Zabriskie Point [DVD] [1970]

The film premièred in NYC in February 1970. The Kent State University Massacre in which the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four and wounded nine unarmed student protestors happened on 4 May 1970.Zabriskie Point is a real place near Death Valley. This film by Michelangelo Antonioni bombed when it was first released – I saw it at the time. More recently it has been seen as a take on youth protest, free love and American consumerism. I bought and watched the newly re-released DVD. It is an interesting film of its time but it doesn’t grab. The early part with students discussing strike action, their brutal suppression by LAPD, the developers puffing their plans for Sunny Dunes holiday resort in the middle of the desert, and the street scenes in LA with vast hoardings extolling the wonders of everyday products were deeply depressing, but probably the best part of the film. The rest, about a male student and a young woman involved with one of the developers, seemed to be dragged out. The relationship is played out in the desert where they wander around aimlessly and occasionally make love, and no sign of any water bottles. As they get passionate the desert around them gets scattered with like-minded couples. Antonioni wanted a thousand couples but the studio refused. The blowing up of Sandy Dunes is memorable, but was filmed on the studio back lot. The following synopsis is from Wikipedia:In a room at a university campus in 1970, white and black students argue about an impending student strike. Mark leaves the meeting after saying he is "willing to die, but not of boredom" for the cause, which draws criticism from the young white radicals. Following a mass arrest at the campus protest, Mark visits a police station hoping to bail his roommate out of jail. He is told to wait but goes to the lock-up area, asks further about bail for his roommate, is rebuffed, calls out to the arrested students and faculty and is arrested. He gives his name as Karl Marx, which a duty officer types as "Carl Marx". After he is released from jail, Mark and another friend buy firearms from a Los Angeles gun shop, saying they need them for "self-defense" to "protect our women."In a downtown Los Angeles office building, successful real estate executive Lee Allen reviews a television commercial for Sunny Dunes, a new resort-like real estate development in the desert. Instead of actors or models, the slickly produced commercial features casually dressed, smiling mannequins. I n the next scene Allen talks with his associate about the greater Los Angeles area's very rapid growth as the two drive through crowded streets.Mark goes to a bloody campus confrontation between students and police. Some students are tear-gassed and at least one is shot. As Mark reaches for a gun in his boot, a Los Angeles policeman is seen being fatally shot, although it is unclear by whom. Mark flees the campus and rides a city bus to suburban Hawthorne, California where, after failing to buy a sandwich on credit from a local blue-collar delicatessen, he walks to Hawthorne Municipal Airport, steals a small Cessna 210 aircraft and flies into the desert.Meanwhile, Daria, "a sweet, pot-smoking post-teenybopper of decent inclinations,” is driving across the desert towards Phoenix in a 1950s-era Buick automobile to meet Lee, her boss, who may or may not also be her lover. Along the way Daria is searching for a man who works with "emotionally disturbed" children from Los Angeles. She finds the young boys near a roadhouse in the Mojave desert, but they tease, taunt, and grab at her, boldly asking for "a piece of ass,” to which she asks in reply, "Are you sure you'd know what to do with it?"Daria flees in her car. While filling its radiator with water, she is spied from the air by Mark, who buzzes her car and then flies only 15 feet over her as she lies face down in the sand. He throws a T-shirt out of the window of the aircraft for her to pick up. Daria goes from upset to curious and smiling during this sequence.They later meet at the desert shack of an old man, where Mark asks her for a lift so he can buy gasoline for the aircraft. The two then wander to Zabriskie Point, where they make love. As they begin, other unidentified young naked people are shown playing sexually on the ground, their wild games sending up thick clouds of white dust from the desert floor.Later, a California highway patrolman suspiciously questions Daria. Hidden behind a portable toilet meant for tourists, Mark takes aim at the policeman, but Daria stands between the two of them to block this, apparently saving the policeman's life before he drives away. Daria asks Mark if he was the one who killed the cop in Los Angeles. He states that he wanted to, but someone else shot the officer first and that he "never got off a shot".Returning to the stolen aircraft, they paint it with politically charged slogans and psychedelic colors. Daria pleads with Mark to travel with her and leave the aircraft, but Mark is intent on returning and taking the risks that it involves. He flies back to Los Angeles and lands the plane at the airport in Hawthorne. The police (along with some radio and television reporters) are waiting for him, and patrol cars chase the aircraft down the runway. Instead of stopping, Mark tries to turn the taxiing aircraft around across the grass and is shot dead by one of the policemen.Daria learns about Mark's death on the car radio. She drives to Lee's lavish desert home, "a desert Berchtesgaden" set high on a rock outcropping near Phoenix, Arizona, where she sees three affluent women sunning themselves and chatting by the swimming pool. She grieves for Mark by drenching herself in the house's architectural waterfall. Lee is deeply immersed in a business meeting having to do with the complex and financially risky Sunny Dunes development. Taking a break, he spots Daria in the house and happily greets her. She goes downstairs alone and finds the guest room that has been set aside for her, but after briefly opening the door, she shuts it again.Seeing a young Native American housekeeper in the hallway, Daria leaves silently. She drives off, but stops to get out of the car and look back at the house, her own imagination seeing it repeatedly blown apart in billows of orange flame and household items

