Susan Sontag – Film Event with Discussion
As part of the seminar “Susan Sontag: Seeing and Being Seen,” which explores Sontag’s reflections on visibility, self-presentation, and representation, we will screen Sontag’s debut film Duett för kannibaler (1969), followed by an open discussion.
At the invitation of the Chair of Art History & Media Theory (Matthias Bruhn), Dr. Kristina Jaspers, a curator at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin and the curator of an exhibition on the work of Susan Sontag at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in 2025, will take on a teaching assignment at the HfG Karlsruhe in the summer semester of 2026, focusing on her relationship to cinema.
The seminar is based on the exhibition of the same name that Jaspers curated for the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn in 2025 and which will be on view at the Schwules Museum Berlin starting in June 2026.
Susan Sontag made her directorial debut with Duett för kannibaler. The passionate cineaste was granted 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 potential moments of fusion and loss of self. For Sontag, the practice of filmmaking enabled a significant expansion of her film-theoretical thinking as well.
