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Antonioni, Michelangelo JamesBrown May 2002 Great Directors Issue 20

b. September 29, 1912, Ferrara, Italyd. July 30, 2007, Rome, Italy

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The films of Michelangelo Antonioni are aesthetically complex – critically stimulating though elusive in meaning. They are ambiguous worksthat pose difficult questions and resist simple conclusions. Classical narrative causalities are dissolved in favour of expressive abstraction.Displaced dramatic action leads to the creation of a stasis occupied by vague feelings, moods and ideas. Confronted with hesitancy, the

spectator is compelled to respond imaginatively and independent of the film. The frustration of this experience reflects that felt in the lives ofAntonioni’s characters: unable to solve their own personal mysteries they often disappear, leave, submit or die. The idea of abandonment iscentral to Antonioni’s formal structuring of people, objects, and ideas. He evades presences and emphasises related absences. His films areas enigmatic as life: they show that the systematic organisation of reality is a process of individual mediation disturbed by a profound inabilityto act with certainty.

Antonioni was raised in a middle-class environment that he accepts has influenced his creative perspective. His formative interests in artincluded puppetry and painting. From 1931-1935, he studied at the University of Bologna where he became involved in student theatre. Aftergraduating in economics, he took a job as a bank teller and contributed stories and film criticism to the Ferrara newspaper Corriere Padano.Before he moved to Rome (sometime around 1940), (1) Antonioni attempted to make a documentary at a local insane asylum. When the setwas lit, the patients suddenly responded with convulsions and the film was aborted. (2) (This experience prefigures the strong key lighting ofTentato suicidio [1953].)

In Rome he began writing for Cinema, a hotbed of political and social criticism. Since the (neorealist) direction of the journal was contrary toAntonioni’s interests in alternative technical practices and filmmaking styles he stopped contributing after only a few months. (3) He spent asimilar amount of time at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, making one, now lost, short film. A stint helping write Un Pilota ritorna(Roberto Rossellini, 1942) led to the signing of a contract with the production company Scalera. While drafted into the army, Antonioni stillcontrived to work under assignment on I Due Foscari (Enrico Fulchigoni, 1942) and Les Visiteurs du soir (Marcel Carné, 1942).

Antonioni’s first documentary concerned the inhabitants of the Po valley region near Ferrara. Shot in 1943, Gente del Po was not released untilafter the war in 1947. In the interim, the bulk of the footage was lost through degradation, accident, and, possibly, deliberate tampering. Still,he displayed an early resilience and determination to complete the film, a trait that would resurface on numerous occasions in the future.

In the next few years, Antonioni continued to write criticism and screenplays, translated french literature, and made several moredocumentaries. N.U. – Nettezza urbana (1948) and L’Amorosa menzogna (1949), in particular, were well received: both won awards from theItalian Guild of Film Journalists and the latter competed at Cannes. On the strength of his documentaries, Antonioni secured financing fromVallani Film to make his first fictional feature in Milan.

The narrational structure of a search with competing urges of desire and death surfaces in Cronaca di un amore (1950). Antonioni willconsistently return to this structure in his later works. The film’s protagonists are doomed past lovers who find their romance renewing andrepeating itself with the same tragic ends. Their wish for the destruction of an intervening third-party twice comes true but on each occasionsomething unidentifiable is also lost between them. All that remains is an individual, separated existence. (An immediate, violent, desire-quenching version of the wish-device occurs, imaginarily, at the end of Zabriskie Point [1970].) Cronaca is suggestive of film noir, (4) butAntonioni sidesteps traditional plot conventions to focus on the interior feelings of the lovers. He utilises a mobile camera, composes roomyframes, and follows the performers in deep-focus long takes. Key dialogue is highlighted by centrality, symbolism, frontality, unexpectedmovement, and cutting: a range of methods that define Antonioni’s precise emphasis of narrative by particulars of style. This approachoccupies Antonioni’s formalism until more comprehensive analytical cutting techniques and less character-dependent camera movementsarise first in Le Amiche (1955) and then more definitively in his first widescreen film, L’Avventura (1960).

