Where Everything Seems to Begin: Antonioni and Branca in the United States circa 1968

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on two films made by Italian directors in the United States at the end of the 1960s, Seize the Time by Antonello Branca (1970) and Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni (1970). Very different in style, production, and intended audiences, Antonioni’s and Branca’s films share themes and atmosphere, they are both immersed in the political environment of the time and they are examples of Italian transnational cinema and Italian representations of the United States. In different ways, they show how, in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s words, ‘in America … everything is going to begin’, but they are also examples of the failure of this potential new beginning.

SOMMARIO

Il paper analizza due film realizzati da registi italiani negli Stati Uniti alla fine degli anni sessanta, Seize the Time di Antonello Branca (1970) e Zabriskie Point di Michelangelo Antonioni (1970). Diversi in stile, produzione, e audience di riferimento, i film di Antonioni e Branca condividono tematiche e atmosfere, sono entrambi immersi nell’ambiente politico dell’epoca e esempi di cinema italiano transnazionale e di rappresentazioni italiane degli USA. In modi diversi, parlano di come — secondo le parole di Pier Paolo Pasolini — ‘in America … si ha l'impressione che tutto stia per cominciare’, ma sono anche esempi del fallimento di questo nuovo, potenziale inizio.

KEYWORDS:

• American culture
• Michelangelo Antonioni
• Black Panther Party
• Antonello Branca
• Italian directors in the US

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• cultura americana
• Michelangelo Antonioni
• Black Panther Party
• Antonello Branca
• registi italiani negli Stati Uniti

During the twentieth century, Italian Leftist intellectuals were captivated by the United States of America. During the Fascist period (1922–1943), ‘America’ was seen to be a land of freedom and unbridled possibility, largely thanks to both the popularity of Hollywood cinema and the translation and distribution of texts by US authors, such as John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos.¹ Even in post-war Italy when, during the Cold War, the United States assumed a completely different ideological connotation for Leftist intellectuals, the US continued to be an object of fascination. This was the case for filmmakers as well. In 1966, for example, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to New York, where he participated in film presentations and interacted with intellectuals and artists.² Reflecting on his trip, which also saw him visit Harlem, attend meetings of student organizations, and meet with black militants, the filmmaker and poet came to the conclusion that ‘the core of the struggle for the Third World revolution is really America’.³ The New American Left reminded him of the Italian Resistance, and, with his usual overindulgent prose, he noted:

In America, even though my visit was brief, I spent many hours in an underground atmosphere of struggle, revolutionary urgency, and hope that belongs to the Europe of 1944 and 1945. In Europe everything is finished; in America I have the impression that everything is going to begin.⁴

This paper focuses on two films made by Italian directors at the end of the 1960s: Seize the Time by Antonello Branca (1970) and Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni (1970). Though very different in style, production, and target audience, the two films are united by their exploration of similar themes and their shared mood. They are also important examples of how the country was seen by foreigners at a turning point in US history. In particular I will examine the ways in which the two films portray the New American Left, as well as how they depict the American spaces and landscapes within which they were filmed. Within this, I will explain the ways in which the two films can be identified as transnational Italian films — as objects that emerged from the interaction between different countries and cultures — and the ways in which the narratives, though conceived under similar conditions, evolve along different paths. Finally, I will discuss the ways in which Pasolini’s perception of America as the place where ‘everything is about to begin’ appears — both thematically and stylistically — in Branca’s and Antonioni’s films. I will, in other words, examine Pasolini’s perception of America against the grain of these two films and the journeys of their directors.

Seize the Time: An Italian Director and the Black Panthers

The global 1968 was the subject of several cinematic narratives.⁵ Filmmakers, both those part of the political movements of the time and those who were not, filmed events and produced newsreels, documentaries, and short and long films documenting the political unrest.⁶ One of these filmmakers was Antonello Branca, a director who worked for the Italian national television company (RAI). During this period, he was also a militant member of Lotta Continua, a prominent Italian Far Left organization during the 1960s. Born in 1935, he began his career at a very young age, working as a photographer in Kenya before embarking on a career as a filmmaker in London in 1961. In 1966, he travelled to the United States to make What's Happening (1967), a documentary about Pop Art and the Beat Generation, starring Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Allen Ginsberg. Whilst in the United States, he also continued to work for RAI, filming a trilogy of documentaries in California: Los Angeles: A City in Automobile; California: The Dissent; and California: A Laboratory for the Future (all three filmed in 1968). For the remainder of his life, he would continue to write and work on projects related to the United States, and would occasionally return there.⁷ Branca died in 2002 and, thanks to the cultural association named after him, his work is slowly being rediscovered.⁸ The recovery of Branca’s work was particularly animated by the production of two retrospectives, one for the cinephile television programme Fuori Orario, aired on Rai Tre in 2008, and another shown at the Cineteca Nazionale — Cinema Trevi (the National Cinematheque in Rome) in 2010. This newfound interest was also motivated by the release of a DVD edition of Seize the Time.⁹ In 2013, Branca’s archive, which includes unfinished and raw material, was donated to the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (Audiovisual Archive of the Labor and Democratic Movement, AAMOD), which distributes his films across different venues, including online streaming platforms. An investigation into this vast array of material is currently (2023) taking place, and will surely reveal more about Branca’s work.

