影片官网上有一个很荒凉的论坛 ，只向访问者发出一个问题：What does Susan Sontag Mean to You?
我: My first encounter with Susan Sontag was reading an excerpt from "Prospect for a Trip to China".
The way she conceptualized traveling, defining it as a permutation of variables, left a sharp impression on my mind. She described her trip to China as the sequence of Luhu Bridge, Sham Chun River, Hong Kong, China, and peaked cloth caps. When I walked the same bridge for the first time to go from China to Hong Kong, I had this illusion in my head of rubbing shoulders with Susan Sontag on the Luhu Bridge, and suddenly the most trivial experience of crossing a bridge became dreamy and meaningful to me.
Great minds like Susan Sontag make living in this world so much more worthwhile.
Regarding the film, I like how it presents photos of Susan in almost excessive frequency - it constantly reminds the viewer that you are looking at nothing but preserved images. There are also a lot of playing around with the photos/images: sometimes a photo is stuffed in a bottle, sometimes dipped in running water, or submerged by sand, and sometimes deliberately bent or distorted. I like how these installations remind viewers of the vulnerability of images and perhaps truths. The Susan Sontag we believe we know is merely a construct of images, images that are perceived by the subjective eye and are perishable.
And I love the last shot of the film, of a young Sontag, apparently not yet skillful about how to pose in front of the camera. Her face shows a lot of timidness and inconfidence, something you do not find in the famous Susan Sontag. But I think this is the perfect metaphor about Sontag: in the eyes of the others Susan Sontag was very knowledgable, too knowledgable perhaps; but she must have felt only the opposite, that she knew so little, about truth, death, and herself. She must have been deeply upset and threatened by how little she knew, and her face captured in the final scene of the film shows exactly that intellectual and existential anxiety.
