Alexander wrote: I am American too, although I was once born in Moscow.
Great turn of phrase! I would love to read an autobiography that began this
way--as in ``I was once born in Los Angeles.....''
Alexander continued: I am certain, though, that Antonioni considered
himself to be a citizen of the world, and thus did not feel his excursion to
be an intrusion by a foreign-born.
I wouldn't consider ``Zabriskie'' to be Antonioni's intrusion into the US,
but, as I phrased it before, his ``plunge.'' I mean this in the sense that
it was a supremely courageous surrender by an artist of those familiar
trappings and cultural safety nets that we instinctively protect ourselves
in. For years, Antonioni had both worked very close to his home in Ferrara
in the Po River plain and, alternately, far away. Making ``The Vanquished''
in 1953, for example, he ventured to Paris and London to film two of that
hugely underrated film's three sequences. He took military leave during the
war to go to Paris to work with Carne as his assistant director. He would
actually flee his army barracks at night to work on others films. Antonioni
had a remarkable, in-bred drive for adventure and risk--which extended most
dramatically to his daring experiments in narrative cinema. In this context,
his sojourn to London to make ``Blow-Up'' in English, followed by his
journey through America to make ``Zabriskie'' simply followed from the way
he had already lived his life. (This continued, of course, as he travelled
to China to make his groundbreaking documentary, ``Chung Kuo Cina'', and
then to Africa to shoot ``The Passenger.'' As well, he has or had planned
projects that were later aborted in such far-flung places as the Amazon and
the Pacific, as well as movies set on other planets!) ``Zabriskie'' was
especially courageous, though, because he came to America not entirely sure
what kind of movie he would make. Gerald O'Grady, the amazing cinephile who
lives in Cambridge, Mass., told me that he accompanied Antonioni on a wild
cross-country trip in the months before pre-production. Antonioni had only
the vaguest notion of what he was looking for--and his English was not so
smooth then as it later became--but he did want to visit the most violent
and dangerous places possible. Gerald said they visited inner cities, car
accidents, crime scenes , etc. It was the adventure itself that began to
inform the movie, and partly why ``Zabriskie'' is itself a road movie. It is
actually more autobiographical than it first appears...
Robert Koehler
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