I never understood, why the hippies of the day, didn't drop LSDand went to see this film. and make it a hit, like they did for 2001?OK... A simple story of girl meets boy, while on a road trip to somewheredoesn't sound much of a plot, and it isn't. You could even say, it's a bit boringas the story unfolds, but... The ending!!!This was one of the first movies where popular music was used as a soundtrack.From the Tennessee Waltz, to Pink Floyd the music accompanies the film, morethan drive the plot or drama. It is as if the music is playing as background to thestory... But when Pink Floyd's "Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up" kicks in, this isa masterclass of film Editing to music. And that is why you should watch this movie.For what ever reason, the Hippies of the day didn't dig this film, and it was a flop,which is a pity. But now, we can view this movie as a piece of modern art, whichit is...

Zabriskie Point (1970) is Michelangelo Antonioni’s most under-rated film. Only Il mistero di Oberwald (1980) suffers the same neglect, but where that film perhaps deserves to be buried (it’s a bizarre clash between Cocteau melodrama and cool modernism in a video manifesto where the technology simply wasn’t up to it), time has revealed Zabriskie Point to be a masterpiece. Even the most glowing reviews here cite quibbles, but I think it’s time to remove those. It stands as the centerpiece of the director’s unofficial ‘trilogy of abstraction,’ an English-language trio of films funded by MGM. It should be considered equal to Blow-Up (1966) and The Passenger (1975) rather than the trilogy’s weak link. While Blow-Up is set in London and The Passenger is set all over Europe/North Africa, Zabriskie Point is the one and only Antonioni film set in America, its poisoned reputation deriving mainly from its left-wing attack on the country and the corporate culture that funded it. Zabriskie Point is the name of a scenic spot in Death Valley, California which Antonioni uses as a metaphor for a nation assassinated by the establishment (Big Business and the police that guard it) where the late 60s counterculture (youth, the students, the hippies, the Black Panthers) represent the only source of hope. The original script had a plane blazing ‘F*** You, America’ across the sky in the final shot which not surprisingly MGM cut. If the counterculture had accepted the film as they did Easy Rider (1969) the film’s commercial success at least would have been assured, but Antonioni’s European arthouse aesthetic clashed with the Hollywood system. This combined with the rampant house un-American activities to sink it, critics too focused on the film’s politics and the casting of amateurs to notice the film’s main text, a very typical Antonionian investigation of the impossibility of visualizing reality, the ‘secret violence’ firing the mystery/uncertainty underlying everything and the abstraction that represents it.Antonioni does the same here as he did in Blow-Up wherein the time and setting provide an obvious layer of meaning which everyone can easily grasp, but which proves to be ultimately a red herring in the greater mystery. While Blow-Up is an entertaining depiction of ‘swinging sixties’ London with its focus on fashion, drugs, sex, nudity and rock n’ roll, Zabriskie Point focuses on the same era and ingredients in California, but stressing student activism. Like Blow-Up, the narrative is easy to summarize. Mark (Mark Frechette) is a college drop-out involved in student activism in Berkeley, L. A. He witnesses a policeman shot dead during a student sit-in and is caught on camera fleeing the scene. A murder suspect, he takes a tiny plane for a joyride to escape the heat, flying due east over the Mojave Desert. Daria (Daria Halprin) is an office temp taking a job in a huge L. A. real estate corporation run by Lee Allen (Rod Taylor). She decides to drive to a meeting in Phoenix rather than fly so that she can check out a meditation guru in the desert. Mark spots her from the air, ‘courts’ her by buzzing her car and dropping a red nightie which she picks up. The plane landed, they hook up, she driving him on to Zabriskie Point where they make love in the dust of Death Valley. They drive back to the plane, repaint it with political/sexual words and images and part, he taking off back for L. A. and she driving on to her meeting at a house in a desert area set aside for development. Mark is met by the police who shoot him dead. Daria hears the news, grieves, and after briefly visiting the house, drives away in disgust. She stops on the roadside, touches the red nightie (Mark’s love-gift) and stands staring at the house. We see her imagining the house exploding multiple times, the contents also exploding in slow motion in an ecstatic celebration of a hoped-for end to consumerism to