Perhaps Antonioni’s main concessions to the dominance of italian neorealism are his configurations of class. As in Cronaca, the relativelypoor female protagonist of La Signora senza camelie (1953) is thrust into a wealthy environment. From shop assistant to star B-grade actress,she is beset by the demands and advice of men. Her ultimate failure is an inability to control her own life. Antonioni has said that heconsidered the film to be a mistake because he concentrated on the ‘wrong’ character. (5) Who the preferable character might have beenremains a mystery. The film’s style is similar to Cronaca, with an odd, perhaps absurd, reflexive effect: the melodramatic filmmakers withinthe story, similar to Antonioni, seem to be utilising mobile camera, long take strategies!

I Vinti (1953), a trio of separate stories set in Paris, Rome, and London, was shot before Camelie but released at least seven months later. (6)Troubles that began in pre-production between Antonioni and the film’s producers presumably continued until the film’s premiere. (7)

Additionally, the film was censored abroad which may have led to long delays. The reason for all the fuss was Antonioni’s insistence onportraying three murders and investigations without providing any moral, social or other evidence to identify the killers’ motivating reasons.Reconstructing the space evacuated by motive, Antonioni positions characters with respect to their environments, foregrounds landscapeand experiments with independent camera movement. This destabilising of character and narrative by formal abstraction continues to beemphasised as Antonioni’s style develops. His next work is a complex example. Tentato suicidio is staged amid artifice but presents a range ofstories about attempted suicide that purport to truth. Cesare Zavattini, producer of L’Amore in città, intended its segments to record the dailylife of “ordinary” people. Antonioni takes Zavattini’s quotidian premise and, rather than concede to it, investigates its validity. Four of thestories are reconstructed and their non-fictional guises come under threat from the fictional probing of the cinematic stylistic system. Even inthe presence of non-actors who tell their own stories, Antonioni is incredulous of a basic “real” dimension.

Another attempted suicide begins Le Amiche, linking two stories that are in medias res . (8) Both concern the immediate traumas of twowomen: Clelia (Eleanora Rossi Drago) is returning to a displaced past, while Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer) is unable to foresee a romanticallysuccessful future. Their lives are influenced – hindered more than assisted – by an ensemble of social friends. The interaction between allplayers is handled at a deliberate slow pace, with space carefully constructed to suggest what has previously happened and to conveyinternal group dynamics. The second story is perhaps the most interesting, unravelling in parts that effect change on the first. Clelia’s stablelinear progression through the story is counter-pointed by the emotional imbalance of Rosetta’s highs and lows. How Antonioni dramatisesthe differences in the two stories is largely reinforced by a flux of inclusions and exclusions in his staging. The scene on the beach is an oftencited example. (9) Only Rosetta is isolated for the length of a single shot. There are teasing set-ups which briefly single out someone else, buta track or pan finds others. A single insert shot in the scene depicts a drawing of Rosetta by Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti), the object of heraffections. Clelia, on the other hand, is always framed side-by-side with another. At the pivotal moment of the scene, a cut suddenly revealsthe two of them standing together. Antonioni’s arrangement of his cast functions to incorporate and separate ideas and conflicts as requiredat specific moments. Close observation of placement in the mise en scène is worthwhile because it helps explain the unknown properties ofthe story: its past, how its characters think and feel, even speculation as to what might happen next. (10)

The complexities of Antonioni’s multi-actor staging style are not as apparent in Il Grido (1957), a bleak portrayal of one factory worker’sjourney away from home, through various liaisons, and back again. There is a return to the use of a mobile camera paired with analyticalcutting (including some reverse shots) to serve the interests of dialogue. The constant state of Aldo’s (Steve Cochran) agitation is emphasisedby this more rapid technique of editing. Even the longer shots (at least three are just over a minute long) concern arguments between Aldoand women. What sets Il Grido apart from Antonioni’s previous films is his stylistic response to a different milieu. Dank, gaslit interiors aretight spaces forced by the staging into a moderate depth. The result is an effect of oppression from which Aldo always tries to escape. Butwhen he surges outside, the land is such a contrast that it too is threatening. Antonioni generally maintains a high horizon line, emphasisingthe flatness and desolation of the background. The high camera angle also accentuates the smallness of Aldo’s daughter, Rosina (MirnaGirardi), whom Aldo is unwilling, or unable, to properly father. When he sends Rosina home on a bus, the element of pathos generates astrange and rare Antonioni moment. It is an interesting opposition to the awkward attention seeking of Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi) in IlDeserto rosso (1964).

