9/09/2005 06:04:00 PM|||The Zen Master|||Arts and Letters Daily had a link to this terrific article from the most recent issue of The New Yorker. Since it would cost me well over $100 to have my weekly literary sustenance delivered to me here in Beijing, I have to subsist on the few articles those demigods of Times Square are willing to publish online for free each week. Luckily, this retrospective look by film critic David Denby at how Susan Sontag viewed the cinema was among the pieces that made it into their website. In addition to offering some fascinating insight into the perspective my favorite recently deceased public intellectual had on the twentieth-century's most unique art form, the article also reveals that Sontag loved some of the same films I do--most emphatically, Yasujiro Ozu's incredible Tokyo Story.

Sontag, it turned out, had a personal canon of about four hundred movies that she visited over and over at revival houses--Renoir's Rules of the Game and Kurosawa's High and Low were particular favorites, and she claimed to have seen Ozu's heartbreaking Tokyo Story thirty times. "There are passions which last forever," she told an audience of movie-lovers at the Japan Society in 2003. At the end of her life, working hard, and often ill, Susan Sontag went to the movies almost every day of the week.

Here in Beijing, I'm lucky to have unparalled, inexpensive access to great films on DVD. For 10RMB (a little more than $1), I can get almost any movie I could want, from Tim Burton's disappointing remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Istvan Szabo's Love Film, and Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, which are just a few of the DVDs I have purchased in the past few days. Even if I can't experience the dark pleasure of the cinema-house by going to the movies "almost every day of the week"--there's usually only one or two English-language films playing in the whole city, and those are the likes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith or Batman Begins--I can certainly attempt to do so from the comfort of my own home.|||112626029745765235|||Sontag at the movies