the psychedelic soundscape of Pink Floyd. She drives off into the sunset as the music rises again, perhaps prophesying this desired-for end in the future.The simplicity of the politics have come on for deep ridicule and critics can even quote Antonioni to support their attack. He said, “Blow-Up’s story could have happened anywhere. Zabriskie Point, instead, is a film about America. America is the real protagonist of the film. The characters are just a pretext.” He also said, “My relationship with America reflects the division of Americans into very distinct categories: in one camp are two-thirds of the population, irritating and unbearable people; the other third are wonderful people. The first group is the middle-class; the second one is today’s youth. Among young people there is an absolute indifference towards money, there is purity, disinterestedness, revolt and change. The middle-class, instead, I would call a social class of crazy people because, after all, despite their alienation, they are uncorrupted and well-meaning. The European middle-class, you see, is corrupt and therefore is not crazy.” Antonioni was now making color films, but his thinking remained b/w, the America we see in his film a country of extreme polarities with no gray areas. The young are all ‘good,’ loved and celebrated in the opening political meeting before being victimized in the campus violence, Mark the ‘innocent’ fleeing unjust authority only to embrace his fate as a martyr by flying back into it, and Daria the free spirit disaffected by corporate culture and the advances of her boss (are they paternal or sexual? – we’re never sure) celebrating free love in the desert (and joined by dozens of other couples frolicking wildly in the dust) before having it rudely taken away. Her destructive urge seems entirely justified. Meanwhile the old are all ‘bad,’ the police officers sinister figures of fascist authority and the middle-class they protect rampant capitalists emphasized all the way through the film by an incessant shower of billboard advertising and by the focus on Allen’s monolithic Metropolis-like corporation. They may be “uncorrupted and well-meaning” but that doesn’t make them any less “irritating and unbearable,” as their business talk fills in the background of the soundtrack in an ominous drone. It’s easy to read the film as a left-wing rant, Antonioni on the side of youth in his celebration of idealism in the face of modern corporate America, just as it’s easy to read the depiction of the ‘swinging sixties’ in Blow-Up as a similar celebration of anti-authoritarianism. Both films would be pretty weak however, if that is all there is. Commentators have refused to look beyond the surface and judge both films as facile, shallow and misguided, Zabriskie Point even more than Blow-Up. But clearly, there is a lot more here. We should tie the film in with the aesthetics of Antonioni’s cinema which matured in the 60s through the ‘trilogy of alienation’ (L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse [1960-1962]) and burst into color with Red Desert in 1964 with abstraction erupting spectacularly to the fore.Antonioni gave a press conference after the Cannes screening of L’avventura in 1960 and his words apply to his whole œuvre. Replying to mystified critics pressing for certainties, he said, “Lucretius, who was certainly one of the greatest poets who ever lived, once said, ‘Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain. The only certain thing is the existence of a secret violence that makes everything uncertain.’ What Lucretius said of his time is still a disturbing reality, for it seems to me that this uncertainty is very much of our time.” The uncertainty of human existence and the violence that fires it lies under Antonioni’s desire to break down the traditional narrative and it lies under what he leaves behind – characters flailing in ennui, alienated from themselves and from each other, from the surrounding world which seems empty, void of value. Then in 1964 at the time of Red Desert he said, “We know that beneath the represented image there is an other image more true to reality, and that beneath that one, still one more, and again a further image beneath that one, until you get to the true image of reality, absolute, mysterious, that no one shall ever see. Or perhaps, one will arrive at the decomposition of any image whatsoever, of any reality whatsoever. The abstract cinema would then have its rationale for existing.” Blow-Up demonstrated this decomposition very clearly with its photographer blowing up his pictures in search of meaning only for the images to become pixilated and meaningless, especially when divorced from context. In Zabriskie Point the visual system deployed is so complex that there is barely a single image which we can trust. Abstraction is everywhere apparent as Antonioni demonstrates the uncertainty of ‘reality,’ the secret violence underlying it and the impossibility of capturing it. Best resist interpreting things definitively and savor the ambiguity, or as he said, “Any explanation would be less interesting than the mystery itself.”The complexity of Antonioni’s visual system (derived with cinematographer Alfio Contini, editor Franco Arcalli and production designer Dean Tavoularis) is announced immediately in the stunning opening 8 minute sequence. Human faces and bodies move indistinctly behind a thick orange filter as the credits play to Pink Floyd’s eerie pulsating music, the indistinct murmur of voices breaking through here and there. Visually and aurally we are in the