Antonioni’s next four films frame the period of his most intense and, it is generally accepted, productive work. Some consider L’Avventura, LaNotte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962) a trilogy (or, with Il Deserto rosso, a tetralogy) of sorts, largely because of a consistency of style, social setting,theme, plot and character (especially the roles played by the ubiquitous Monica Vitti). (11) The usefulness of such a categorisation isquestionable. (12) However, at least in the first three, Antonioni demonstrates a formal stability between films that, considering his earlierfluctuations in method, is surprising. Part of what makes L’Avventura so impressive is that Antonioni developed a cohesion of narrative andstylistic devices that had only haphazardly surfaced in his earlier films. It might not be too ridiculous to suggest that analogous to some of hischaracters, Antonioni was searching for something, a method of communication, which he finally “found” with L’Avventura. That he wouldn’tlet go until he had explored the approach a couple of films further, is retrospectively understandable.

It is with these films that Antonioni became a famous, critically esteemed, and even popular filmmaker. Concurrent with a boom period in theItalian industry and a re-vitalisation of European cinema in general, Antonioni was suddenly reflective of a massive change in film culture thathe had really been progressing towards for the last decade.

The critical discussion of these films is so extensive that I will forego summarising them here. But it is worth mentioning that a fundamentalelement of “the trilogy” is Antonioni’s increasing interest in the abstraction of space: for instance, the shot of the church in the desertedvillage in L’Avventura; the opening shot of La Notte that tracks down the Pirelli building; and the final seven minute montage of L’Eclisse. Thesekinds of independent, wandering, investigative techniques are dominant traits in Il Deserto rosso, Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point and ThePassenger (1975). However, there is expansive conjecture regarding their purposes and effects.

For his first colour film, Il Deserto rosso, Antonioni further abstracted reality. Effects trick the eye: the flattening of space by telephoto lenses;the strange scale, placement, and colour of objects; out of focus foregrounds and backgrounds. He implements a faster, sometimesdisorienting, cutting style and emphasises the aural qualities of industry. To use André Bazin’s phrase perversely, the dramatic evolution ofAntonioni’s revised style is a dialectical step, but not in the direction of realism. (13)

Il Deserto rosso marked a turning point. Antonioni’s shifting directions of interest compelled him to explore international markets, includemale protagonists, and vigorously question the nature of photographic reality. In this transitive period, he made another short film, Il Provino(1965), a preface segment for Dino De Laurentiis’ I Tre volti, starring Saroya, a past queen of Iran.

No small account can possibly sum up the ambiguous openness evident in Antonioni’s next film. Aside from being his biggest commercialsuccess, Blow-Up is a highly valued critical commodity that has drawn the interest of an astounding range of commentators. The reasons forsuch a deluge are somewhat unclear. Other films are, for instance, self-reflexive, conducive to subject theories, or consciously explore howreality and meaning are constructed. Nevertheless, Blow-Up continues to attract various emergent criticism. Rather than add to such a massof interpretation, and again for reasons of space, I will instead vouch for the usefulness of Peter Brunette’s “post-structuralist,” feministaccount. (14)

Compared to the troubled Zabriskie Point, the story surrounding the risky production and exhibition of Blow-Up is a relatively happy one.When Antonioni went to make a film in America, he decided to make a film about America. He said, “I see ten thousand people making loveacross the desert.” (15) And the problems began.

Quite unlike the complex ambiguity of Blow-Up, the story of Zabriskie Point has a considerable vagueness located in its simplicity. It clearlyconstructs a negative image of authority and materialism, but its converse handling of revolutionary students is not especially exciting orengaging. That leaves the most compelling centres of the film as its two fantasy sequences. These in their most reduced forms amount tolove (more accurately, mass sex in the desert) and death (expressed via the violent explosion of a houseful of commodities). (16) They’reoutright hallucinatory spectacles, practically hollywood marketing devices, which makes the massive losses the film took at the box officeeven stranger. (17)

The Passenger is another open text, full of self-reflexive concerns such as perception, reality, identity and truth. Past narrative techniques arefurther explored: doubling, journeying, constructing an unseen death. While Blow-Up investigates the possible, but redundant, existence ofan object, this is a search that turns inward and ultimately finds nothing.

