Product Details

• Actors: Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Paul Fix, G.D. Spradlin, Bill Garaway
• Directors: Michelangelo Antonioni
• Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Clare Peploe, Franco Rossetti, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra
• Producers: Carlo Ponti, Harrison Starr
• Format: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0), French (Dolby Digital 1.0)
• Subtitles: English, French, Japanese
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Warner Home Video
• DVD Release Date: May 26, 2009
• Run Time: 110 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001TK80CA
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,480 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Zabriskie Point" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

As a postcard from a bygone era, Michelangelo Antonioni's sole American movie is amazing to look at. This was the Italian director's first film since his English-language breakthrough Blowup (1966), which had been a masterpiece that captivated general and art-house audiences alike. Expectations understandably ran high, and as a visual experience Zabriskie Point delivered. Here was this foreigner's eye, among the most distinctive in world cinema, looking at city and desert, streets and backroads, office towers, mini-marts, police cars, airfields, and nonstop signage--the textures of U.S. life transliterated into something alien and askew. Revisited decades later, that's the aspect of Zabriskie Point that comes fascinatingly to the fore.

>Not so in 1970. Zabriskie Point bombed with critics and audiences because Antonioni proved to be way out of his depth in attempting to relate to American youth and their inchoate revolution--something underscored by the irredeemably amateurish performances of unknowns Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette in the leading roles. The story, such as it is, takes its impetus from a student strike during which a police officer is shot. Whether Mark fired the shot is unclear (the editing at the crucial moment recalls the cop-killing in Godard's Breathless), but he splits. His flight into the desert in a stolen plane will bring him together with Daria, who's driving to Phoenix to meet her employer and possible lover, a real-estate developer (Rod Taylor). What transpires between these two young people has to be seen to be believed, except that it can't be believed. Nevertheless, the events of the next-to-last reel license Antonioni to tee up an extraordinary finale--a hallucinatory apocalypse in which American materialism gets what's coming to it, and the desert becomes a sunset bloom.

It's a measure of the film's miscalculation that, although the Taylor character is clearly meant to personify capitalist rapacity, the actor's professionalism is such a relief from the vapid leads that the guy comes off as sympathetic. There are also brief, welcome turns by G.D. Spradlin (future deliverer of the Apocalypse Now line "Terminate with extreme prejudice") and veteran Western player Paul Fix, whose Death Valley café becomes the scene of an astonishing Edward Hopper moment. Gold is where you find it. --Richard T. Jameson

Also on the DVD
The lone extra is the original trailer, with which, like the title song, we can only hope Antonioni had nothing to do. Over images of the prehistoric wilderness that gives the film its name, an adult voice salaciously intones: "Zabriskie Point ... where a boy ... and a girl ... meet ... and touch ... and blow their minds." Cue rock music and mass love-in. --Richard T. Jameson

Product Description

ZABRISKIE POINT - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

111 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gary Fike, March 22, 2001

By 

Gary Fike (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Zabriskie Point [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I give this move 5 stars for personal reasons. If you peer ever so closely at the panoramic 'orgy in the desert' shot, you will see me groaning with "her" in the sand. While there was no actual fornicating going on within my range of vision, I can tell you the gal next to me was asking out loud for it! Damn! I miss those incredibly naive, self-indulgent days. It was, I believe, October of 1968 and I was a senior in a Las Vegas high school. I answered the casting call for extras. Miracously, my father allowed me to miss a week of school to "train" with a feely-touchy dance troupe from NY. When shooting started MGM would bus us from Vegas to the Point every morning at 5am. Most of my time on the set was spent gawking at Diana, Antonioni, and all the wild movie equipment. They even imported fine silk sand to blow around. I guess Death Valley sand was not european enough. I remember Antonioni, in full archetypical director mode, chasing Mark F. off the sound set for laughing at our feeble attempts to create "love noises" for the orgy scene. HA! The setting was surreal, the weather incredible, the catered lunch edible, and the young ladies sensuous and willing in that 60's way. You know how you sometimes fantasize about going back to a time in your life that was almost perfect? Well, this is one of those times for me.

Oh, I read the Time Magazine review when the movie came out and the reviewer said, "The moral of the story? Don't help a good boy go bad. Lock your airplane, take your keys." <G>


Since I wrote that "review" back in 1991 I had occasion to revisit Zabriskie's Point (the place, not the movie). It was my 50th birthday and my wife treated me to a stay at the famous Furnace Creek Inn.

