Michelangelo Antonioni reached
the US in 1970, and found a country in internal disarray, with the
Summer of Love an increasingly distant memory. As with the earlier Blow-Up, which zoomed in on the desolation Antonioni had detected beneath swinging London’s poppy toplayer, Zabriskie Point
proposed that all was not entirely right under California’s sunny
skies, although it takes some while for this editorial line to come into
focus. Initially, we’re merely eavesdropping on
the hubbub of student radicals staging a sit-in and preparing their next
move. There are heated confabs in the refectory; soon, there will be
blood on the quad. (The film opened a matter of months before the Kent
State killings: Antonioni had sensed there was something in the air.)
Off-campus America is presented as hostile, almost entirely
industrialised, determined to reduce individuals to cogs in a machine:
The Red Desert on a bigger scale.
Already, though, you’re dazzled by the film’s revivifying reframing of its landscape, an outsider perspective rivalled only by Point Blank
in turn-of-the-70s cinema; the incredible colours leap out from the screen. This first act, which might go under the title
“Paradise Sold”, nails the kind of consumerist fakery Godard had done so
much to show up. The frame floods with billboards, presented here as a
kind of supersized junk mail. Only in the second act, a sort of Paradise
Regained, do human faces begin to outnumber impersonal signs, as two
students – trickflying longhair Mark (Mark Frechette), suspected of
killing a cop in the protests, and developer’s daughter Daria (Daria
Halprin) – break away from the troubled masses, and head off to the
untamed Mojave in search of peace, meaning, connection.
Compared to the agit-prop of La Chinoise –
which had its students recite entire passages from Mao – Zabriskie
Point’s critique of capitalism is hardly sophisticated. Its title is
sourced, rather bluntly, from a Mojave landmark “where old prospectors
lost their way”, and it winds its way towards the detonation (fantasised
or otherwise) of the harshly modernist glass box in which Daria’s
father (Rod Taylor, gruffly patrician in a way that now recalls late Mel Gibson)
has imprisoned a staff of mute ethnic domestics. It could be the
closing passage of a nursery school primer entitled Stick It To The Man,
Man! Antonioni’s sponsor here was MGM, and the
soundtrack (the Stones, the Dead, the newly emergent Floyd) and sight of
two good-looking kids having a high old time in the wilderness suggest
all concerned were working towards something that might attract the same
drive-in crowd who lapped up Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde. Antonioni’s affectless Adam and Eve veer between the lovers in Pierrot le Fou – though clumsy with dialogue, Frechette shares Belmondo’s knack of using the frame as his own personal playground – and, in their drippier moments, those in The Blue Lagoon.
Yet even as the screen fills with lithe
couples cavorting naked in the Mojave gypsum – and we’re left wondering
just how many weeks it took to pick that substance out of their cracks –
the film proves rather touchingly naïve. What we’re looking at is a
souvenir of perhaps the last moment when this mass medium was still
prepared to wholeheartedly endorse other ways of life – which is why I
think Zabriskie Point might still be picked up and taken to heart by
anyone presently being offered the unappetising choice of signing-on or
yet more call-centre work. In documenting a paradise lost, the film
has become a paradise lost: it’s hard not to regard that final round of
explosions – though notionally liberating, and undeniably beautiful to
look at – as bearing witness to a dream going up in smoke. If ever a
film deserved a rerelease on the college circuit, this was it: a vivid
reminder of a moment when the major studios weren’t just corporate shop
windows, and took gambles on works as boldly nonconformist as this. It
was, and remains, far out.
Zabriskie Point is available on DVD through Warner Home Video.
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