourage : un ministre, des politiciens, de « jeune loups » qui se ménagent l’avenir et des hommes chargés à la fois de faire le coup de main, de pratiquer le chantage et de tuer; c’est l’histoire d’un homme criminel mais bon père de famille, un de ces types qui se réclament de la loi et de l’ordre et qui, lancés dans le système capitaliste, s’en tirent avec les moyens du bord- leur seule éthique se résume en une phrase : la force ne perd jamais. Réjeanne Padovani repose sur la réalité du Québec. Sur la réalité tout court puisqu’on retrouve, à quelques variantes près, les mêmes données dans la plupart des pays qu’on appelle « avancés ». Et, dans la vie, les choses sont peut-être encore plus outrées. Le personnage qui m’a servi un peu de modèle a chez lui une table de quatorze couverts et une place toujours disponible : celle de l’immigrant, du Sicilien qui descend à Montréal et à qui on dit : « Va chez X.» Arrivé là, on s’occupe de lui, on lui procure du travail. Ça crée une filiation. Plus tard, on peut lui demander des services.
Réjeanne Padovani est une sorte de réflexion sur l’état actuel de la civilisation au détour d’une histoire de gangsters- car je suis personnellement convaincu que les pays occidentaux sont en décadence, en voie de désintégration. C’est un film sur la vénalité et sur le terrorisme, sur la violence quotidienne et sur la tragédie qui survient brusquement et disparaît aussitôt sans laisser de trace.
Ce n’est pas une démonstration politique. Je me contente de regarder, d’observer, de constater. Je suis beaucoup trop perplexe sur la conduite à suivre pour en dicter une à quiconque.
Attention! Le personnage que j’ai fait jouer à René Caron, ce n’est pas vraiment le maire Drapeau. Bien sûr, il y a des côtés- amateur d’opéra, etc.- qui le rapprochent de Drapeau, mais je n’aurais pas voulu une caricature ou un pastiche de Drapeau parce que j’ai l’impression que cela aurait limité la portée du film. Les gens se tiennent à ça et oublient le reste.
Et puis, ce qui serait plus grave, c’est que ça porterait les gens à personnaliser la politique, ce qui est très mauvais. C’est un peu un défaut, ici, au Québec : on personnalise toujours. On pense qu’il suffit de se débarrasser de quelqu’un pour que la situation change. C’était ça un peu le drame de Duplessis, et mon film sur Duplessis était fait en grande partie pour illustrer ce phénomène. Pendant des années, les gens n’ont fait que souhaiter la disparition de Duplessis : quand il sera parti on sera enfin libres, disaient-ils. Mais quand Lesage est venu, il n’y a pas eu beaucoup de différence. C’est pour cela que je ne voulais pas non plus personnaliser Drapeau très précisément, en faire une caricature, parce que le prochain maire de Montréal ne sera pas forcément mieux que le maire Drapeau.
Le fond de l’affaire, c’est que je ne voulais pas tellement faire passer telle information précise, telle chose en particulier. Je voulais surtout que ce soit un film dont on sorte avec l’impression qu’on est gouverné par des fous; par des fous méchants qui sont manipulés par des profiteurs de tout ordre. C’est plus une sorte de sentiment vague, d’impression que je voulais créer au lieu de tenter de faire passer une information précise, comme celle de dire tel monsieur fait tel genre de choses. C’est un certain climat que je voulais faire passer, et c’est là-dessus que j’ai travaillé. Je voulais faire comprendre que la police et la pègre, c’est finalement la même chose; qu’il n’y a pas tellement de différence entre les deux, que leurs liens sont très étroits.
Je pense que c’était là une dimension importante qu’il fallait que je transmette aux spectateurs : on est gouverné par des fous; et i faut le savoir. C’est très important; c’est essentiel. Je sais que cela pourra paraître un peu forcé, mais j’estime pour ma part avoir fait preuve d’une très grande retenue dans la peinture de ces gens.
Gina- le vide et le plein
Depuis un certain temps, je me refuse à réfléchir. Je me refuse même à lire des livres théoriques : c’est un processus d’abêtissement. Je me sens dans une période de création d’histoire, et je ne veux pas en sortir. Je me laisse envahir de plus en plus par des choses irrationnelles : si je les énonce(sous forme d’idées), je les tue.
