Promised Lands
Director: Susan Sontag
Year Released: 1974
Rating: 1.0
Famed American writer/essayist Sontag staples together clips and interviews for this purported visual essay on the Yom Kippur War between Israel and various Arab forces. It's too disconnected to provide much illumination into the (timeless) conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, and there's no cohesion: it goes from mixture of talking heads to sound clips and scenes to daily life, to women walking barefoot by goats, back to city life, then to images of people grocery shopping, then to corpses and tanks rolling out. There is an intriguing bit with a doctor explaining his 'cure' for dealing with the psychological aftermath of fighting ... it doesn't seem healthy, it seems like torture. Had Sontag 'zoned in' on something as specific as this, this might have been a clearer-headed documentary - as it stands, it's a loose collection of ideas.