Branca’s only feature length film, Seize the Time, focuses on Norman Jacobs: a black man who becomes increasingly aware of his place in both the world and the landscape of Leftist political movements that defined America. The film strongly emphasizes how the struggle against racism is heavily intertwined with class struggle. As an official synopsis from the time reads:

An African American man lives in the USA. Because of the colour of his skin and white racism he is desperately in search of his ‘identity’.

The film follows him through a series of real situations — a lie detector exam when he is looking for a job, discussions with the white bourgeoisie and police repression — he slowly becomes conscious of the colour of his skin and the problems of the society he lives in. In the end, all that is left for him is to join his people and those who do not believe in racism, to free not only black people but also the oppressed people all over the world.¹⁰

The film was also presented at the 1970 Mostra internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro (Pesaro Film Festival), the most cinematographically and politically innovative film festival in Italy during this period.¹¹ Quite explicitly, a leaflet for the festival reads:

Made following from the inside the work of the Black Panther Party in the USA, Seize the Time is the story of an African American man who, through a series of events, becomes conscious of the fact that his problems are only partially the consequence of the colour of his skin. In a classist society, being black means having been exploited and continuing to be exploited and oppressed. Being black means being part of the masses of people who are exploited all over the world regardless of the colour of their skin. As astronauts arrive on the moon, in America blacks, and Panthers in particularly, are killed in cold blood following a premeditated repressive plan. There is only one answer to this state of affairs, and this is the indication that the film wants to give, that is to take up arms and to seize the time, as the title of the film states.¹²

The version presented in Pesaro seems to have had an introduction which is not included in the known version of the film.¹³

The film traces the physical and mental journey of its protagonist Norman, played by Norman Jacobs (the only professional actor in the movie) as he travels across the United States. At the beginning of the film, his involvement in the activities of the Black Panther Party is tenuous. However, scene by scene, the viewer watches him become gradually immersed in the world of the party and its members; he begins to visit their offices, associate with party members and, in a pinnacle scene, repeats Panther-inspired knowledge to his children, teaching them how to fight and claim their rights. In the language of the press release that accompanied its distribution, Seize the Time ‘mixes fiction and direct cinema, using a professional actor and material shot on location, during protests, and raw footage coming from different sources, like the sequence shot in the apartment where Fred Hampton was killed by the police’.¹⁴ More explicitly, in a letter sent to the Italian Ministry of Tourism and Spectacle by the production company, the author explains why the film will not be dubbed; the style of Seize the Time, the letter states, can be defined as an in-between cinema verité and ‘guerrilla theatre’.¹⁵ The title of the film is taken from a song written by Elaine Brown, a former chairperson of the Black Panther Party who appears in some of the film’s sequences. Branca filmed in 16 mm in various locations across the USA, between December 1968 and September 1969, before expanding into 35 mm.¹⁶ The original working title of the film was Burn, Baby, Burn: a reference to a poem written by Marvin X following the 1965 Watts Rebellion.¹⁷ Norman Jacobs’ story can therefore be seen as paradigmatic of many similar stories which took place during the same period. It is also one of the relatively few films shot in this environment, as ‘film played a marginal role in the Black movement’¹⁸ and, more broadly, films made about the Black Panther Party during this time were rare. Films such as Black Panthers: A Report (1968) by Agnes Varda, The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) by Mike Gray, and Eldridge Cleaver (1970) by William Klein (filmed in Algeria) were rare exceptions. According to a letter written by the actress Jane Fonda to Gillo Pontecorvo, the Black Panthers wanted him to direct a film on their party, but the project did not develop much past this point.¹⁹ Seize the Time is therefore extremely important also because it is one of the few films that documents the party’s activities and the life of its militants.

The film raises some questions: why, for example, did a white, Italian director become so close to the Black Panthers? And to what extent can he talk about the party authentically? Will his gaze always unavoidably be that of an outsider? This debate is explored through an enlightening dialogue at the beginning of the film between two white liberals and Norman, where one of the men talks to the protagonist about the ways in which they should protest and organize (‘to me it’s a matter of terms, not a matter of goals’). A letter, preserved at AAMOD, belonging to an unknown US contact for the film, Janet L. Kranzberg, shows how closely Branca worked with the Black Panther Party and wanted to share their work with a wider public. According to Paese Sera, which, at the time, was a newspaper with close ties to the Communist Party of Italy, the film was watched by the leadership of the party in New York and Algiers, the city in which part of the group was based in 1969.²⁰ During the debate that followed the premiere of the film in Pesaro, Branca mentioned how ‘the film was made from within the Black Panther movement’.²¹ Indeed, this can be seen in many scenes of Seize the Time, where the influence of the Black Panthers and their personal documentation becomes most obvious: in an internal meeting of the organization; in the scene in which two Black Panthers teach Norman how to free himself from a strait jacket; and, of course, in the scene in which Elaine Brown herself sings. In Seize the Time, as the title itself suggests, what is about to begin is the spark of a fleeting revolutionary moment; it needs to be seized upon soon, before it evades their grasp.