Tout ce que je savais avant d’écrire Gina, c’est que, du temps où je tournais des documentaires à l’extérieur de Montréal, mon équipe et moi étions toujours seuls dans l’hôtel, avec la danseuse. Les hôtels de province ne servent presque plus qu’à accueillir des marginaux durant la semaine, puis les gens ordinaires en fin de semaine. Cette image me frappait : des cinéastes, seuls dans un hôtel, avec une danseuse. Quand nous avons tourné « On est au coton », la danseuse s’appelait Brigitte. Il ne lui est pas arrivé ce qui arrive à Gina (ça je l’ai pris de deux faits divers authentiques, qui sont d’ailleurs encore devant les tribunaux québécois), mais presque toutes les autres scènes nous sont arrivées telles quelles. Très souvent, dans ces hôtels-là, la salle de billards est vide toute la journée, et la danseuse joue seule. Elle devient experte. Un de mes assistants pour « on est au coton » était un « pool shark », et nous avons déjà battu deux joueurs de la place, à Saint-Georges.
On se disait « il faudrait faire un film sur tout ça », ça nous trottait dans la tête. Après Padovani, j’ai dit : « ça y est, on y va. » Mais je ne peux pas faire- comme Jacques Leduc- un film qui soit totalement fidèle à cette réalité banale, un film où il ne se passerait vraiment rien. Ça ne me satisfait pas. Il faut que j’y mette de la fiction. Alors j’ai fiat mes recherches sur les faits divers, et j’ai bâti de personnage de Gina.
Il est possible que ça n’aille pas vraiment avec ma méthode, ou que ça soit contradictoire. Mais je suis contradictoire : j’aime des choses différentes, j’aime Jean-Luc Godard et The French Connection. J’aime que le bon punisse le méchant à la fin, même si ce n’est plus du tout réaliste. Disons que Gina est un film aussi écartillé que moi...
Prima facie, it is hard to imagine someone like Visconti to make a film totally on studio sets, with artificial lights and painted cardboard and so on, immediately after such classical neo-realism pieces like Ossessione(43), Terra trema(48), Bellisima(51), and before Rocco e i suoi fratelli(60). But it is more or less in line with Senso (54), adapted from formal literary works.
In general, there are too much dialogue in the film and you can smell that they are not genuine italian ones. The fault is certainly not of Visconti, but of Dostoevski. If you take a look with his original novel (which is fortunately not very long), you will understand what I mean. There the dialogue is even longer, more gratuitous and quickly becomes unbearable. Visconti has retained several details of the original, including the age of the new tenant, the pinned skirt, The Barber of Seville, the pre-written letter, etc. But Walter Scott, the author of those books that Natalia borrowed, is not mentioned. And there are tons of things added : rug repairing business, the landlady, the boss and so on.
Visconti’s real part started when Natalia started to tell her story. By a ingenious pan we are brought to past tense and immediately Jean Marais the narcissist’s face (pardon me if I hate Cocteau so much). The lighting is a stylistic one, resembling that of a stage play. From here on the narrative is simple and effective. And I have to admit, Jean Marais played his role well. He is indeed a very cool guy, always dark and brooding for some personal matters.
Then comes the most breathtaking scene in the film : the dance in the bar. Here I could almost see Antonioni, the true cinematic form of passion and frustration. You have to see the dance in L’Eclisse to understand why. It deserves a whole chapter to discuss so I am not going to talk about it here.
After the show in the bar, everything went back to normal level. The midnight snow is a good idea, but the quality of this special effect is as poor as the downsized canal and streets – hardly convincing.
All women in this film are worth looking at : Maria Schnell is an angel; the local beauty who writes Ciao on the windows is very attractive (according to my standard), Clara Calamai is gorgeous; even the landlady makes me feel warm.
Let me repeat : Maria Schnell is unforgetable. I wonder why such a gem is not appreciated by more people. I only see her once more in Réné Clément’s Gervaise. In both films, it is her performance, not anything else, that sustains the whole narrative. Her ability to express emotions and to transfer them is simply amazing.
