From counter-culture to the Capitalocene: Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point at 50
Connolly, Stephen and Nardelli, Matilde (2020) From counter-culture to the Capitalocene: Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point at 50. In: Symposium: From Counter-culture to the Capitalocene: Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point at 50, 14 February 2020, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. (Unpublished)
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Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point was a critical and commercial failure on its release in 1970. Antonioni was accused of not understanding America; the film was seen as a superficial aesthetic engagement with landscape and the emerging counter culture.
Fifty years on, the film’s attunement to capital’s impact on the Californian landscape – an early and trenchant visualisation of what may be called the Capitalocene – is coming into view. Furthermore, in Antonioni’s rendering of the US, any trace of dissent is violently policed; a highly prescient mainstream framing of militaristic management of dissent in the land of the free.
On its half century anniversary, this symposium revisits the film as a precursor of cultural and environmental critique in the cinema. Speakers will draw on contemporary reverberations of the filmmakers vision and his anticipation of material culture will make for a multi-faceted exciting symposium relevant to today's engaged students of film and media.
Symposium organised by Stephen Connolly (UCA) and Matilde Nardelli (University of West London) assisted by Emma Reyes (UCA).
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