Zabriskie Point, Antonioni's Most Expensive and Experimental Movie

Branca’s Seize the Time, shot in a semi-documentary style, is an independent, low-budget production which, shot within the very political organizations it depicts, employed largely non-professional actors and actresses. While in terms of production, style, and scope, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point could not be more different from Branca’s film, the two films are united in several ways. A well-known and respected director in Italy, Antonioni shot Zabriskie Point at the peak of his career, after at least three of his movies received critical acclaim in the English-speaking world: L'Avventura (1960), Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, 1964), and Blow-Up (1966). The latter, shot in English in London with an international cast, was critically acclaimed and a box office hit, and ultimately came to be identified as a unique example of a successful film made by an international director. According to Callenbach, ‘Antonioni is the only major director who ever made a film in an alien culture with complete success’.²² Zabriskie Point was also the second of Antonioni's movies to be produced by Metro–Goldwyn–Meyer (MGM), in collaboration with prominent producer Carlo Ponti. The director decided to make a film in Los Angeles and Death Valley

because [America] is one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting country in the world. It is a place where some of the essential truths and contradictions of our time can be isolated to their pure state. I had many images of America in mind, but I wanted to see it with my own eyes, not as a voyager but as an author.

However, unlike its British counterpart, Antonioni’s US film was not welcomed with the same critical consensus,²³ and was a total box office failure: it grossed about $800,000, compared with a budget of $7 million.²⁴ While, as it states in the published screenplay of the film which also contains a press review,²⁵ the US critics were far from reaching a consensus on this topic, it is undeniable that the film was coldly received, and Antonioni himself wrote: ‘Why Americans saw in Zabriskie Point a film against their country remains a mystery to me’.²⁶

With this film, the director from Ferrara, at the time 57 years old, aimed to narrate the experiences of young and rebellious people. However, instead of making a movie simply depicting youth revolt — as MGM, hoping to capitalize on a youth audience, had expected — he filmed a story of ‘ordinary’ people immersed in the American landscape — a space that fascinated him. Zabriskie Point follows the love story of Mark, a student who is willing to die for the revolution but ‘not of boredom’, as he states in the opening scene of the movie, and Daria, a girl who works for a developer of high-end desert real estate called Sunnydunes Enterprises, but only when ‘I need the bread’. Played by two non-professional actors (Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin), the characters are somewhat estranged from contemporary society and their politically active peers, representing ‘Antonioni's usual frustrated, vacant outsiders’.²⁷ They are not the sole protagonists of the film, however; on the contrary, Antonioni argues that ‘America is the protagonist — the characters are only a pretext’.²⁸

In many of the interviews that Antonioni gave before and during the shooting of the film, he spoke about his relationship with the United States and the reasons why he wanted to make Zabriskie Point. He visited the country in 1961 for the promotional tour of L'Avventura, and then later ‘took two trips to America (the first in spring of 1967 and the second in autumn). I had this idea to do a film here because I wanted to get out of Italy and Europe’.²⁹ He was particularly drawn to the freedom that the United States seem to offer:

I immediately fell in love with that great sense of freedom you feel as soon as you arrive in America. I'm talking about a freedom which is physical, too, of moving about — a characteristic that struck me immediately and that I think is typical of that culture.³⁰

This relates to a different sense of geography and space that the director felt there: ‘When something happens in Rome, it is happening in Italy. And the same thing for Berlin in Germany. Not here. When something happens in Los Angeles, it doesn't matter for New York — it has nothing to do with New York’.³¹ This spatial understanding of the United States is evident in Zabriskie Point, a film that not only explores the vast spaces of the country but also interrogates the ways in which a European decides to move within them: repeatedly Antonioni’s camera focuses on the deserted landscapes of the Southwest and the characters who inhabit them, whether it be a lone cowboy drinking or a group of restless children, and the typical set of icons that constitute the imaginary of the American South, such as gas stations and isolated villas.

What Is About to Begin? Politics in the United States circa 1970 as Seen by Europeans

Antonioni and Branca’s works seemed to be premised on drastically different motivations. While the former wanted to tell the story of a young man and woman who navigate the American landscape against the backdrop of revolutionary protests, the latter wanted to recount the revolutionary protests through its protagonists, relegating human drama to the periphery. Similarly, whilst Antonioni was motivated by the personal and artistic exigency of a mid-career director who wanted to leave his country, breathe new air, and find inspiration,³² Branca was a political militant interested in the struggles of his time. The two directors, however, are united by their decision to cast non-professional actors. Whilst for Branca, as an independent filmmaker, this seemed natural and acceptable, for Antonioni’s critics (especially those from mainstream American media), this proved to be controversial. Callenbach noted how ‘almost every scene in which more than one line is spoken becomes embarrassing’³³ and Chatman argues that Antonioni's decision to use non-professional actors for the leading roles was a mistake.³⁴ Nonetheless, Daria and Mark, whose fictional and real names are the same, also represent ordinary people who undergo their own transformation during the film. As Marsha Kinder noted, ‘this story could have happened to them. […] the story is about them’.³⁵ This transformation appears to be very different than Norman Jacobs’s, who during Seize the Time becomes a full-fledged political militant. Mark, in contrast, only seems to be able to perform protests that, whilst rebellious, are also impulsive and incoherent. Daria, additionally, can only dream of blowing up her boss’s villa, a fantasy shown in the most recognizable scene of the film: the epic ending which sees objects of the consumer world float through the sky accompanied by a Pink Floyd soundtrack. Despite their differences, however, all three characters are representative of different facets of the fraught political environment in which they lived and, most importantly, it is precisely this environment that makes the personal and political development of Norman, Daria, and Mark possible.

