Ausschnitt: Duett för kannibaler, 1969 (© Sandrews)
Duett för kannibaler
Duet for Cannibals
Sweden 1969
Director: Susan Sontag
DCP | OmeU
Two couples in a remote house near Stockholm, among them an intellectual
puppet master and manipulator: What begins as a summer arrangement develops into
a precisely composed game of seduction, dependence, and role reversal. Between
cool analysis and ironic refraction, it remains unclear whether this is a drama or a black
comedy.
Duett för kannibalen (1969) marked Susan Sontag's directorial debut. The passionate cineaste
was given extensive artistic freedom in Sweden. The film was shot in Swedish, a
language she herself did not speak: a year earlier, she had already noted: "Making a film about language
– every person in the film speaks their own language." Musically, motifs from Richard
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde frame the action and mark possible moments of fusion
and loss of self. For Sontag, the practice of filmmaking also enabled a significant expansion of her
film-theoretical thinking.
At the invitation of the Chair of Art History & 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 that deals 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 group discussion.
Friday, May 15, 2026, 6:30 p.m.
Blue Salon, Room 012, HfG Karlsruhe
Free admission, donations welcome
