Zabriskie Point

Antonioni's career has a fascinating symmetry; his breakthrough, zeitgeist-defining masterpiece L'Avventura was released in 1960, and nailed the as-yet un-named decade that came to be known as "The 60's" to the mast as surely as the contemporaneous films of Godard and Truffaut. Zabriskie Point, the Heaven's Gate of arthouse cinema, was released in 1970, and its embrace of free love in the desert, psychedelic rock 'n roll and groovy revolution seemed hopelessly dated upon release, and moreover as a celebration of the US counterculture, unintentionally revealed its utter bankruptcy. Antonioni traversed the decade from A to Z, first presciently defining the era, and then succumbing to it worst excesses.Coming off of his huge international hit Blow-Up (a film both praised and hated for all the wrong reasons), MGM gave Antonioni carte blanche to come to America and document Where it Was At. Right there, we have a problem, because Antonioni, one of the most reticent and ambiguous of film-makers, who preferred to suspend meaning, was going to Make A Statement about Amerikka. Then he decided he wanted to cast actual products of the counterculture rather than professional actors, to play the free-spirited leads. Antonioni was no Bresson, these are literally two of the worst performances you will ever see in any movie ever. Then he hired two young, then unknown counterculture writers Sam Shepherd and Mark Peploe, who would later on do good work, but here were in their artistic infancy. Suffice to say, the script sounds like it was written by non-English speakers attempting to cram as much ill-understood hippy argot into 90 minutes as possible. The slight story makes Easy Rider look like Tolstoy. Boy decides to ditch campus radicalism, because he is too much of an anarchic free spirit, but somehow manages to shoot a cop during a demonstration in self-defense; a fugitive, he takes off into the SoCal desert, first in a car, then in a stolen plane; Girl works for a fat-cat real estate developer despoiling the desert with tract housing, meets the boy cute when his plane buzzes her car. They have an Adam-and-Eve like idyll in the desert, the cops catch up with them, and a psychedlic apocalypse ensues. There are three characters with any real speaking parts, and the only sympathetic (because actually acted) person is Rod Taylor as the ostensibly evil fat-cat capitalist, clearly not the intent of the filmmakers.So why is this hackneyed time-capsule, rejected by its intended counterculture audience, still worth watching, if you don't mind seizing up with cringes of embarrassment for an artist laid low by the '60's and his hapless cast every 10 minutes or so? Simple. Even at his worst, Antonioni had an eye for landscape and architecture nearly unparallelled in film history. Here are the highlights:The opening documentary-style debate between members of the USC chapter of the SDS and the Black Panthers, half-out of focus and scored to Pink Floyd's synthesized noises; the Boy's flight from LA to the desert, a travelogue of freeway billboards; the Frank Lloyd Wright-on-crack desert condo project, empty as a ghost-town; the plane-meets-car in Death Valley boy-meets-girl syndeoche; the orgy at Zabriskie Point, where bodies meld with rock and sand; and the unbelievable ending, a consumerist Gotterdammerung scored to Pink Floyd's screaming Careful With That Axe Eugene, which almost redeems the entire enterprise....All of this is shot in massive 'Scope, Antonioni's only super-widescreen film, in brilliant color, and scored by the aforementioned Floyd, along with the Dead, The Stones, and other late '60's luminaries. The unspeakable banality of a script that would warm Charles Manson's heart rubbing shoulders with the director's de Chirico-like visuals is a fascinating spectacle, and actually worth a viewing, not just for its intermittent beauties, but for a moral reason: It shows how an era was so possessed, in the Dostoevskyan sense, that even its best minds were reduced to cheese, atavism, and barbarity (see also Godard's collapse into Maoism, John Lennon's mouthing of hippy platitudes he surely didn't believe, RD Laing's dismissal of the fact of mental illness, the better to pillory social norms, Noam Chomsky's detour from linguistics to treason). Zabriskie Point should be shown to every middle-schooler to prevent '60's revivalism, it is a fabulous Just Say No.And Antonioni never made a good film again.

