A mood-documentary shot in Israel during and immediately following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Promised Lands doesn't lend itself to categorization. In an article that Sontag wrote for Vogue at the time of the film's release (it's nearly impossible to imagine such a thing happening today, but declining literary standards in American fashion magazines is a topic for another time) she defined filmmaking as 'nitpicking, anxiety, fights, claustrophobia, exhaustion, euphoria.' This string of emotive descriptions also works handily as a definition for this curious work, which has its points to make, but isn't afraid to let the dusty desert wind flow through and knock aside any generalities.
Banned by the Israeli government on its first release, the film seems generally inoffensive today, except perhaps to those who object to any depictions of war's cost. It's those images which resonate most in this mostly dialogue-free film, the surprising sequence set at Jerusalem's War Cemetery for the British dead from World War I which opens the film. Also the harrowing sight of tanks and trucks abandoned in the desert as rusted coffins, their metal skins shattered and shredded by shrapnel, the unburied dead being covered by the drifting sand. Although Sontag engages other subjects, it is this punishing sense of war's brutality that provides the film's moral backbone.
It should be noted that Promised Lands is a film that could have benefited from a tauter structure. For though Sontag's refusal to indulge polemics about the Arab-Israeli issue is impressive (particularly given her willingness to engage directly in political causes throughout her life), she cedes to much of the film to a pair of interviews, whose rambling dissertations provide some insight, but whose contributions pale against the striking impact of Sontag's narration-free imagery.
Sontag provides a good deal of time to the thoughts of Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli who lacerates his countrymen for abandoning their ideological roots in the rush towards American-style consumerism following the striking victories of 1967. While it can be hard to follow Kaniuk's train of thought (particularly given his low and mumbly voice, and Sontag's habit of continually cutting away), his thoughts combined with the powerful imagery of sun-struck deserts and ancient Jerusalem alleys, provide a stark picture of a land of eternal conflict. This point is made even more forcefully with the inclusion of physicist Yuval Ne'eman, whose description of Arab ideology in the contemporary Palestinian cause as nothing less than purely distilled anti-Semitism is hard to refute. It's not for nothing that Sontag includes the Israeli soldier stating the case for the war in stark terms: 'You have to fight because we can't lose.'
By the end of Promised Lands, Sontag's lack of a disciplined editing scheme wounds an otherwise strong film. Certain sequences are left to run too long, and many others are jumbled together in no particular order. It's a shame, because the scenes of life in conflict that she has captured here are burningly resonant, such as images of soldiers hitchhiking to the battlefield in civilian cars or the campy but strangely effective wax museum that presents the official history of the Israeli state. There is the disembodied voice, reckoning on these tangled civilizations and age-old enmities, wondering, 'What is it? Sand, and so much blood.' Although she didn't always seem to know exactly what it was that she was capturing, Sontag was enough of an artist to know that she was present in a crucible-moment, and that if she just pointed her camera in the right direction, history would do the rest.
Large bricks are promised.
