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Unguided Tour (aka Letter From Venice) (PG) + Introduction by Brian Dillon

Architecture on Film

Unguided Tour

In writer Susan Sontag’s final film, Venice becomes stage and subject, in dialogue with a lovers’ weekend. Dancer Lucinda Childs stars as a tourist of melancholy, memory and fading romance.

Sontag’s adaption of her story for the screen creates cinema at the intersection of Venice and the narrative, as her protagonist drifts through the end of an affair and ‘a city that even the Italians visit as if they were a foreigner’.

Against the backdrop of a vacation in the floating city and its lingering past unfolds a relationship that will similarly soon be history, as on screen dialogue and offscreen conversation blur the present and future, conjuring a contemplative tourism of both place and the mind.

Introduced by writer Brian Dillon (Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, In the Dark Room).

Italy 1983 dir Susan Sontag 71 min

Curated by the Architecture Foundation

This title has been locally classified

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