Clara Calamai, the star from Ossessione, played the prostitute here. She is also someone added by Visconti. In the film, she conducted Mario to her usual place of doing business, some one- square-metre open space under the canal bridge, with a few rugs laying on the ground.
There is no development of character. Their inner conflicts, the various phases of their struggle as they wrestle with the Angle of the Lord, are never outwardly revealed. What we see is rather a concentration of suffering, the recurrent spasms of childbirth or of a snake sloughing off its skin.
André Bazin[1]
…leaving for no particular reason. Why we are leaving?
Luke, in Last Days
In a conference paper titled ‘formalism and critical evaluation’, Noël Carroll proposed us a way of critical evaluation other than the formalism approach. In opposition to the formalist’s claim that ‘works of art do not appear to make cognitive or moral claims’ and ‘truth cannot function as criterion of artistic excellence’, Carroll posited that in the realm of cinema, thought-provoking can be worthy if the content, moral or cognitive, is incorporated into an active (the opposite of ‘inept’, in his terms) form. Since different art requires different standard, while no moral value is connected to instrumental music, in the case of dramatic arts, content has to be taken into consideration in order to make ‘formal coherence both possible and intelligible’[2].
Such is the case, we believe, with Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Many have complained about the apparently purposeless wandering of the protagonist and refuse to comprehend the inner emotional turmoil he went through in his last days. This, however, is of course what the film is all about. In order to express this inner happening into a cinematic form, the director uses varies cinematographic means including narrative structure, soundscape, long take and its according mise-en-scène, and especially a symbolic reference to Jesus Christ, whose suffering we are more ready to identify with. Indeed, religious inferences are abundant throughout the film, although they are rather more subtle compare to the direct depiction of ascension (or resurrection) near the end of the film. In the following we are trying to go through these inferences one by one and see how they amount to a point of culmination where there is no longer possible to ignore the analogy[3].
The film opens with a series of long shots where the protagonist, Blake, is seen wandering alone in the wildness. The symbolic meaning of this sequence is made clear if we reproduce its order in words: swamp & forest, river, fire, train and the fork of road ahead. Swamp and forest can be regarded as the indication of a critical moment in life, as Dante’s “Nel mezzo
Unable to face the ordeal, he goes back to the house and dig up the cigar box. We are never shown the content of it. But it is probably heroin. Because immediately afterwards his behavior seems funny enough: a transvestite poking a shotgun around sleeping couples[4]. All this indicates that he is temporarily relieved of the pain.
There is another shot before the kitchen scene that confirms that we are witnessing a fight. While Blake is digging in the background, we see Scott and
The immediate aftereffect of drugs is a new wave of depression. The conversation with the Yellow Page salesman shows that toward the end, Blake is no longer able to sustain. In the room with TV set, while on the screen a saccharine version of ‘On Bended Knee’ is playing, Blake is literally on bended knee due to an insufferable inner turmoil, supposedly invoked by this song. We hear on the sound track that whirling noise (very like a prolonged train whistling) is gaining momentum and finally suffocating the music. For some moment the music is completely gone which indicates a subjective experience of impaired hearing. When it is coming back, there are discernible church choral voices. After Blake finds his position leaning against the door, the music volume is almost normal, only to be ‘knocked down’, albeit briefly, by the sudden opening of door. Soon
The two Mormons bring up the subject of Jesus Christ both verbally and visually. A moment earlier the brothers are describing a revelation with ‘…here is my son Jesus Christ, hear him.’ Then a very effective cut presents us with Blake in the center of another room, opening a television. The connection is almost too obvious. But once it is established, everything the brothers say seem to make sense. Actually, one can imagine that the whole scene of proselytizing is designed to provide this cut and these so called ‘background information’.[5]
It pays to note that the aforementioned cut is also a temporal shift. The ‘On Bended Knee’ scene actually finishes some time before the Mormon brothers enter the house. Because after
While normally a disjunction in temporal order consists of either a flashback or a flashforward, the strategy used by Gus Van Sant fits in neither category. First of all, although the ‘On Bended Knee’ scene revealed a posteriori the detail of a prior event, it is not attributable to any character’s spasm of memory, thus lacks a narrative motivation. But if we try to regard it as a flashforward, we may also encounter an irresolvable difficulty that in the chronological order, the ‘flashed part’ is in the narrative present, not future. The strategy used here, which I choose to name as ‘snake tail’, has nothing to do with traditional ‘flashes’ that observing the laws of dramaturgy. These deferred details are there to reinforce a symbolic link or to convey a sense of structural arrangement.
