A Century of Cinema

Published in the Frankfurter Rundschau in 1995, Susan Sontag's essay flows like an ongoing stream of water. After all, 16 years ago she was writing of cinema as a decadent art. This was also her last published essay on cinema. Susan Sontag in 1975. © Estate of Peter Hujar/The Paris Review inema's 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It's not that you can't look forward anymore to new films that you can admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions -- that's true of great achievements...

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'A Rose for Emily' by William Faulkner

The Emily you will meet below, had a tragedy like many of us. Her tragedy was so grave that Faulkner couldn't stop himself from handing her a rose. Picture Courtesy: the melancholy of objects 4 by Guy Batey When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years. It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires...

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'Funes, the Memorious' by Jorge Luis Borges

First published in the Argentine newspaper La Nación in 1942, this short story by Jorge Luis Borges is a fictional version of his meeting Ireneo Funes, a teenage boy who lives in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, in 1884. After a gap of three years, when the writer returns to the same place, he finds Funes bed-ridden, the result of an accident which leaves him with more than it takes away from him. INSIDE-OUTSIDE.Memory by Tatjana Mihailova I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no...

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