Jerry Schatzberg
Panico A Needle Park

"Panico a Needle Park" is a film that has indelibly marked young people straddling the sixties and seventies. 1968 was the year of youth rebellion, political crises, the booming development of drugs, the rapid spread of rock music, the hippies. In this cultural scenario dictated by the "new experiences," the harsh "Panico a Needle Park," directed by Jerry Schatzberg and released in 1971, sees the light. Right from its release, Shatzberg's second film faced distribution issues due to its "violence," so much so that in England, the film was even censored. A work born under the great influence that heroin had on young people in those years, trapped in a world that did not belong to them, determined to escape this reality through the "artificial paradises."

The story is about two young people, part of a notorious neighborhood in New York, where heroin is the most successful thing. Bobby and Helen are two young individuals aware of their difficult living conditions, yet equally eager to turn the page and settle once and for all. They decide they want to get married, despite the ever-looming alienating danger of heroin, the true connection point between the two. Their life goes on amid doses, overdoses, thefts, prisons, pain, prostitution. It's a life constantly hanging in the balance. It's like walking on a wire stretched to infinity and under nothing. And then comes the day when heroin can no longer be found, and everything seems to end. Bobby (Al Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) start stabbing each other, forced to humiliate themselves to get the "stuff". Both feel disoriented, consciously annihilated by the drug. Interpersonal relationships gradually disperse, until it resembles more of a conflict than true love. Schatzberg shows us with scenes of absolute impact a complex life heavily conditioned by heroin use. Everything loses importance...

Schatzberg directs one of the first films that so closely analyzes the drug problem and does so by giving Panico a Needle Park an almost documentary-like approach. The performances of the two main actors are unforgettable: Pacino demonstrates his great cinematic aptitude which will later be confirmed with an extraordinary career, while Kitty Winn, despite her superb performance, will remain out of significant roles. Panico a Needle Park is a punch in the stomach, both for the themes dealt with and for the "nonchalance" with which they are shown to us: given that it was 1971 Schatzberg took quite a risk, bringing to the big screen a raw and realistic film, describing a widely spread reality but equally stigmatized by the "big" world politicians. An interesting work that manages, also thanks to the superb cinematography of Adam Holender, to "illuminate" those years which remain the most "lived" and recounted by the people of that time and have over time been dubbed the "cult period". "Panico a Needle Park" is the decadent proof of the seventies situation in America and the entire world.

Since that period, since those years, little or nothing has improved...