ABSTRACT
Sontag was an avid cinephile and explored her passion by writing perceptive essays about film early in her career. Her interest in French New Wave cinema is shown in her essays on Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson, among others. Beyond the French New Wave, Sontag also comments on works by Ingmar Bergman and Leni Riefenstahl. I trace the movement from an early Sontag defense of Riefenstahl on aesthetic grounds to her rejection of her and her work on feminist political grounds later in her career. These various essays on cinema, most found in the same volume as the essays discussed in Chapter 2 as well as Against Interpretation and Other Essays, show Sontag creating a body of work particular to one form of media that takes her analysis of silence and contemplation into a broader arena than just work on visual art and literature.