We went over and it was as I remember it. Stunning. The only change was the parking/view area. You can no longer just drive on in to the canyons as the catering truck did back in 1968. So, while I am 'pointing and pondering' these three beautiful ladies arrive. They are talking away in some Euro language and I hear, "Antonioni". I say, "you know the movie?"
"Yes, we came to Death Valley just to see this place."
I say, "I was there when the movie was filmed".
They all came unglued and plied me with questions. Had to have a photo. My wife was bemused, to say the least. For a moment, I was once again Making Love, Not War. <G>

I am just realizing what an effect this movie has had on so many people and how lucky I was to be even a small part of it.

The real miracle of it all is that my father let a 17 year old wanna-be hippie skip a week of school to bounce around Death Valley with a bunch of radicals. Another odd thing was that I had recently sworn off drugs and alcohol so I got to be totally "present" for the experience. From my observation, I may have been the only sober participant...!

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a film that doesn't play by the rules, June 17, 2009

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Zabriskie Point (DVD)

Zabriskie Point is stunning as a piece of visual art. The campus scenes, the office interiors, the strange billboards and roadside stops along stretches of barren highway, the desert scenes, the world looked at from a small plane ...all of these visuals captivate the mind. Like many Antonioni films, the cinematography is a dream and individual stills belong in an art book/museum.

The characters are incomplete, only cursorily imagined, and the narrative is desultory and vague. In a way this works if one sees the film not as a critique of capitalist society or a study of radical political solutions to western materialism but as a record of what it feels like to be young and alive to possibility. To the young characters everything seems strange and alien and fails to meet their expectations of what life should feel like--to me that is what the film is documenting and that is what I like about it. The main character is not particularly drawn to politics nor does he feel in any way connected to the campus radicals that are pursuing a political agenda. He's a loner who lives by the beat of his own drum. He's an outsider even among outsiders. In many ways this makes him quintessentially American.

The film is not really about campus politics, rather its about a return to a more pastoral time in American life. The fact that the main character drives an old pick-up, and that the female lead drives an old car from another age supports the view that these are kids that simply don't feel at home in the modern world. Neither are campus radicals, what connects these two is that they are both nature lovers fleeing crass modernity. I think the fact that neither actor has been traditionally trained only adds to the films authenticity.

The enemy is ultimately a modernity which turns people into calculating capitalists or anti-western radicals, but neither of these stances really appeals to these two desert wanderers. What they want is something real and for them that something real is not American industriousness nor youthful radicalism. For them what is real is their strange meeting which can only take place outside the usual perimeters of society in a completely undefined world which is always old but also always new.

Antonioni does not play by the usual rules. He is an experimenter and his films simply do not fit into categories. Most film reviewers find fault with the lack of professional acting, or the lack of conventional narrative but I think these reviews miss the point. The concentration on visuals and liminal states of mind over clearly defined characters and narrative trajectories is what makes the film singular and memorable.

I would also argue that although the soundtrack plays an important part in this film, the most profound parts of Antonioni films are always the silences.

52 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Let's Set Some Matters Straight, August 7, 2000

By 

L. S. Slaughter "silvanus" (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Zabriskie Point [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Pursuant to reviews below, (1) John Cassavettes DID NOT DIRECT THIS FILM. (2) BLOW UP made no pretensions to being a 'crime film'- it was a perceptual mystery. (3) Mark Frechette died shortly after, and Daria Halprin is missing in action. Zabriskie Point missed its beat by about three months, when a political shift presaged its arrival and its anarchic sentiments seemed suddenly arch and dated (and remain so since, immersed in acceptable materialism as we are). Antonioni THE DIRECTOR has always been a champion of the natural world, and the intrusion of man-made things on human values and the sanctity of relationships, and he suceeded well with these themes in L'AVVENTURA, L'ECLISSE, LA NOTTE, and BLOW UP. One does sense he was slightly out of element coming to America to make ZABRISKIE POINT; it does read like an outsider looking in, and he hasn't suceeded at that as well as a UK director like John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) managed. Always a master of sound, ZABRISKIE does offer great moments, however. Halrin and Frechette are handsome leads, and Pink Floyd's 'Heart Beat, Pig Meat' offers some wild ambient backdrop. It is not a BAD film, but rather a very flawed one; it was produced perhaps one year too late, and suffers the same dislocation other 'counter-culture' films weathered none-too-gracefully. But it's not a dog, and is still more expertly assembled AND intended than most of the worthless pop trash playing at your local HellPlex in the year 2000.