16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
MISUNDERSTOOD., August 4, 2007
This review is from: Zabriskie Point - by Michelangelo Antonioni (Import) (DVD)
Yes I think its a great film. From the wooden acting of the leads to the Pink Floyd extravaganza at its finale, Zabriskie Point never fails to astound with its incomparable visuals and mastery. Mr Antonioni bravely flings himself on the minefeild of the sixties in America and the results are unlike anything else. Sure to confound most everyone expecting a trite fable, what one receives instead is a blisteringly funny and beautiful comment on a culture too obsessed with consumerism and "success" to notice much besides its own narcicissm. Brilliant.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lost Idealism, September 20, 2008
This review is from: Zabriskie Point - by Michelangelo Antonioni (Import) (DVD)
Director Michelangelo Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT is a masterpiece of pure cinema that somehow seems lost to those that despised it as well as to those that embraced it back in 1970. Mark (Mark Frechette) the iconoclast hero is disenchanted with the discussion of college students that we see him congregate with inside a lecture hall somewhere in Los Angeles. The students discuss peace and peace activism conducted and achieved through acts of civil disobedience. Apparently they can't reach a consensus on what means they will use to achieve their end. Convinced they are not willing to take the most extreme of all actions and tired of their rhetoric Mark leaves, buys a gun, nearly kills a cop and impulsively steels an airplane leading him off into the desert. . Simultaneously, we see Daria (Daria Halprin) a very young secretary to land developer Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) decidedly skipping a workday and driving off into the desert in her old Buick. Eventually their paths cross in the desert and they stop their flight at the crest of the Zabriskie Point overlook. For me viewing this film I don't necessarily see the contrast between an American society so decadent, self-centered and materialistic when compared to the two protagonists Mark and Daria. They are unaware that the very thing they are trying to escape, they are in fact part of or even symptomatic of. They look into the barren terrain of the desert and see a beautiful landscape. Yet when they make naked love they are consumed and covered in sand and dust which is symbolically the resulting fruit to the consummation of the act. They are from dust. Their result shall be dust. When Daria first drove into the desert she stopped at a roadside bar frequented by a man long past his physical prime and lost in a singular moment of youthful triumph. Outside the roadside bar Daria found a group of young boys, much younger than her, who equally were lost in their youthful retrogression and idleness. There is no growth in this film for any of its characters, only stagnation. There is no real emergence of a counterculture or any notion of such in this film. There is only the singular culture of man and the limitations of man when compared to the immense and vast majesty, beauty and beguilement of nature. Cinematographer Alfio Contini's color images capture this so vividly. Even the script is more revealing than it appears. We still get the cliched version of a Los Angeles police force. But the business establishment represented by land developer Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) is also seen to be at odds when selling his idealized project. We don't specifically see it, but we get the notion that he is trying to sell a housing project that will incorporate itself into the landscape and become one-with-nature. We see the home that developer Allen has created for himself, a beautiful domicile in the desert, which at first glance seems to go in tandem with this notion of co-existing with nature. But this too can not be in such a vision that Antonioni has created. Equally along the way Mark's fate has prophetically been sealed. Daria's final apocalyptic vision is that of director Antonioni's. No matter what culture man establishes there can never be true harmony. The only true harmony is nature unto itself.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unique, artistic and imaginative., December 26, 2006
This review is from: Zabriskie Point - by Michelangelo Antonioni (Import) (DVD)
ZABRISKE POINT caused great division in film-going circles and got reviews ranging from: "wannabe classic but artless piece of empty canvas" which was the main-stream, establishment view most critics included, to "revelation of everything that is wrong in the world today (1970)" as viewed by the alternative movement media and people.
This is an image-driven film not a script-driven film, portraying American society & the angst of its youth in the late 1960's, from the viewpoint of a director who ones stated that "A director's job is to see".
There is also an obvious (IMHO) remark on the futile hope of the hippie/civil rights movement's influence in the politics and evolution of America. What Zabriskie Point has to offer in abundance is mood. The deserts, skies, city, and even the faces in close-ups are filmed with the eye of a filmmaker in love with the art of getting things in the frame, bringing us in. The music helps a lot; the score includes Pink Floyd, Kaleidoscope, Grateful Dead. The mood is kind of similar to the moods of Antonioni's other masterpieces, filled with loneliness and desolation (and perhaps the freedom that comes from that).
It's the story of a young man and a young woman. HE (Mark) escapes his existence around the boiling, dangerous campus life going on in the circa late 60's LA area, while SHE (Daria) is sent out from LA to drive to Phoenix for some business meeting. They meet by chance as Mark's plane(!) and Daria's car meet up, and they spend some time together in an existential kind of adventure out in the desert... The use of a mostly non-professional cast conveys a sense of realism (though may seem awkward to some)and seems to be a choice of purpose since those who look most like real actors are subjugated to the roles of the corporate characters.
Since this is a PAL DVD (not playable for some of American NTSC players)and no other edition is listed at Amazon, here is a link you can get NTSC copy of it in 2.35:1 WIDESCREEN format too.
http://shop.vendio.com/cindysboots/item/858848817/index.html
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