It had been several years since I've seen this film, and so all I remembered of it was the generally-admired "explosive" ending. However, now upon having seen it again twice in the last two days, the film makes sense to me. The plot is simple enough; that being said, I neither expect nor desire a conventional plot from Antonioni, given that he is filmmaker whose priorities, especially in the case of "Zabriskie Point", were highly visual (the cinematography by Alfio Contini is outstanding). Several other Amazon reviewers of this picture have commented on the amateurish performance of the leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin; ultimately, their "performances" or "non-performances" have very little to do with the relevance and originality of this film. Anyone who is familiar with the work of European filmmakers knows that their use of amateur actors has not been uncommon, this having been practiced by the likes of Fellini, Visconti, Buñuel, Godard and Fassbinder; they knew that, for their respective purposes, the presence of an "amateur", as opposed to that of a polished professional, would actually enhance the quality of their films. Secondly, I believe it is important to look beyond the obvious in this picture. The desert functions as a metaphor for death, sterility, even purity (sterility being a quality that Antonioni, especially via his silences, is fond of). And Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) and his company, the "Sunnydune Development Corporation", bring even more death to the potentially deadly desert (the "corporate" representing "man-made death"; the desert representing "natural death"). Daria, Lee Allen's secretary, drives in a dull gray 1950's Buick towards a soulless conference with her boss in the Arizona desert; while Mark returns in his Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test airplane to death on an overcast airstrip (he has his time in the sun and then returns to a foggy demise; it's practically Wagnerian). Mark's death also functions as a metaphor for the self-destructive youth of that era; his character, whether well-executed or not, functions as the "Anti-Hero". Daria, in driving away from the "explosion" at the end of the film, rejects capitalism, as it is represented in this picture, and as it manifested during the late 1960's in the United States. Inspired by the "noble" death of her friend, Mark, Daria finally derives the courage to leave her boss and his bourgeois trappings; which makes Mark's self-sacrifice seem slightly less pointless. There are also some interesting out of context moments in this film; the boy in the desert town plucking at the strings of a deconstructed, discarded piano; Patti Page's version of "The Tennessee Waltz" is used very effectively in the desert restaurant scene. Finally, I must agree with many other Amazon reviewers of this film, that the original music composed by Pink Floyd, especially as it is utilized in the final scenes of the picture, is fantastic. PS--for the linguist and/or the multilingual, this DVD also features both dubbing and subtitles in French, as well as subtitles in Japanese.Stephen C. BirdAuthor, "To Be to Is to Was"

Classic movie - dvd in good shape.

i also agree with opinion of dont buy this german version of zabriskie point!with such a spectacular film!death valley etc!they cut half the film out at the sides so you only see 1.33.1/ square picture instead of the full cinema scope!what were these people thinking of when they did this?

Still worth watching.

"Zabriske Point" (1970) is directed by Antonioni(Blow-up, Red Desert). This film starts off very slowly focusing on youths at a campus. The initial scenes seem rather amateurish and weak, but once the film gets beyond the campus and into the desert of Zabriske Point in Death Valley then Antonioni starts to turn on his magic. There are some very hauntingly beautiful shots of the desert, and of couples strewn out in a dry river valley, and then an amazing finale with an apocalyptic image of the shreds of civilization.I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the dvd quality was very good with deep blacks and rich colours, and it appeared that the movie had been remastered since it was a very clean print. There are, however no special features except for a movie trailer.

Antonioni was a director of beautiful and influential art films, and as well as their intellectual content, they can also be appreciated almost as beautiful slow-moving paintings.So why, when the original film, with stunning visuals (particularly the renowned end sequence set to the music of Pink Floyd) was shot in 2.35:1, does this release come in 4:3? This is tragic.I would give 5 stars for the film, but sadly only one star for a DVD release that completely misses the point. My old Serbian landlady told me a saying from her part of the world: "What use is a cow if it gives you 5 litres of milk and then kicks the milk pail over?"