Duett för kannibaler (OmeU) - Susan Sontag – Ein Filmabend mit Gespräch

In the organizer's words:

Director: Susan Sontag | Sweden 1969 | 105 min | DCP | original version with English subtitles | with Lars Ekborg, Gösta Ekman, Adriana Asti

Two couples in a remote house near Stockholm, among them an intellectual string-puller 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. Susan Sontag made her directorial debut with Duet for Cannibals (1969). The passionate cineaste was given extensive artistic freedom in Sweden. The film was shot in Swedish, a language she did not speak herself: a year earlier, she had already noted: "Shooting a film about language - every person in the film speaks their own language." Musically, motifs from Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde frame the action and mark possible moments of fusion and loss of self. For Sontag, film practice 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 Susan Sontag's work 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 will be followed by a discussion.

Click here for the screening:
https://kinoimblauensalon.de/de/events/duet-for-cannibals-2026-05-15

Price information:

Free admission | Donation requested