In an essay titled ‘Traveling Theory’, Edward Said writes about the appearance of Gyorgy Lukacs’ theory of reification in later works by Lucien Goldman and Raymond Williams. Said examines these remediations of Lukacs’ work to demonstrate how theories travel from place to place, developing and mutating in response to different socio-historical situations and new conditions of acceptance. Drawing on Said’s essay, Luca Caminati’s latest monograph takes travel as its guiding method of inquiry, examining some of the lesser-known work of three giants of the modernist film canon: Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Caminati’s book considers a diverse range of non-fiction films—from made-for-television reportages to essay films shot during these filmmakers’ travels across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Caminati situates this body of work within the emerging socialist networks of globalist solidarity that supported the anticolonial struggles and liberation movements between the 1950s and the early 1970s. Notably, his interest extends beyond the films under consideration, encompassing the experiences of ‘political travel’ of these filmmakers and their participation in forms of solidarity inevitably shaped by asymmetric power relations and lingering imperialistic imaginaries.

Much like Said’s travelling theories, Caminati’s volume prompts a shift in how we may understand these filmmakers and their work. By exploring the relation between their travels, their cinematic endeavours and a broad geopolitical map of political networks, zones of contact and artistic influences, the book reconfigures the category of the European auteur through a more dynamic, at times surprising, set of references, affinities and collaborations than those traditionally provided by canonical film history. If, as Said suggests, different periods and contexts require different formulations of theories from their original conditions of emergence, then Caminati’s book may be precisely what Italian studies and Italian film studies may require in the current era of the transnational and of the global.

Following an introduction that outlines its theoretical and methodological terms of inquiry, the book comprises three chapters, each dedicated to one of the three filmmakers. The first chapter focuses on Roberto Rossellini’s journeys to India, which resulted in India: Matri Bhumi (1959) and the French-language reportage J’ai fait un bon voyage (1959), which was shown on Italian television with the title of L’India vista da Rossellini (1959). Rossellini arrived in India upon direct invitation from prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, an admirer of his films, who invited Rossellini to document the modernising efforts of his nation. As Caminati explains, Rossellini went above and beyond this request, ‘building an ode to India’s unprecedented scale of modernization’ (p. 14). By combining meticulous close readings, archival work and a series of contextualising gestures meant to reveal the impact of certain readings and encounters on Rossellini’s vision of India, the chapter reveals Rossellini’s personal elaboration of what the author understands as an ethnographic project in conjunction with the exploration of a contemplative mode of filmmaking that evokes and blends suggestions from the travel diary, the historical documentary, fiction and the first-person essay.

The second chapter extends the author’s earlier scholarship on Pasolini’s ‘heretical orientalism’, that felicitous term coined by Caminati to describe the filmmaker’s revolutionary vision of terzomondismo and some of the contradictions of his engagement with the Global South. One of the most impressive achievements of this chapter is that it gives us a layered context through which one may want to make sense of the encounter of the European leftist intellectual with the emerging anticolonial struggle after the Second World War – from the impact of Frantz Fanon’s work in Italy to the significance of Gramsci’s reflections on the southern question. Focusing on films such as Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), Le mura di Sana’a (1971–1973) and Appunti per un’ Orestiade Africana (1969) together with several literary and critical texts authored by Pasolini in those years, the chapter argues that Pasolini’s engagement with the Global South reveals a double articulation of internationalist solidarity and orientalism. The Third World imagined by Pasolini is at once a place of ancestral and mythical beings, and a revolutionary formation that he understood as co-extensive with – and therefore imbricated in – the destinies of other ‘internal’ souths such as the Roman peripheries or the Mezzogiorno. The argument that Caminati makes is persuasive: in being juxtaposed, these internal souths and the Orient appear as two variations of a single fact that, at the bottom, is the same: sameness being, in other words, one way to describe the limits of the ‘orientalist gaze’ that reduces non-Western alterity into a projection of one’s own anxieties and dreams.

The third and last chapter of the book – dedicated to Michelangelo Antonioni – provides the most convincing response to Said’s invitation to map the territory of dissemination, translation and interpretation covered by travelling theories. In the case of Caminati’s work, the travelling object is Antonioni’s China project. The author examines it though an analysis of Chung Kuo, China (1972) alongside the impact of China’s cultural revolution in Europe, a fascinating analysis of Maoist visual culture and a comparative examination of films on China’s cultural revolution made by other Western travellers. The chapter ends with a fitting coda recounting the author’s encounter with a version of Antonioni’s film that was broadcast by ABC in 1976 and retitled Highlights from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo: China Special, Parts 1 and 2. Caminati examines some of changes made to this version, while shedding light on the evocative context of reception and dissemination of this broadcast following Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. As the author notes, Antonioni’s film is a paradigmatic cultural object opening multiple readings and interpretations while crossing the geopolitics of twentieth-century modernity and of an emerging globalised world.

Caminati’s insightful study not only enriches our understanding of these filmmakers’ transnational cinematic endeavours but also makes the convincing case for travel as a productive scholarly category and a point of convergence for an examomation of the intersections of global geopolitics, postwar intellectual history, and cinema of the Cold War period.