Susan Sontag – Movie night with discussion
Zu Gast: Dr. Kristina Jaspers
Duet for Cannibals
Two couples in a remote house near Stockholm, including an intellectual puppet master and manipulator: what begins as a summer arrangement develops into a precisely composed game of seduction, dependency and role reversal. Between cool analysis and ironic refraction, it remains unclear whether this is a drama or a black comedy. Duett för kannibalen (1969) marked Susan Sontag's directorial debut. The passionate cineaste was given extensive artistic freedom in Sweden. The film was shot in Swedish, a language she herself did not speak: a year earlier, she had already noted: ‘Making a film about language – every person in the film speaks their own language.’ Musically, motifs from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde frame the action and mark possible moments of fusion and loss of self. For Sontag, the practice of filmmaking also enabled a significant expansion of her film-theoretical thinking.
At the invitation of the Chair of Art Studies & Media Theory (Matthias Bruhn), Dr. Kristina Jaspers, curator at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin and responsible for an exhibition on the work of Susan Sontag at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn in 2025, will take on a teaching assignment at the HfG Karlsruhe in the summer semester of 2026, which will deal with her relationship to cinema.
As part of the seminar, Susan Sontag's debut film “Duett för kannibaler” (1969) will be screened, with an introduction by Kristina Jaspers. The event is open to the public and invites the audience to join in a discussion afterwards.