Young Intellectuals Making Movies

When I think about intellectuals and movies, I think of Susan Sontag. For Sontag, movies were the most promising form of modernist expression, in part, because they elided the domineering and interpretative hubris of the intelligentsia. "In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret," she wrote in 1964. By allowing surface aesthetics and everyday existence to linger on camera and providing a "direct experience of the language of faces and gestures," films could force us to experience life in a way the written word never could.