Antonioni’s style in these three films is far removed from that of the ’50s’ films. The earlier invocation of interior moods and feelings has beendiscarded in favour of a construction of exterior things in their own various contexts. His characters are now positioned as part of a complexnetwork of objects and inter-subjective relationships. The camera no longer functions to serve the action; it becomes a tool for Antonioni toinscribe meaning. He asks questions that are best resolved by stepping outside the fiction and considering the film’s structure of organisationand cognition. By incorporating the film viewing experience into the story, his formal choices are layered with a political subjectivity: heexplains how ideology is working within the film.

The height of such artistry explains the relative disappointment, to most, of the rest of Antonioni’s films. Il Mistero di Oberwald (1980) is anabrupt swing away from epistemological preoccupation. Made on video for television, it provided Antonioni relief from high budgetproduction burdens. Excited by the potential of new filmmaking technologies, he experiments with post-production colour manipulation toproduce unusual effects. In other respects the film is less daring, perhaps a signal of Antonioni’s desire to move in a different direction butnot quite knowing where.

With Identificazione di una donna (1982), he returns to older concerns. A specific filmmaking problem (the processing of choices available to adirector) is merged with devices of searching, uncertainty and sudden abandonment. It is tantalising to put Antonioni in the shoes of thedirector in the text, opening up a reading that suggests a confusion about what kinds of films he ought to make. But it seems just as sensibleto consider Identificazione as a re-focusing on the hesitant, anxious individual, now framed by apparent self-reflexivity. Its formal system is abalance of autonomy and traditional continuity: a complex arrangement, both distancing and engaging. The problem may reside in the mix.At this late stage in his career, Antonioni and the film’s producers may have felt it necessary to appeal to a large, international market. Heexpected to continue making pictures, but the lack of success here probably assisted in the halting of his progress. In the historical context ofa worldwide resurgence in mainstream cinema, the inability to construct a narrational or stylistic pigeon-hole for Identificazione wastroublesome.

Thirteen years later, after a debilitating stroke left him unable to speak, Antonioni was able to make Al di là delle nuvole (1995), with WimWenders providing insurance should the production come into difficulty. For most critics, the return was welcomed even though few admiredthe film. This time, it may be impossible to reject the alter-ego hypothesis: a lot of the wandering Director’s (John Malkovich) dialogue is culledfrom Antonioni’s interviews and writings. However, the Director’s presence within the film is largely observational. Even his affair, in thesecond of four segments, occurs because of a voyeuristic curiosity. His presence bares witness to a nexus of love stories, a collection ofevents he has been told, or possibly invented. They are lost stories, in the sense of being momentary, transitory, and disconnected in spaceand time. In an authorial context they are stories Antonioni has told elsewhere, not directly on film. They existed outside of cinema, beyondthe clouds of the imaginary. Without the benefit of the cinematic apparatus, without the human capacity, continually stressed in the cinemaof Antonioni, to observe and perceive, most of us would never hear or read them.

No one would have seen them.

FilmographyDramas directed by Antonioni:

Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair) (1950)

La Signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias ) (1953)

I Vinti (The Vanquished) (1953)

Tentato suicidio (Suicide Attempt) (1953);episode of L’Amore in Città (Love in the City )

Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) (1955)

Il Grido (The Cry) (1957)

L’Avventura (The Adventure) (1960)

La Notte (The Night) (1961)

L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962)

Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert) (1964)

Prefazione: Il Provino (Preface: The Screen Test ) (1965);episode of I Tre volti (The Three Faces )

Blow-Up (1966)

Zabriskie Point (1970)

The Passenger (Professione: Reporter) (1975)

Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery) (1980)

Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman) (1982)

Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds) (1995), Co-directed by Wim Wenders

segment in Eros omnibus film (2004)

Documentaries directed by Antonioni:

Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley) (1947)