While both Antonioni and Branca approached their films with a frame of reference that derived from European politics and culture,³⁶ their interests and, by extension, the projects they created were very different. This is reflected most obviously in the way the two directors talked about the US Left at the time. Antonioni, for example, wanted to represent America in an allegorical way,³⁷ and use political unrest as a backdrop: ‘If I had wanted to do a picture about student dissent, I would have continued the direction I took at the opening with the student-meeting sequence’.³⁸ Whilst Branca filmed within the Black Panthers, Antonioni was working for MGM (a major and mainstream production company) and needed to hire people active in or close to the student movements like Fred Gardner and Sam Shepard to help him write the screenplay. Additionally challenging was the task of approaching African Americans to participate, as he admitted, ‘it's difficult to come into contact with black people and even harder to meet young revolutionary people’.³⁹ Similarly, Pasolini recounted his meetings with some militants of the Black Panthers in Harlem, saying that ‘they were suspicious because I was white’.⁴⁰

This racial emphasis can be seen in both films; not only in the abovementioned debate in Seize the Time, but also in the famous opening scene in Zabriskie Point, where we see white student radicals and black militants debating about which form the struggle should take. This was a fictionalized version of an ongoing debate that was taking place during this period, and was filmed among real students and protesters, including Kathleen Cleaver, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers who at the time was also interviewed by Antonello Branca.⁴¹ Chatman, who loved Antonioni's movies as much as he was sceptical of Zabriskie Point, contested the opening sequence of the film, noting how ‘the Black Panthers movement had little to do with the student movement’.⁴² Yet it is none other than Bobby Seale (one of the founders of the party) who speaks widely in his book Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton about this connection, especially the alliance between the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).⁴³ When we take this into consideration it should not be particularly surprising that campuses of colleges and universities play a pivotal role in both films. In Seize the Time, events are filmed with a hand-held camera, with quick movements and cuts typical of independent cinema — a style very close to that of cinéma vérité. Some of the events are simply ‘peaceful’ demonstrations, whereas in others we witness the brutality of the police force, as well as some military trainings (these are extremely similar to those seen in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969)). When examining the raw material preserved at the AAMOD, it becomes clear that Branca filmed much more than what he included in the narrative. Antonioni also fictionalized several of these protests, including one with a killing.⁴⁴

Cities and the Desert in Zabriskie Point and Seize the Time

Antonioni and Branca travelled to the United States in search of something that was ‘about to begin’ — a revolutionary social and political climate. They bought with them, however, a visual frame of reference for the country that was built upon stereotypes and clichés that were well ingrained in the way Italians saw the United States. For Italians, America — with this word I refer to a concept, not an erroneous synonym for ‘United States of America’ — appears as a land of billboards and neon signs. While big advertising posters certainly feature in the skyline of some Italian cities, they represent for the Italian eye something quintessentially American which triggers fascination. One may look at Alberto Lattuada’s 1962 Mafioso, where the one sequence set in New York City is populated by billboards, or an industrial film from the same period, Italians the World Over.⁴⁵

Antonioni and Branca were also fascinated by these aspects of the landscape, and they feature them in two key and similar sequences, both towards the beginning, of Zabriskie Point and Seize the Time. For an American critic like Chatman, the overwhelming presence of billboards is a symbol of Antonioni’s foreignness: ‘The interesting shots of the dizzying array of billboards along Los Angeles streets are taken from Mark's point of view. But what native would ever actually look at them?’⁴⁶ Antonioni ‘focused on material things — buildings, screens, posts — and America's billboard culture is a natural target’.⁴⁷ These billboards have for Antonioni a clear meaning: ‘I suggest that the material wealth of America, which we see in advertisements and on billboards along the roads, is itself a violent influence, perhaps even the root of violence.’⁴⁸ Several scholars, among them Pertoldi,⁴⁹ have found in these scenes a clear connection to Pop Art artists: ‘American pop art emerged powerfully from those shots with the billboards’.⁵⁰ Gustafsson went even further, stating that ‘Mark's navigation though downtown Los Angeles in Zabriskie Point is a veritable tour through the commercial semantics of Pop Art.’⁵¹ Pop art was likely a frame of reference for Branca as well, who made What’s Happening? on this exact subject. At the beginning of Seize the Time, Norman’s arrival in Los Angeles occurs against the backdrop of billboards and, with its quick cuts and rapid editing, the scene draws parallels with Zabriskie Point. From the outset, therefore, the films draw a strong connection to the physical setting, which, in this case, can also be read as a metaphorical statement on America itself, as the billboards signify consumerism, advertising, the market, and capitalism.