When Blake is in the shed writing, we are again offered a very complex sound track which is not at all illustrated by the images. Like the previous ‘On Bended Knee’ scene, here the masterful deployment of an independent, complex, three-dimensional sound track has achieved a striking effect (No wonder Leslie Shatz won a prize in
In contrast with the prevailing promiscuous atmosphere in the house, Blake is ascetic. Sometimes he is extremely weak, other times exalted. But most of time he is alone and indifferent to his surroundings. A second earlier he is in the conversation, trying to pick the meaning of words; a second later he is speechless, absent. He is too immersed in his own suffering which none of his adherents are able to comprehend. Scott’s attitude is more or less an exemplar: to others it is ‘Blake is not here. None of us have seen him’ and to Luke, ‘you got to leave him alone.’
If we analogize Scott to Peter, who is always taking care of things, covering up Jesus and being the spokesman of the group, then Luke is more like John, with a tender and submissive disposition. And it is true that after Blake dies, they flee from the place out of fear, just like the disciples have done in
The last night of his life, or rather dawn, Blake came back in a total darkness. Here the soundtrack is again suggesting water, with slight touch of wind-bell and guitar chord. When the wash job is finished, we hear a whistle accompanied briefly by a full orchestra, steps approaching, the opening of a door and the crowd that comes through it – the Mass is going to begin. Then he sited down. For the first time, we are able to take a good close up revealing his face. He is looking somewhere above him and his lips are moving, as if he is praying. In his eyes we see total drug-free sobriety. And again we hear church bell, choral voice and brief exchange of words. This sound track is presumably recorded in the same locale as the previous scene in shed.
The next morning, when the Grim Reaper appears with his scythe, Blake is found dead. We see in the superimposition a naked Blake getting up and turning around to climb an invisible stair (it looks like he is stepping on the very window pane). The soundtrack is simple enough: bird chirps. This ascension or imaginary resurrection is the culmination of all the inferences made throughout the film, unifying two sufferers, two human beings from different epochs of history, in the very moment of transcending.
Clément Janequin’s cheerful La Guerre plays at the end of the film. It seems to suggest that the resurrection is to be celebrated. From the chronological point of view, it is yet another ‘snake tail’ since we have seen in the previous scene when the ‘two guys and a girl’ decide to flee, these people are already on television.
For the sake of one possible interpretation, in our case, the symbolic link of Blake to Jesus Christ, various elements can be cited as supportive. But there are other notable passages where interesting uses of sound and camera movement are involved which do not directly support this view. Last Days is a work deliberately imbued with ambiguities. On one side it exploits, as we have been trying to demonstrate here, the established notion of suffering by an almost clichéd moral image: Jesus Christ; on the other hand, it seeks to neutralize, sometimes to destroy this notion, in another level. As soon as Blake bathes in the river, we see him pissing in it. Or if anybody tries seriously to pin down the reference of Jesus, Gus Van Sant might just ask, ‘do you believe a Jesus in women’s underwear?’ If moral content can be of any artistic value to the work, or even contribute an important potion of it, we need not hence to evaluate the film aesthetically according to its moral lesson. Whether or not Gus Van Sant’s portrait of Kurt Copain is accurate is not an issue, just like this reference to Jesus Christ is not an issue. The ability to evoke interpretation and effectively support them is good, but even better if it is designed to accommodate multiple interpretations. As Anne Sheppard put it, ‘The so called laws are conventions which an artist may exploit, but not a code by which artistic works must be judged... In general, a work which is rich in possibilities of interpretation will be a work which we find aesthetically valuable.’[6]
[1] André Bazin, What is Cinéma (volume I).
