May Hong HaDuong (UCLA), Luca Celada (Il Manifesto / HFPA), Alberto Gemmi (L’Immagine Ritrovata)

Rediscovered after 60 years of oblivion, Smog, the first Italian film shot entirely in America, is as much an estranged interior mapping of its protagonists as it is a permanent document on film of a Los Angeles, which in 1962, was a metropolis in its adolescence.
For Vittorio, the protagonist stuck in an unexpected stopover, in the indecipherable and alienating landscape, the city is a simulacrum of otherness. Through Franco Rossi’s lense, what Thom Andersen called ‘the most photographed city’ conveys the vertigo of the future through the metaphorical device of modernism that in those years made Los Angeles the world centre of architectural experimentation. The ideal backdrop for a film about the disorientation of modernity.