Directed by Nancy Kates
Screening at MIT
March 17, 2016 at 7pm*
Bartos Theater, List Visual Arts Center
Building E15, 20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MA

 Regarding Susan Sontag is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. The documentary explores Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words, read by actress Patricia Clarkson. From her early infatuation with books and her first experience in a gay bar; from her marriage in adolescence to her last lover, Regarding Susan Sontag is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism still resonate today. More than any other thinker of her day, Sontag was watched, viewed, photographed and stared at. She was gazed at, and she looked back, very carefully, particularly at language and metaphor and at photography and what she called “the ecology of images.”

 Film will be followed by Q&A discussion with director Nancy Kates.

 Nancy Kates is an independent filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is best known for her film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a full-length documentary she made with co-producer Bennett Singer about Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights leader.

 This event is co-sponsored by the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, Cinematic Migrations, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the MIT Program in History, Theory, and Criticism.

*pizza will be served at 6:30pm.