Los Angeles features predominantly in both films, and serves as a metaphor for the United States in general:

The American milieu, conveyed though cars, signs, modern buildings, and the astonishing comic conceit of a TV real-estate commercial whose people are really plastic, come[s] out as the modern-weird that Antonioni has given us in Deserto Rosso, only here it's ugly and exploitative as well.⁵²

The act of leaving Los Angeles is drastic for Mark and Daria, while the desert is the place where everything explodes, the space in which the contradictions of the contemporary world finally became dust.⁵³ The desert is almost a non-place, where life is frozen; a space where children apparently live without adults, as we see in the scene of the old town Ballister — a town ‘truly in the middle of nowhere’, as actress Halprin recalled.⁵⁴ According to Rifkin, the desert for Antonioni is the place where ‘past and present collide’.⁵⁵ Perhaps unavoidably when we consider the impact of the Western genre on the Italian cinematic and cultural imaginary, the desert has been seen by scholars as an ‘intense homage to the mythical America of Western movies’.⁵⁶ In this mythical and real desert, the two protagonists can escape, as it offers them ‘refuge when they each escape from the tense and claustrophobic city’.⁵⁷ If ‘classical narration always privileges story over space’,⁵⁸ in this film, and most of Antonioni’s cinema, the space becomes the story.⁵⁹

If in Zabriskie Point the city is the place to leave, in Seize the Time it is instead the place where contradictions can explode. For Norman, the urban black ghetto was the place from which he needed to escape:⁶⁰ ‘now they say go back in the ghetto. What the hell! It took me 25 years to get out of it!’. In the film, the ghetto is codified as a place of contradictions, a space where black identity finds its freedom of expression, but also the place from which Norman himself must escape in order to achieve his own supposed emancipation. Most of the film depicts quintessential US spaces without specifying exact locations. The city where the ghetto is filmed is in fact nameless, providing it with a universality that implicates every ghetto in America. We can also notice, thanks to some police vans, that the last scenes depicting demonstrations were filmed in Alameda, California, and some possibly in Chicago. But these are never expanded upon in the film, nor are places so recognizable that the viewer (especially a non-US one) would identify them. In this way, ‘the ghetto’ becomes a place that represents both nowhere and everywhere; the unrest can really happen anywhere at the time.

In New York City, we see Norman walking down 42^nd Street, one of the most recognizable streets in the world, during Christmas time. Against this iconic backdrop, he wears a straitjacket. The image of a black man trying to free himself from a straitjacket in the centre of the world-famous shopping district, and in sight of the financial and economic backbone of the United States, is perhaps the best metaphor for the period the film is representing. Still wearing the straitjacket, he decides to buy a gun. Outside of the store, he encounters two Black Panthers, a man and a woman, who are involved in a wide-ranging discussion: repeating sentences from the United States Declaration of Independence, Huey P. Newton, Malcom X, Mao Tse Tung, and Che Guevara. When he leaves the store, the straitjacket is gone, and his mission has become clear. Now ‘free’, he can face the world with a new perspective. This transformation is emphasized by the pan of the camera, which tracks Norman walking as Elaine Brown sings in the background: ‘Well then, believe it my friend / That this silence will end / We'll just have to get guns / and be men’. The centre of New York, then, we are led to believe, is the metaphorical straitjacket: an imprisoning space that negates any opportunity for self-expression. It is only after shedding the jacket that Norman can return to the ghetto and participate in the Black Panthers’ activities, such as the breakfast for children or selling the official newspaper of the party, The Black Panthers. Only now he can finally walk freely in the ghetto, talking to others, smiling at them, debating the ways in which they can change and re-organize the spaces they live in. Branca shows us this transformation through a pan of Norman walking down the sidewalk, implying that it is through this urban dwelling that he can regain touch with the neighbourhood.

Conclusions: Everything Is Over

Branca and Antonioni were in the United States at the same time, working in the same environment, sometimes even meeting with the same people, like Kathleen Cleaver. Both felt and filmed what Pasolini had sensed and written about just a couple of years earlier: ‘I spent many hours in an underground atmosphere of struggle, revolutionary urgency, and hope that belongs to the Europe of 1944 and 1945. In Europe everything is finished; in America I have the impression that everything is going to begin’.⁶¹ We can trace in their films the filmic counterparts to Pasolini’s words: ‘I’ve lived a situation altogether alive with discontent and exultation, with desperation and hope, in total protest against the establishment. I don’t know how all this will end, or if it will end at all’.⁶² However, paradoxically, we can also see in these films (particularly in Zabriskie Point) another facet to Pasolini’s fascination with America: that of disillusionment. The poet and filmmaker, in fact, returned to the USA in 1969, for a less well-documented trip about which he only wrote a few melancholic lines:⁶³ ‘Everything is over: there remains only a folklore like the stupendous peeled skin of a snake slipped away, gone underground [in English], leaving only used-up longhairs, small-time gangsters, crowds of the desperate to populate Nixon’s America’.⁶⁴

Zabriskie Point is an attempt by a famous director to make a movie with an independent feel but produced by a major production company. Seize the Time is, on the contrary, the first major project of an independent filmmaker. The former was not universally applauded like Blow-Up and remained Antonioni’s only US film. Likewise, Seize the Time was rejected by the Venice film festival, the most important festival of the Italian cinema system, and remained Branca’s only feature-length film. The films represent two extraordinary and important testimonies to how the United States was perceived and experienced by Italian filmmakers at the end of the 1960s, and they can also be seen as ‘failures’: in the case of Seize the Time, the failure to be accepted by a major film festival and enter the ‘normal’ cinematic circuits; in the case of Zabriskie Point, a box office failure and partly also a critical failure. However, from their failure and inability to be absorbed by the world of mainstream cinema there emerges a form of radicalness. Perhaps, one can go as far as to claim that even Zabriskie Point is a truly radical, disruptive, and destructive film. Indeed, it succeeded where many other possibly more directly militant and political films failed: it made capital bleed, hit the heart of capitalism, and almost bankrupted a major firm, as MGM lost a great deal of money after the making of Zabriskie Point, especially the costly last sequence. The fact that this was unintentional, and that the main goal of the film was not to financially damage MGM, is beside the point. ‘Everything is about to begin’, wrote Pasolini. And Antonioni, with his powerful last sequence, also tells us that everything has already ended: everything really is over.