N.U. – Nettezza urbana (Sanitation Department) (1948)

Superstizione – Non ci credo! (Superstitions) (1948)

L’Amorosam menzogna (Lies of Love) (1949)

Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit ) (1949)

La Villa dei mostri (The Villa of the Monsters ) (1950)

La Funivia del Faloria (The Funicular of Mount Faloria) (1950)

Chung Kuo Cina (Chung Kuo China) (1972)

Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (Return to Lisca Bianca ) (1983); segment of Falsi Ritorni (Fake Returns)

Kumbha Mela (1989)

Roma (1990); segment of 12 Autori per 12 Città (12 Authors for 12 Cities)

Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale (1992)

I am unable to verify the productions of Roma – Montevideo, Oltre l’Oblio, Bomarzo, and Ragazze in Bianco. Presumably short documentariesmade between 1948-1950, they are not listed in most filmographies.

OTHER CREDITS

Un Pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns) (1942) Dir: Roberto Rossellini (Co-scriptwriter)

I Due Foscari (The Two Foscaris ) (1942) Dir: Enrico Fulchigoni (assistant director and co-scriptwriter)

Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) Dir: Marcel Carné (Assistant director)

Caccia tragica (Tragic Pursuit) (1947) Dir: Giuseppe De Santis (Co-scriptwriter)

Le Sceicco bianco (The White Sheik ) (1952) Dir: Federico Fellini (Co-scriptwriter)

Uomini in più (1955) Short film directed by Nicolò Ferrari (Producer)

La Tempesta (1958) Dir: Alberto Lattuada (Second unit director)

Nel segno di Roma (1958) Dir: Guido Brignone (Director of reshoot)

More extensive filmography details are included in the books by Ian Cameron and Robin Wood, Seymour Chatman, and Peter Brunette (seebelow).

Select BibliographyAntonioni, Michelangelo, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema , ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, American editioned. Marga Cottino-Jones. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996

Arrowsmith, William, Antonioni: The Poet of Images, ed. Ted Perry. New York: oxford university press, 1995

Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998

Cameron, Ian and Robin Wood, Antonioni. London: Studio Vista, 1968

Chatman, Seymour, Antonioni: Or, the Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of california press, 1985

Rifkin, Lee Edwin, Antonioni’s Visual Language. Ann Arbor: umi research press, 1982

Rohdie, Sam, Antonioni. London: British Film Institute, 1990

Comprehensive bibliographies are available in both Chatman and Rohdie. In Italian, highly regarded and often cited works include: LorenzoCuccu, Le Visione Come Problema: Forme e Svolgimento del Cinema di Antonioni , Rome: Bulzoni, 1973; and Giorgio Tinazzi, MichelangeloAntonioni, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974.

Articles in Senses of CinemaHere Comes the Sun: Zabriskie Pointby Fiona A. Villella

L’Avventura by Gregory Solman

Web ResourcesFilm Directors – Articles on the InternetMany online articles can be found here.

Michelangelo AntonioniIncludes a short biography, filmography, forum and an essay by Sam Rohdie.

Michelangelo Antonioni ArchiveA small but well designed site with synopses of his films and a forum for discussion.

The Pantheon: #3. Michelangelo AntonioniGlen Norton’s site has a few links, a filmography and an essay “Antonioni’s Modernist Language” which suggests Antonioni’s is the first trulymodernist cinema in its portrayal of incompleteness and alienation.

Strictly Film School: Michelangelo AntonioniThis entry in Aquarello’s much-loved site comprises reviews of Il Grido and Blow Up.

The Films of Michelangelo AntonioniFocusing on Il Grido, L’Avventura, La Notte and Beyond the Clouds and often employing a comparative approach, this page looks at themes,visual style and performance in Antonioni’s cinema.

EntretienA piece by Antonioni (originally published in Cahiers du Cinema, October 1960), published here in EuroScreenwriters online journal.

Michelangelo Antonioni: PassengerReview of The Passenger as part of Derek Malcolm’s Century of Films feature.

Click here to search for Michelangelo Antonioni DVDs, videos and books at

Endnotes

1. Different sources give different dates, ranging from 1938 to the early 1940s.

2. For a full account of this experience, see Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, pp. 14-15.

3. An excellent account of Antonioni’s uneasy relationship with the Cinema journal is found in Rohdie, Antonioni, pp. 8-14.