presence of abstraction. The credits finish and we realize we have been watching a student meeting. Telephoto lenses flatten perspectives and create constantly moving background clutter which vies to take over the foreground. We have young, excited, passionate people voicing their grievances, Antonioni capturing their bodies moving in lines across the screen clashing with each other to continue the abstracted effect as they gesticulate, make points, show irritation or laugh. At one point the thread of the dialogue is lost and we are given over entirely to the poetry of the images. It’s an affectionate group portrait from a director who dispenses with the usual notion of an establishing shot, choosing instead to plunge us into an abstract tangle of visual lines and aural confusion. Critics like to scorn the film’s inarticulate soundtrack with dialogue barely audible, but that is part of the point. We are distanced quite purposefully as we witness a virtual documentary of moving and heard signs and signifiers.Antonioni then cuts to Daria arriving at her new office building, Allen’s ‘Sunnydunes Land Development Company.’ Where the young students define the space they live in, corporate America defines the robots/prisoners incarcerated within it. Learning from Fritz Lang, Antonioni deploys a mixture of very wide and very long lenses to trap his characters within the right angles of grids, cages of lines in offices and corridors shot from camera positions carefully positioned to emphasize the ever-present threat (the ‘secret violence’) of which Allen and his associates seem unaware. A telephoto lens frames Allen in his office standing over a square desk in a square room looking out of a square window at the skyscraper standing opposite which is a quite deliberate reference to Lang’s Metropolis (1926) as the tangled lines of the architecture ‘threaten’ the ‘order’ of Allen’s world. Another set-up echoes M (1930) as a wide-angle camera set below Allen’s desk looks up at the sitting man, his legs massive and his face puny as he listens to a business meeting framed against the window and a blue sky where an American flag is flying as if to say THIS is corporate America. In another sequence Allen and his colleagues watch a TV CM advertising their product (the land development in the desert we see at the end) in which Antonioni intercuts them with mannequin models as if to stress their inhumanity, depersonalizing them as the CM stresses all the marketing points deemed sacred to the heart of their targeted market – the middle class. All of this may be read as part of the left-wing rant, but the sheer beauty of the compositions work against the negativity suggesting that as in Red Desert, Antonioni is celebrating corporate progress as well as condemning it.Antonioni sets up a dichotomy between two halves of the middle-class establishment. First, we have the ‘nice’ face of corporate enterprise (the businessmen aren’t depicted as capitalist pigs as such, Allen never being less than generous to Daria) as it sets about taming the wilderness (the desert), advancing civilization in a subtle statement of Manifest Destiny obviously understood from watching a Western or two (significantly native Americans serve – are subjugated by - their white masters in the desert house). Second, we have the ‘nasty’ face of law enforcement which clears the way for corporate enterprise to prosper. The grids and cages of the office buildings and the desert house also exist within the police station and patrol cars where activists are arrested and from where Mark is eventually shot. Antonioni pointedly cuts from the low shot of Allen sitting at his desk to a close-up of a cop’s face and the grid-like gas-mask that covers it. Numerous officers in masks all in uniform are presented as a suffocating ‘grid’ of authority which will not permit youth to stand in the way of progress. They are like the cavalry in Westerns suppressing the Indians (exchanged here with the counterculture) so that ‘civilization’ can advance.When corporate America reaches out into the streets as it does in the film’s third scene as Mark drives a truck with his friend, it does so in a dazzling display of billboards, signs and advertising painted on buildings and other vehicles. This is a tour de force sequence put together with immaculate editing and tremendously skillful use of mirrors, window reflections and other reflective surfaces. It’s very much an alien’s view of America as a strange land full of names and pictures jumping out to catch the attention, the dazzling lines, shapes and colors off-set with the electronic music we last heard as Giuliana wandered the factory wastelands of Red Desert. Again, as with that film, the abstract display is defiantly ambiguous for as much as the non-stop commercial onslaught sickens you to the bone, you can’t help but be captivated by the beauty of the spectacle.This dichotomy between disgust and beauty continues once the two main characters leave the metropolis. Mark (and Antonioni) savors the beauty of the shapes down below from the air – twisted spaghetti-like roads, sports stadia, straight lines disappearing off into the immense flatness of the Mojave Desert. A similar sense of wonder attended Vittoria’s flight to Verona in L’eclisse where Antonioni demonstrates that the monstrous things man has done to the world are also intensely beautiful and as worthy of celebration as they deserve condemnation. Daria’s drive also has its share of beauties woven out of the ugliness, especially her stop in a country town to find her meditation guru which