Acknowledgments

This paper was born, in a very different shape, in 2009 thanks to a class I took in London with Professor Mark Shiel; Shira Peltzman and Sabah Haider read versions of this article at the time. At AAMOD I thank Alice Ortenzi (who knows everything about Branca) and Aurora Palandrani. I am also indebted to Donatella Barazzetti and Cristina of the ‘Associazione culturale Antonello Branca’, to the late Ciro Giorgini, and to Roberto Silvestri. I also thank the students (Demetrio Antolini, Fiona Ward, Lora Jury, Johnathan Gilette, Vincent Albarano, Amy Ferketich) of my Transnational Italian Cinema class at The Ohio State University, with whom I discussed Zabriskie Point. Thanks to the organizers of the Locarno Film Festival 2007 (where I saw Antonioni’s film in 35 mm for the first time, in the pouring rain), to Ron Gregg for organizing with me the screening of both films at Yale University in 2013, to Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown for participating in the debate following the screenings, and to Karen T. Raizen, for all the things related to Pasolini and beyond.

This is dedicated to Shira: for our friendship, for helping me identifying locations when I had never been to the United States and for showing me around in Los Angeles when I finally saw some of these locations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and a WIRL-COFUND Fellowship (under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions COFUND scheme 2020–2022).

Notes

1 The best known examples of this fascination are the anthology of US writers published in 1941 by Elio Vittorini: Americana, ed. by Elio Vittorini (Rome: Bompiani, 1941), which was initially censored, and the translations and critical work by Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1951).

2 See the fall 1966 issue no. 42 of Film Culture, ‘America’s independent motion picture magazine’, which features Pasolini (with Andrew Sarris, Agnes Varda, and Annette Michelson) on the cover, an interview with the director, and the transcription of a roundtable (pp. 96–105).

3 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Civil War’, in In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology, ed. by Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010), pp. 15–25, at p. 20. This work was originally published in Italian in 1966 and was translated by Susanna Boneetti. On Pasolini and the Third World, see Giovanna Trento, Pasolini e l'Africa: L'Africa di Pasolini: Panmeridionalismo e rappresentazioni dell'Africa postcoloniale (Milan: Mimesis, 2010); Luca Caminati, Orientalismo eretico: Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del Terzo mondo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007); and Pieter Vanhove, ‘Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Bandung Man”: The Indian and African Documentaries’, Senses of Cinema, 77 (December 2015) <http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/pier-paolo-pasolini/pasolini-indian-and-african-documentaries/>.

4 Pasolini, ‘Civil War’, p. 16.

5 On the concept of the global 1968, see Global 1968: Cultural Revolutions in Europe and Latin America, ed. by A. James McAdams and Anthony P. Monta (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), and on its relationship to cinema, see 1968 and Global Cinema, ed. by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (Detroit: Wayne State, 2018).

6 On the underground, alternative, and militant cinema of this period, see David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), particularly pp. 166–231. For the Italian context, see Christian Uva, L’immagine politica: Forme del contropotere tra cinema, video e fotografia nell’Italia degli anni Settanta (Milan: Mimesis, 2015).

7 See, among others, the unmade film Vacancy: Una storia americana, which was supposed to be produced by Branca’s production company Moby Dick Cooperativa Cinematografica, in 1981. The screenplay is housed at the archive of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italian National Film School).

8 Associazione Culturale Antonello Branca (ACAB), <http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8000001909/22/associazione-culturale-antonello-branca-acab.html> [accessed 15 March 2023].

9 Luca Peretti, ‘Filmare contro’; ‘I mille lavori televisivi di Antonello Branca: Interview with Ciro Giorgini’; ‘Una vita e molte opere come “lotta continua”: Interview with Donatella Barazzetti’, all in Alias/Il Manifesto (24 December 2010), 4–5.

10 ‘Un afro americano che vive negli USA. Dato il colore della sua pelle e il razzismo dei bianchi, è disperatamente alla ricerca della sua “identità”. Attraverso una serie di situazioni reali: l’esame con la macchina della verità, quando cerca lavoro, il confronto con la borghesia Bianca e la repressione poliziesca, lentamente prende coscienza del colore della sua pelle e dei problemi della società nella quale vive. Non gli resterà, alla fine, altra via che unirsi alla sua gente ed a quelli che al razzismo non credono, per liberare non solo i neri ma gli oppressi di tutto il mondo’. ‘Synopsis for the Censorship Board (Sinossi Nulla Osta censura)’, in Antonello Branca’s Papers, Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (AAMOD) (9 March 1970).

11 On this and other radical film festivals of the time, see Andrea Gelardi, ‘La scoperta del “Terzo Mondo”: le politiche di programmazione degli antifestival italiani (1960–1976)’, Cinergie — Il cinema e le altre arti, 21 (2022), 163–77.

