Customer Reviews

Zabriskie Point

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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...!

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.

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.

There was a great retrospective documentary made about Zabriskie Point in 2001. I saw it on late night cable. It is called INTO THE BELLY OF THE BEAST. It profiles through interviews with the crew all of productions problems associated with this film. A must see for all Zabriskie Point and Antonioni fans. I have heard that it is not on the new DVD release. Warner Brothers should include this as a special feature on the next pressing. I would love to see it again. It is an awesome account of this very flawed but still influential film.

I saw "ZP" during its initial theatrical release at a theater on an Air Force Base in Texas. Although it was a little more controversial than "My Fair Lady", it was not the revolutionary and subversive piece that many of its current admirers like to believe, or at least the armed forces saw fit to make it accessible to the troops. Of course that was at least in part because nobody could figure out what Antonioni was trying to communicate with this film.

So let's get real, "ZP" is neither the masterpiece its fans claim nor the hopeless morass that most casual viewers find it after their initial exposure. It has some interesting themes and some innovative techniques. It was Antonioni's only foray into America and he had been marking time for several years after "Blowup". As a foreigner he was attracted to the growing student protests on US campuses, these were already a tradition in Europe but were almost unprecedented in America.

His outsider status provided an excellent opportunity for an objective evaluation of US culture at the end of the 1960's. Unfortunately his rambling tale was too superficial to really capture the moods, atmosphere, and dynamics of this period of social change. Other films like "The Strawberry Statement", "Getting Straight", "Joe", "Medium Cool", and "Gimme Shelter" are far better time capsules.

Antonioni's screenplay (if it can be called that) is more an excuse for filming lots of ordinary things in extraordinary ways. You don't ever forget his heroine's smile as she fantasies about blowing up her lover's luxury house, with slow motion images of our materialistic society being blown over the desert. All this to the Pink Floyd's "Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up"; a retooled "Careful with That Ax, Eugene".

Antonioni was probably trying to tell us something with his film, maybe that positive change is an internal attitude thing and that violence is not the way to change the system. In 1971 the obvious message was that it was irresponsible to run away or dropout from even an extremely decadent society, that once you get your own head together the responsible thing is to return and change the system with a positive example, even if it gets you killed.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

This is a very intriguing film and rather euphoric in its approach from director Michelangelo Antonioni. It is a quixotically coherent effort from director Antonioni and the story works on several levels making it stand apart from other films in this era. The actors give titillating performances. It is so interesting to see Rod Taylor show up in this film.

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.

Michelangelo Antonioni has made his second counter-culture classic (the other being "Blowup") that deals graphically with 60's free love, rebellion, take-over, violence, and thought-provoking ideas. I am not shy to say that this is my favorite movie and Daria Halprin delivers a controversial performance noting her little experience in the world of film. The pic may look somewhat like a documentary and for this reason, it may be described as surreal for the genre of social drama. This film is provided with a precocious atmosphere, a lovingly "made" relationship between Mark Frechette and Halprin. The hippy days are accordingly portrayed in this classic 1960's drama of social comment that has a climax that will give an affect on your eyes as well as your ear-drum as Daria's post-apocolyptic vision of an exploding building in Arizona. The scenes in Death Valley where Halprin and Frechette exchange thoughts is the most poignant moment of Antonioni's masterpiece. What he has done to "Zabriskie Point" can only be described as surreal beauty.

Antonioni's tightly woven vision of American culture was written off as a postcard view of the US lacking any depth by most US reviewers, but even today this film accurately reflects the collective psyche of American society. At a time when we are concerned with inner city violence and the deaths in our high schools, the bombings of the World Trade Centre and federal buildings throughout the country, the vision of the director is uncannily evocative of the dark underbelly of the American society. An ongoing inability to tolerate any grey areas in relationships with others, as evidenced by the incredible rush to bomb opposing viewpoints out of existence, is beautifully captured in the climax of the film in a wonderfully ambiguous juxtaposition of violence and beauty.

I think this film still continues to express a vision of America that is as relevant today, perhaps even more so, as it was in the years following its release. A must for any serious student of film-making.

I lived through (and took part in) the student activism and "alternative culture" of the 1960s and the dawn of the 1970s as a student myself (at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, when it still had its quarters in and near to Park Square, and at the all-too-explosively alive Kent State University). I remember how we despised the acrid and shallow materialism of the prevailing culture of the "UniTIGHTASStates of AmeriKKKakapeepee" and how we longed to see it all blow up in the faces of the U. S. of A.'s besotted leaders and of the easily deluded citzenry that kept on (and continues) voting them into office. That has happened, at last, with the implosion of the U.S. economy near the beginning of the 21st Century; it is a pity that this collapse, that makes an arrogant nation seethe with poverty and frustration, thus doomed soon to powerlessness, did not occur sooner, to have limited all the victims of AmeriKKKan power and greed between the time of the film, 1970, and that of AmeriKKKa's financially and militarily agonising doom. When Daria, seething with resentment for Mark's needless death (although his carelessness certainly brought it upon him), fantasises that the very symbol of the bourgeois fatuity of AmeriKKKan callousness and vulgarity, the garishly opulent corporate facility (and/or mansion) set high in the desert surface with joltingly sudden violent force explodes to smithereens (with visions of explosions of urban artificialty of many additional sorts added to this), it is a breathtaking vision of justice come to a besotted and unworthy AmeriKKKan culture of excess and greed.

I like the natural touch of the two leading actors using their real first names for their roles. Mark and Daria are the only natural humans in the film, doing what comes naturally to them, even if by thoughtless whimsy (e.g., Mark's theft of the aeroplane) at times as well as by following their feelings to moving expression of what they experience at every moment, leading them, unafraid, to such natural sexuality and joyous revelry in each other, amidst the artificial constructs throughout the film, from which they stand aloof, of crazed student ideological excess, ruthless law enforcement, business and corporate cupidity, and so forth. Some of this may be naive, and doubtlessly is, but it is such a relief to find these two young adults in this film who do not fall into the "cookie-cutter" patterns of AmeriKKKan popular and corporate culture. Alas, Mark in the film dies for daring what he does, from an insistence on following his impulses (for better and for worse) in unfettered freedom, which his society quickly crushes brutally and without immediate sufficient cause (i.e., for him having "borrowed" without permission the aeroplane which he is returning). Mark Frechette himself, whose performance in the role is so edgily convincing (and who was the gay lover of American-Québécois writer, Robert Dôle, also a young hippie during those years, before Antonioni filmed "Zabriskie Point", Dôle having departed by then to live in Québec) was a true counter-cultural rebel who lived out his convictions (none too wisely, but very intensely) and who died all too young for living out what he believed.

This is a wonderful film, redolent (of course!) of its era, but surprisingly relevant for the decades to follow and for present times of such bitterness and of justice that too long has been delayed. A mere account of the film's action simply cannot convey the richness and untrammeled irony of what Antonioni accomplished thereby in this masterpiece of cinema. I wish that the DVD edition that I acquired (or any other one) had included supplementary material and an appreciation of what Antonioni accomplished (but only if it were well done and worthy of him) but I also am simply pleased that this DVD is available at all, being a film, as it is, which does not flinch from judging the crassest kind of modernity that Southern California, Arizona, and the U. S. of A. as a whole, embody and came to represent to the entire world.