Franco Rossi’s restored Smog plays like a Nouvelle Vague travelogue, with protagonists seemingly lost in an urban landscape that amplifies their inner malaise. That backdrop is Los Angeles and the long-lost 1962 film (now finally available in a pristine 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and UCLA Film & Television Archives) is also a snapshot of the city in its modernist “adolescence.” At the time Rossi was one of the very first European directors to film entirely on location in the US, and director of photography Ted McCord (East of Eden (1955), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)) captured the sprawl in stark black and white, including lost Hollywood landmarks, Pierre Koenig’s iconic Stahl House (Case Study House #22), the Baldwin Hills oil fields and (at the time) a just remodeled LAX. Vittorio, a Roman lawyer, played by Enrico Maria Salerno, is forced to spend 48 hours in the city due to a missed flight connection. Confounded by the undecipherable geography and its rootless inhabitants, he is both attracted and repulsed by what he considers the vapid lives of the Italian expatriates he encounters, including enigmatic Gabriella (Annie Girardot). The film uses the Los Angeles location to explore themes of mobility and impermanence, identity and displacement, a metaphorical gaze on the city, which was becoming a subject for artists such as Ed Ruscha, Joan Didion, Dennis Hopper, David Hockney and Charles Bukowski—as well as the locus for a veritable explosion of mid-century architecture. The movie, which also includes a haunting score by Piero Umiliani and Chet Baker, screened that same year at the Venice Film Festival before disappearing, unreleased, into the vaults from which it just now re-emerges as a singular time capsule