12 ‘Realizzato seguendo dall’interno il lavoro del Black Panther Party, negli USA, Seize the time è la storia di un afro-americano che attraverso una serie di situazioni prende coscienza del fatto che i suoi problemi gli derivano solo in parte dal colore della sua pelle. In una società classista essere neri significa essere stati sfruttati e continuare ad essere sfruttati ed oppressi. Essere neri vuol dire fare parte delle masse che vengono sfruttate in tutto il mondo indipendentemente dal colore della pelle. Mentre gli astronauti raggiungono la luna, in America i neri in generale, e le pantere in particolare, vengono assassinati a sangue freddo secondo un piano repressivo premeditato. C’è una sola risposta a questo stato di cose, e questa è l’indicazione che il film vorrebbe dare, ed è quella di prendere le armi e di Seize the time, afferrare il tempo, come dice il titolo del film’. ‘Short Leaflet for the Pesaro Film Festival', in Antonello Branca’s Papers, AAMOD.

13 Archivist Alice Ortenzi is currently investigating the matter.

14 ‘Fonde tra loro i principi del cinema di finzione e del cinema-diretto, usando tanto un attore professionista quanto materiale girato dal vivo, nel corso di disordini, e materiale proveniente da diverse direzioni, come per esempio tutta la sequenza girata nell’appartamento dove Fred Hampton è stato assassinato dalla polizia’, 'Short Leaflet for the Pesaro Film Festival’, in Antonello Branca’s Papers, AAMOD.

15 ‘Letter from Filmmakers Research Group to the Ministry of Tourism and Spectacle’, in Antonello Branca’s Papers, AAMOD (no date).

16 And precisely from 1 December to 15 September. See, among other documents, ‘Certificate of the General Consul of Italy, New York, 16 September 1969 (Certificato del Consolato Generale d’Italia, New York, 16 settembre 1969)’, in Antonello Branca’s Papers, AAMOD.

17 Letter to the Ministry of Tourism and Spectacle: ‘The film with the provisional title BURN BABY BURN has now definitely taken the title SEIZE THE TIME (il film a suo tempo denunciato sotto il titolo provvisorio “BURN BABY BURN” ha assunto definitivamente il titolo: SEIZE THE TIME, Afferra il tempo)’, in Antonello Branca’s Papers, AAMOD (27 January 1971).

18 James, p. 177.

19 Museo del Cinema di Torino, Archivio Storico, Fondo Gillo Pontecorvo, Black Panthers, GIPO 622.

20 See Anonymous, ‘Seize the Time: La guerra delle pantere’, Paese Sera (16 September 1970) and Elaine Mokhtefi, Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers (New York: Verso, 2018).

21 S. Spina, ‘Con il film “Seize the Time” sulle Pantere Nere di Antonello Branca entriamo all’interno di questo movimento rivoluzionario, ma soltanto per conoscerne gli aspetti più suggestivi ed appariscenti’, Noi Donne (17 October 1970).

22 Ernest Callenbach, ‘Review: Zabriskie Point’, Film Quarterly, 23.3 (Spring 1970), 35–38, p. 35.

23 For a synthesis of the critical responses on the film, see Seymour Chatman and Paul Duncan, Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films (Köln and London: Taschen, 2004), p. 118.

24 David Thomson, ‘Zabriskie Point’, in Have You Seen … ?: a Personal Introduction to 1000 Films Including Masterpieces, Oddities and Guilty Pleasures with Just a Few Disasters (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 1002.

25 Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie point, di Michelangelo Antonioni (Bologna: Cappelli, 1970).

26 Michelangelo Antonioni, ‘Let’s Talk About Zabriskie Point’, Esquire, 74.2 (1 August 1970), 68–69.

27 Anthony Macklin, ‘Zabriskie Point’, Film Heritage, 5.3 (Spring 1970), 22–26, p. 23.

28 Antonioni in Hollis Alpert, ‘By the Time She Got to Phoenix’, Saturday Review, 53 (21 February, 1970), p. 34. Quoted in Ned Rifkin, Antonioni's Visual Language (Ann Arbor, MI: Umi Research Press, 1982), p. 109.

29 Marsha Kinder, ‘Interview with Antonioni’, Sight and Sound, 38.1 (1968–1969), 26–31, p. 27. Republished slightly altered in Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews, ed. by Bert Cardullo (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), pp. 70–78 and in Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision (New York: Marsilio, 1996), pp. 304–12. See the press book of MGM, which claims that Antonioni started thinking about the film while filming Blow-Up, as he read a local story from Phoenix (Arizona) about the death of a young man who had stolen an airplane. See Press Book, ‘Notiziario 224’ in Metro Goldwyn Mayer Films (MGM) S.pA. (Ufficio Stampa e Pubblicità, 1970).

30 Ugo Rubeo, Mal d'America: Da mito a realtà (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987). Quoted in Antonioni, Architecture of Vision, pp. 319–25.

31 Kinder, p. 27.

32 This was contested by leftist critics of the time, for example Goffredo Fofi, who wrote that the film demonstrated once more the ‘revolutionary pretences and the supposed suffering of certain directors … Antonioni believed, like many other ‘poets’ before and after him, that his uneasiness could perennially represent that of the world and history and would not be at best that of a class in a specific historical time’ (‘il preteso rivoluzionamento e la pretesa sofferenza di certi registi …  Antonioni ha creduto come tanti altri ‘poeti’ prima e dopo di lui che il suo disagio potesse rappresentare perennemente quello del mondo e della storia e non fosse invece al massimo quelli di una classe in un tempo preciso’), emphasis in the original. See Goffredo Fofi, Capire con il cinema: 200 film prima e dopo il ’68 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), p. 217. Originally published in Quaderni Piacentini, 41 (July 1970).

