Like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras, Susan Sontag has come to filmmaking in the course of a career as a novelist and essayist. In 1968 she accepted a Swedish studio's invitation to write and direct a move in Stockholm. Duet for Cannibals is the result.
Frederic Tuten, in Vogue magazine, wrote: "Duet for Cannibals is a witty, bone-dry serio-comedy that fascinates and disturbs in turn...Dr. Arthur Bauer, attractive in a swinish way, fiftyish, arch-revolutionary theoretician engaged in writing his memoirs, is Sontag's anti- or false revolutionary, an arrogant, self-aggrandizing trickster who blurs together revolution and his ego. Francesca, Bauer's neurotic, elegantly seductive wife, supports her husband's mystifications while composing her own. Tomas, an earnest student revolutionary hired by Bauer to catalogue his documents, and Ingrid, Tomas's impressionable girlfriend, are the fodder for the elder couple's psychological and sexual feast."
With this film Susan Sontag joins the company of writers-filmmakers and offers her own special contribution to cinematic art.