stresses the wasteland aspect (orphaned bad kids from L. A. throwing stones, fighting and training up for sexual molestation among trashed upturned cars and a wrecked piano which one deranged kid twangs eerily) alongside the stunning beauty of the Edward Hopper-like compositions of people inhabiting a bar. One shot effortlessly stating the ambiguity has Daria escaping the kids, running back to her car and driving off only for the camera to move in through a window on a lone old man sitting sipping his beer and smoking at a bar to the strains of Patti Page’s Tennessee Waltz, the camera resting back and carefully framing the image in the inimitable Hopper manner.The ‘courtship by air’ celebrates these two young people coming together in nature away from civilization (telephoto shots of the car moving through the desert with the mountains brought close evokes Shane [1954]), but their lovemaking in Death Valley reinstates the ambiguity. Daria remarks the landscape is peaceful, but Mark corrects her – “It’s dead.” The love-making sequence expanded with numerous couples celebrates the spirit of free love and the hopes and joys of youth, but the floundering around in dust and the aggressive attitudes assumed by some of the couples never let us forget that the land is dead, their country is dead as the couples become at one with the earth only to emerge from it looking like ghosts. The rapid editing and Jerry Garcia’s lyrical guitar accompaniment lend an air of elegy to a nation which has sold its soul to commercial Mammon. The final image is a long shot of the valley covered in couples making love, but they are like flowers dying in the desert. Then to emphasize the point Antonioni cuts to a rich fat American family arriving at Zabriskie Point in their portable home, the man’s comment (“They should build a drive-in up here. It would make a mint.”) commenting on how corporate America exploits natural beauty where it should be left alone and appreciated from afar. So we think as Antonioni’s camera watches two of nature’s children climb out of the valley as a ghostly reminder of what could have been.Perhaps the greatest thing about this extended desert love scene is that while it can be read as part of the left-wing rant, it actually stands alone as an excellent example of ‘dead time’ in Antonioni’s cinema where nothing actually happens in terms of plot. We have an entirely abstract tableaux of images which exist in themselves but resist reduction. The story is interrupted and we are taken off into an entirely different world of narrative possibility which seems rich, strange and entirely ‘other.’ It is in such spaces that the poetry and the abstraction of Antonioni’s vision is most keenly felt. Other examples are the closing 7-minute montage of L’eclisse, the 7-minute penultimate tracking/crane shot of The Passenger, and the closing 5-minute (again 7 minutes if we include Daria’s actions and reactions before/after) tableaux of explosions which close Zabriskie Point. As with the love scene we have the very obvious (for many TOO obvious) left-wing rant. Daria connects the police shooting Mark with the actions of her employer, stares at a native American maid ‘subjugated’ by him, and desires to just obliterate everything. Yet, in the destruction lies the act of creation and out of it Antonioni weaves images of the most stunning beauty. The sequence is essentially a binary (like so much in Antonioni!), the first part sheer anger as the house is blown up 17 times (actually once but shot from 17 different camera set-ups) from multiple angles and with varying film speeds. Out of the flames and smoke there’s a swish-pan right to a blue background and various household objects are blown up, the floating debris making a series of compositions that closely resemble the art of Jackson Pollack animated into life. He takes mundane objects like a fridge, a clothes rack or a TV and blows them apart in exquisite slow motion, destruction seguing into creation. As the Pink Floyd screeches to a climax Antonioni delivers his greatest image with the exploding bookcase, an act of cultural destruction above all, but as the books blossom into beautiful fanned images it’s as if commodities have been released from between their covers and allowed to truly express themselves to the beholder. Like the love-scene, this explosive finale is quite superlative to the plot, an example of ‘dead time,’ and yet it is where the heart of the abstraction within Antonioni’s cinema expresses itself the most, the perception that ‘reality’ is ultimately unknowable, that ‘mystery’ is everything. Reduce it all to a left-wing rant if you want, but that denies the incredible richness of what Antonioni here achieves.

I saw this film when it first came out in the very early 70s and enjoyed it back then. Since then I have seen it, probably, another three or four times and I have understood it, and appreciated it, a bit more each time. This latest release is excellent. As well as being wide-screen, it also has subtitles so you can make out all of the dialogue. This is particularly useful at the beginning of the film during the student meeting where it's hard to tell what people are saying (but that might be my ears!). This is basically a film about idealism and youth culture versus commercialism in 60s America. The desert scenes and the music soundtrack are excellent and the final few minutes of the film are worth the price of the DVD on their own (once you've seen this, you will never forget it). This may be Antonioni's "flawed masterpiece", but it's still a masterpiece.