Since the publication of her controversial essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 to her death 40 years later, novelist and essayist Susan Sontag maintained a passionate yet deeply ambivalent interest in popular culture--in particular, photography, pop art, advertising, and movies. In the introduction to the revised edition of Against Interpretation (1996), she wrote, "What I didn’t understand [in the 1960s] . . . was that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions.”

In an essay first published in 1995 and revised the next year, Sontag examined the causes for what she saw as the "ignominious, irreversible decline" of films and the end of "cinephilia"--her term for "the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired." One cause, as discussed in the following passages, has been the decline of theater going in favor of home viewing of movies. Compare these two versions of Sontag's text, and consider in what ways (if any) the revision shows an improvement over the original.

Kidnapped by Movies (original version)

from "A Century of Cinema," by Susan Sontag

Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive, such as: it looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn't raining. But whatever you took home from the movies was only a part of the larger experience of losing yourself in lives that were not yours--which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience.

The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie.

The first prerequisite of being kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. And the conditions of "going to the movies" were essential to that. To see a great film only on TV isn't to have really seen that film. (This is equally true of those made for TV, like Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz and the two Heimat films of Edgar Reitz.) It's not only a question of the dimensions: the superiority of the larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Since film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom, To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.

No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals--erotic, ruminative--of the darkened theater. The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to be more attention-grabbing have produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention. Images now appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls and on megascreens hanging above sports arenas and the outsides of tall buidlings. The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art at its most serious and for cinema as popular entertainment.

* * *

Kidnapped by Movies (revised version)

from "The Decay of Cinema," by Susan Sontag

Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn't raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people's lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie--and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of "going to the movies" was part of it. To see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film. It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.

No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals--erotic, ruminative--of the darkened theater. The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention. Images now appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls and on megascreens hanging above sports arenas. The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular entertainment.

Selected Works by Susan Sontag

• Against Interpretation, essays (1966)
• Death Kit, novel (1967)
• Styles of Radical Will, essays (1969)
• On Photography, nonfiction (1977)
• Illness As Metaphor, nonfiction (1978)
• Under the Sign of Saturn, essays (1980)
• In America, novel (1999)
• Where the Stress Falls, essays (2001)
• At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches (2007)

The first version of this passage by Susan Sontag appeared in her essay "A Century of Cinema," published in the Frankfurter Rundschau in 1995. The revised version was published in The New York Times Magazine (February 25, 1996) under the title "The Decay of Cinema."