The (un)sustainable ecologies of self-reflexivity in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point.

This article analyzes Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film *Zabriskie Point* through the lens of eco-cinema, a field that critiques anthropocentrism and explores sustainable environmental ethics in film. It argues that the film juxtaposes traditional narrative elements, which often conceal the environmental costs of cultural production by reinforcing subject–object dualisms, with counter-narrative and self-reflexive components that highlight the material impact of filmmaking and consumer society on the environment. Through sequences set in industrial Los Angeles, a real estate promotional video, and the desert landscape of Death Valley’s Zabriskie Point, the film both envisions alternative, embodied environmental relations and problematizes its own production’s ecological footprint. Ultimately, *Zabriskie Point* serves as a historical and contemporary reflection on the tensions between cultural experience, environmental ethics, and the unsustainability embedded in Hollywood and broader consumerist practices.