[2] Noël Carroll, ‘Formalism and Critical Evaluation.’ The Reasons of Art/L’art a ses raisons, ed. Peter J.McCormick.
[3] Being a last reminder to the eyes of most insensitive beholders, this scene can be perceived by those who appreciate subtlety as too blatant.
[4] This is shown with a soundtrack that suggests water pouring or cleaning.
[5] But what the reaction of the others? ‘You guys talking to Jesus for real?’
[6] Anne Sheppard: Aesthetics, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art.
Un buon vecchio è morto ed è andato in paradiso. Ovviamente, ha incontrato Dio. Però, ha scoperto che…Dio è un bambino.
Il vecchio : Buongiorno, eh, grazie a Dio, credo che Lei è Dio ?
Dio : Sì, sicuramente. per l'amor di Dio!
Il vecchio : Però, da quello che appare, penso che Lei sia molto maggiore. Quanti anni ha?
Dio: Io sono ancora un bambino. Sto cominciando la mia carriera. Tutta la vita mi è davanti.
Il vecchio: Però, sembra che Lei ha fatto già molte grandi cose, non è vero?
Dio: Sì, sì, ho creato il mondo in sei giorni. Tu sai che facevo molto lavoro nel Vecchio Testamento. Ma da quando è venuto Gesù, non ho più avuto nessuna cosa importante da fare.
Il vecchio: Gesù viene a visitarLa spesso?
Dio: Sì, quache volta vuole la mia firma. E ogni volta gli dico che m’annoio a morte, che voglio creare il mondo intero dall’inizio. Ma lui non me lo ha mai permesso.
Il vecchio: Non lo ha mai permesso ?
Dio: No. Io so che ci sono molti problemi a questo mondo. È tutt’altro che perfetto. L'unico modo che posso vedere è di creare un mondo nuovo. Ma lui m'assicurava sempre che si prende cura di tutte le cose, che non dovrei preoccuparmi. Dovrei piuttosto riposarmi e divertirmi.
Il vecchio: Allora, si è preso cura dei problemi ?
Dio: Non lo so. La sola cosa che so è che ci sono ancora molte persone che continuano a invocare il mio nome ogni giorno.
Il vecchio: Forse non hanno veramente un problema ogni volta che invocano il Suo nome ?
Dio: Sì. Questo è possibile. E Gesù dice che tutto è sotto controllo. Che un giorno lui vuole discendere sulla terra e risolvere tutti i problemi una volta per tutte.
Il vecchio: Bravo! Le ha detto quando?
Dio: Sì, ogni mille anni. Ora però io non ho più fiducia in lui.
Il vecchio: Perché ? Non è forse Suo figlio ?
Dio: È il più grande dei problemi ! Io non so quello che lui ha detto agli altri. Ma la verità è che io non ho mai avuto famiglia. Come potrei essere suo parente? Io l’ho accolto duemila anni fa perché ero troppo solo e non c'era nessuno con cui potere giocare. Ma lui è troppo serio. Non ha mai giocato con me. Parla, parla sempre.
Recently, I came across an article written by Susan Sontag which might serve as a good review of Resnais' techniques.
For all this complexity, Resnais conscientiously avoids direct narration. He gives us a chain of short scenes, horizontal in emotional tone, which focus on selected undramatic moments in the lives of the four main characters…Muriel, like Marienbad, should not puzzle, because there is nothing “behind” the lean, staccato statements that one sees. They can’t be deciphered, because they don’t say more than they say. It is rather as if Resnais had taken a story, which could be told quite straightforwardly, and cut it against the grain…it is Resnais’ way of making a realistic story over into an examination of the form of emotions.
Thus, although the story is not difficult to follow, Resnais’ techniques for telling it deliberately estrange the viewer from the story. Most conspicuous of these techniques is his elliptical, off-center conception of a scene…Resnais denies the viewer a chance to orient himself visually in traditional story terms. We are shown a hand on the doorknob, the vacant insincere smile of the client, a coffee pot boiling. The way the scenes are photographed and edited decomposes, rather than explains, the story…In Resnais’ films, all speech, including dialogue, tends to become narration --- to hover over the visible action, rather than to issue directly from it.