33 Callenbach, p. 35.

34 Chatman and Duncan, p. 122.

35 Kinder, p. 30.

36 This is the case of Antonioni as well, as it is recognized for example by Callenbach who talked about a ‘European Marxist perspective’. See Callenbach, p. 36.

37 ‘[A] film — I will never grow tired of repeating it — does not need to be “understood”. It is enough if the viewer “feels” it’, Antonioni 1975 p. 168. Furthermore, ‘I wasn't trying to explain the country — a film is not a social analysis, after all. I was just trying to feel something about America, to gain some intuition. If I were an American, they would say I was taking artistic licence, but because I'm a foreigner, they say I am wrong’: Antonioni in Guy Flatley, ‘“I Love This Country”: Antonioni Defends Zabriskie Point’, New York Times (22 February 1970), emphasis in the original. Now in The New York Times Encyclopedia of Film 1896–1979, ed. by Gene Brown, 8 (New York: Times Books, 1984). For the metaphorical-apocalyptical character of the movie, see Alberto Moravia, ‘È esplosa pure l'arte di Antonioni’, in Zabriskie point, di Michelangelo Antonioni (Bologna: Cappelli, 1970), pp. 11–16.

38 Antonioni, ‘Let’s Talk About Zabriskie Point’.

39 Giorgio Tinazzi, ‘American Experience’, Jeune Cinéma, 37 (March 1969). Republished in Cardullo, p. 316. See also Murray Pomerance, Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 175.

40 Pasolini, ‘Civil War’, p. 17.

41 Raw footage of this interview is preserved at the AAMOD archive.

42 Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 161.

43 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1991).

44 ‘There are marches on Washington, American universities are in revolt, four youths have been killed on an Ohio campus [he is referring to the Kent State massacre] and two more in Jackson. It is difficult, unfortunately, to reject the temptation of feeling like a prophet’. Antonioni, Zabriskie point, di Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 19.

45 Luca Peretti, ‘Mafia, Mobility, and Capitalism in Italy circa 1960’ in Companion to the Gangster Film, ed. by George S. Larke-Walsh (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), pp. 244–61; Luca Peretti, ‘Italians the World Over: The Glorification of Italian Labor Abroad’, in Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor, ed. by Carlo Baghetti, Jim Carter, and Lorenzo Marmo (Bern: Peter Lang Press, 2020), pp. 449–58.

46 Chatman, p. 161.

47 Macklin, p. 22.

48 Antonioni in Flatley, now found in Brown.

49 Stefania Pertoldi, Il mito del viaggio in Easy Rider e Zabriskie Point (Udine: Campagnotto Editore, 1987), p. 119.

50 Roberto Campari, Il fantasma del bello: iconologia del cinema italiano (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), p. 102.

51 See Henrik Gustafsson, Out of Site: Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema

1969–1974 (Dissertation, Stockholm University, 2007), p. 70. On the use of billboards in the film, see also Pomerance, pp. 191–92.

52 Callenbach, p. 35.

53 On the desert in Zabriskie Point, see Anna Maria Giacomelli and Italia Saitta, La crisi dell'uomo e della società: nei film di Visconti e di Antonioni (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1972), p. 141. On space in Antonioni's films see also David Forgacs, ‘Antonioni: Space, Place, Sexuality’, in Spaces in European Cinema, ed. by Myrto Konstantarakos (Exeter: Intellect, 2000), pp. 101–11.

54 Pomerance, p. 158.

55 Rifkin, p. 47.

56 Aldo Tassone, I film di Michelangelo Antonioni, un poeta della visione (Rome: Gremese, 2002), p. 142.

57 Rifkin, p. 33.

58 Gustafsson, p. 16.

59 On the desert in Zabriskie Point, see also ‘Scritto autobiografico [di Tonino Guerra] sul sopralluogo alla Death Valley (California) [per il film "Zabriskie point" di Michelangelo Antonioni], s.d.’, Museo del Cinema di Torino, Archivio Storico, Fondo Tonino Guerra, TOGU0014.

60 On the history of the word ‘ghetto’ and its evolving meaning, see Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

61 Pasolini, ‘Civil War’, p. 16.

62 Pasolini, ‘Civil War’, p. 17.

63 Lombardo wrote about Pasolini in the United States in Anna Lombardo, ‘Pier Paolo Pasolini: l’America vista da New York’, in Oltreoceano: Pier Paolo Pasolini nelle Americhe, ed. by Alessandra Ferraro and Silvana Serafin, (Udine: Forum, 2015), pp. 143–54. Two texts by Ara Merjian have been very important in thinking about Pasolini in/and the United States; see Ara H. Merjian, Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020) and Ara H. Merjian, ‘Everything Is About to Begin’, in Art in America (1 December 2016) <https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/everything-is-about-to-begin-63225/> [accessed 3 August 2020]. Pasolini was just one of the many European intellectuals who travelled to the United States during the second half of the 1960s. Some of them were film directors, like Agnes Varda (who shot there Black Panthers, 1968, and Lions Love, 1969) or Jean-Luc Godard, who toured US universities with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1970, as detailed in the film Godard in America (Ralph Thanhauser, 1970).

64 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere, Volume II (1955– 1975), ed. by Nico Naldini (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), p. cxxx.