4. The Italian film noir, or giallo, is contextualised with respect to genre and Hollywood in Chatman, Antonioni, pp. 12-21.

5. Antonioni, p. 31. 6. This could be incorrect. If the Ian Cameron and Robin Wood filmography (which is used verbatim by Seymour Chatman) constitutes an

“official” document, I Vinti was first screened at the Venice Film Festival, September 4th, 1953 (after being shot in 1952). La Signora senzacamelie (shot in winter 1952-53) premiered in Rome, February, 1953. It would be easy to consider the Venice date a typographical error. Buteven if this is so, if I Vinti premiered in 1952 as most filmographies claim (without supporting evidence), this at least indicates the insecurityof such published information (and highlights the problem of faithful Chatman-like copying). The other explanation for the discrepancy is a

reluctance to temporally distance a film from the time it was made, regardless of its actual release date. 7. The film’s production difficulties are touched upon in Chatman, pp. 21-26. Antonioni was more concerned about the lack of criticism

regarding his stylistic choices related to unmotivated drama: see Antonioni, pp. 263-268. 8. To me, the third story between Momina and Cesare, suggested in Cameron and Wood, Antonioni, p. 54, is more of a disconnected sub-plot.

Its comparative romantic/sexual ease doesn’t seem to interest Antonioni as much as foolish tragedy (Rosetta) and its determinedavoidance (Clelia). Strangely after identifying ‘the Rosetta-Lorenzo-Nene [Valentina Cortese] triangle’ as ‘the central story’ (53), Cameron

later asserts that ‘it is impossible to pick out a storyline in Le Amiche ‘ (65).

9. Cameron and Wood, pp. 50-53; Chatman, pp. 36-38; Rifkin, Antonioni’s Visual Language , pp. 26-27, 71-72. 10. The beach scene contains a shot similar to a previous set-up in the art gallery: Rosetta’s (inactive) painting hung between Nene (on the

right, reflective) and Lorenzo (dominant in the left foreground) while now she herself is an active presence (left, dominant), Nene is againcontemplative (right), and Lorenzo, in the background, is centered and moving but engaging little interest. The second instance reinforcesthe first and suggests what is still unclear in the narrative: that Lorenzo and Rosetta are about to have an affair and that Nene will be its

victim. Only when Rosetta commits suicide (deactivates) are Nene and Lorenzo staged together with no intervening other. 11. Cameron and Wood consider the first three a ‘loosely connected trilogy’ (93), as does Rohdie, p. 114. Four chapters in Chatman are devoted

to an analysis of ‘The Great Tetralogy’.

12. See Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni , pp. 5-6. 13. Andre Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Volume One , ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of california press, 1967), p. 35.

14. Brunette, pp. 109-126. 15. Beverly Walker, “Michelangelo and the Leviathan: The Making of Zabriskie Point,” in Film Comment, 28, 5 (September 1992): 42. Written by

the film’s publicist, this account conveys a range of disturbances and oddities that affected its production. 16. A colour-related symbology of such a reading is comprehensively detailed in Rifkin, pp. 109-115. Rohdie is sympathetic to the film, calling it

‘one of Antonioni’s very best,’ (73) but he does not, substantially, say why. Another account stresses a Freudian reading and the theme of

individualism; Arrowsmith, Antonioni, pp. 127-145. 17. …than claims of Zabriskie Point‘s anti-Americanism. Surely the portrayed sector of disaffected youth cared little for such sentiments. Or did

they? Or were they a much smaller target audience than intended? Or not targeted at all? Or did critical backlash ruin the film’s chances?Or? Nobody has successfully answered why Zabriskie Point was such an utter commercial failure. It was made for about $7,000,000 and

grossed $891,918; Chatman, p. 160.

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James BrownJames Brown is a post-graduate Screen Studies student at Flinders University in South Australia currently finishing a thesis on thepopularisation and regionalisation of recent South Korean cinema. He writes reviews for Heroic Cinema and was print co-ordinator for the2003 and 2005 Adelaide Film Festivals.

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