The extremely rapid cutting of Muriel is unlike the jumpy, jazzy cutting of Godard in Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie. Godard’s abrupt cutting pulls the viewer into the story, makes him restless and heightens his appetite for action, creating a kind of visual suspense. When Resnais cuts abruptly, he pulls the viewer away from the story. His cutting acts as a brake on the narrative, a kind of aesthetic undertow, a sort of filmic alienation effect. 234-235
Interestingly, the same can be said to Bresson, which Sontag has no hesitation to praise to sky-high.
Resnais’ use of speech has a similar “alienating” effect on the viewer’s feelings. Because his main characters have something not only benumbed but positively hopeless about them, their words are never emotionally moving. Speaking in a Resnais film is typically an occasion of frustration – whether it is the trance-like recitation of the incommunicable distress of an event in the past; or the truncated, distracted words his characters address to each other in the present. (Because of the frustrations of speech, eyes have great authority in Resnais’ films. A standard dramatic moment, insofar as he allows such a thing, is a few banal words followed by silence and a look.) Happily, there is nothing in Muriel of the insufferable incantatory style of the dialogue of
Resnais’ techniques, despite the visual brilliance of his films, seem to me to owe more to literature than to the tradition of the cinema as such. Most literary of all is Resnais’ formalism. Formalism itself is not literary. But to appropriate a complex and specific narrative in order deliberately to obscure it --- to write an abstract text on top of it, as it were --- is a very literary procedure.
There is a story in Muriel… but Muriel is designed so that, at any given moment of it, it’s not about anything at all. At any given moment it is a formal composition; and it is to this end that individual scenes are shaped so obliquely, the time sequence scrambled, and dialogue kept to a minimum of informativeness.
The typical formula of the new formalists of the novel and film is a mixture of coldness and pathos: coldness enclosing and subduing an immense pathos. Resnais’ great discovery is the application of this formula to “documentary” material, to true events locked in the historical past. 237
Sontag thinks this strategy worked for Night and Fog, but not his other films, here is why:
(In Night and Fog) The camera moves about, nosing out the grass growing up between the cracks in the masonry of the crematoria. The ghastly serenity of Dachau --- now a hollow, silent, evacuated shell – is posed against the unimaginable reality of what went on there in the past…the triumph of Night and Fog is its absolute control, its supreme refinement in dealing with a subject that incarnates the purest, most agonizing pathos.
However, in regards to
…the disturbing anomaly of Hiroshima is the implicit equating of the grandiose horror of the Japanese hero’s memory, the bombing and its mutilated victims, with the comparatively insignificant horror from the past the plagues the French heroine, an affair with a German soldier during the war for which, after the liberation, she was humiliated by having her head shaved.
I have said that not a memory but remembering is Resnais’ subject: nostalgia itself becomes an object of nostalgia; the memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of feeling.
And here is about Marienbad:
Here, a strong emotion – the pathos of erotic frustration and longing – is raised to the level of a meta-emotion by being set in a place that has the character of an abstraction, a vast palace peopled with haute couture mannequins. This method is plausible because it is a totally ahistorical, apolitical memory which Resnais has located in what is a kind of generalized Past. But abstraction through generality, at least in this film, seems to produce a certain deflection of energy. The mood is stylized reticence, but one does not feel, sufficiently, the pressure of what the characters are being reticent about. Marienbad has its center, but the center seems frozen. It has an insistent, sometimes sluggish stateliness in which visual beauty and exquisiteness of composition are continually undermined by a lack of emtional tension. 239
Obviously, Sontag’s criticism is imbued with an extremely personal and subjective sensitivity which gives her essay the vividness wanted in such occasions. But again, due to the unwanted authoritative tone derived most of the time unconsciously from it, her analysis slips quickly into the purgatory of unjustified evaluations.
But who care about that much academic regulations? Having guts is more important and Sontag is certainly such a woman. In The New Yorker (September 24, 2001) she remarks about the immediate aftermath of 9/11:
"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of
