Screen Test: Susan Sontag

Directed by Andy Warhol

Susan Sontag was one of the many subjects of Warhol’s Screen Tests, a silent-film portrait series capturing well–known cultural figures of the 1960s. Warhol filmed seven Screen Tests of the journalist and author Sontag in his Factory—a space of collaborative and interdisciplinary artistic production. Of the Sontag films, ST318 is perhaps the most direct and severe. The intricacies of Sontag’s facial features are heightened by the film’s slow–motion progression, stretched out to four minutes and thirty seconds.