Zabriskie Point (film)

This article refers to the 1970 movie 'Zabriskie Point'. For the soundtrack album see Zabriskie Point (album); for the natural monument, see Zabriskie Point.

Zabriskie Point
File:1ZabriskiePoint.jpg Original movie poster
Directed by	Michelangelo Antonioni
Written by	Michelangelo Antonioni
Produced by	Carlo Ponti
Starring	Mark Frechette Daria Halprin
Cinematography	Alfio Contini
Distributed by	MGM
Release date	1970
Running time	110 min

Zabriskie Point is a 1970 film by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, widely noted at the time for its setting in the late 1960s counterculture of the United States. Some of the film's scenes were shot on location at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.

This was the second of three English-language films Antonioni had been contracted to direct for producer Carlo Ponti and to be distributed by MGM. The other two films were Blowup (1966) and The Passenger (1975). Although later considered a cult film, Zabriskie Point was an overwhelming commercial failure and panned by most critics upon release. The film has been called "one of the most extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history."

Plot

The film opens with a documentary-like scene in which students and campus radicals talk about direct violent political action in response to racial inequality. Mark (Mark Frechette) says he is willing to die "but not of boredom" for the cause and then walks out of the meeting, which draws criticism from the young radicals. Mark is later arrested while trying to bail his roommate out of jail following a mass arrest at a campus protest. After their release from jail, Mark and his roommate, anxious to confront the police with arms, buy hand guns from a Los Angeles gun shop.

In a downtown Los Angeles office building, successful real estate executive Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) reviews a television commercial for Sunny Dunes, a new resort-like real estate development in the desert. Instead of actors or models, the slickly produced commercial features casually dressed, smiling mannequins. In the next scene Allen talks with his associate (G. D. Spradlin) about the greater Los Angeles area's very rapid growth as the two drive through crowded streets.

File:Zabriskie point antonioni 03.png

Mannequins in a television commercial for Sunny Dunes, a desert suburban real estate development

Mark goes to a bloody campus confrontation between students and police. Some students are tear-gassed and at least one is shot. Mark reaches for a gun in his boot and a Los Angeles policeman is seen being fatally shot, although it is unclear by whom. Mark, now a fugitive from the campus violence, takes a city bus to the end of the line in suburban Hawthorne where, after calling home to find out he's been seen on television at the crime scene, he is turned down asking for a sandwich on credit from a local blue collar delicatessen. Broke, on the run from the murder of a policeman (a murder he was prepared to commit but didn't) he spies airplanes landing at the Hawthorne Airport and, without a better plan, steals a small plane, takes off unannounced to flight controllers, flies over suburban Los Angeles, and escapes into the desert.

Meanwhile Daria (Daria Halprin), "a sweet, pot-smoking post-teenybopper of decent inclinations," is driving across the desert towards Phoenix in a 1950s era Buick automobile to meet her boss Lee, who may or may not also be her lover. Along the way Daria is searching for a man who works with "emotionally disturbed" children from Los Angeles. She finds the young boys near a roadhouse in the Mojave desert, but they tease, taunt and grab at her, boldly asking for sex. Daria flees in her car. While filling its radiator with water, she is spied from the air by Mark, who buzzes her car and then flies only four feet over Daria as she lies face down in the sand. They later meet at the desert shack of an old man, where Mark asks her for a lift so he can buy gasoline for the airplane. The two then wander to Zabriskie Point where they talk, play, and ultimately make love. The site's geological formations seem to come alive in a dusty orgy performed by The Open Theatre. Later a California highway patrolman suspiciously questions Daria. Hidden behind a portable toilet meant for tourists, Mark takes aim and almost shoots the policeman but Daria stands between the two of them to block this, likely saving the policeman's life before he drives away. Talking to Daria, Mark empties his gun of bullets and apparently swears off violence as a solution to his conundrum.

File:Zabriskie point antonioni 01.png

Daria stares at her boss' desert home before blowing it up in her mind's eye

Getting back to the stolen plane, they paint it with peace slogans like "No War," large breasts, and psychedelic colors. Daria pleads with Mark to travel with her and leave the plane but Mark believes he can return it and escape capture. He flies back to Los Angeles and lands the plane at the airport in Hawthorne, however the police along with some radio and television reporters are waiting for him. Patrol cars chase the plane down the runway. Rather than stopping, Mark tries to turn the taxiing plane around across the grass and is shot to death by one of the policemen. Daria soon learns about Mark's death on the car radio and drives to her boss Lee's lavish desert home, "a desert Berchtesgaden" set high on a rock outcropping near Phoenix, where she sees three affluent women sunning themselves and chatting by the swimming pool. She grieves for Mark by pressing into dramatic architectural waterfall. Lee is deeply immersed in a business meeting having to do with the sprawling and financially risky Sunny Dunes development. Taking a break, he spots Daria in the house and happily greets her. She goes downstairs alone and finds the guest room which has been set aside for her but after briefly cracking open the door, she shuts it again and reflects on her situation in an all-glass cage-like stairwell landing. When she is approached by a young native American housekeeper in the hallway Daria becomes resolute to leave without a further word - as if she now understands the racial inequality that Mark was fighting against and ultimately died resisting. She straightaway drives off but stops down the road to get out of the car and look back at the dramatic, lavish cliff house.

Without warning the entire house blows up as if packed with explosives. We see the explosion from multiple angles in super slow-motion. Then, to the slowly building Pink Floyd original composition the exploding house becomes the slow-motion explosion of many common items in popular American culture, from skinned chickens to loafs of Wonder Bread to patio furniture. As the screams of the Pink Floyd sound track reach culmination we see entire library bookshelves explode, books twisting in mid-air in super slow-motion. Daria's world now transformed and radicalized she silently slips back into the old Dodge and drives into the sunset.

Cast

File:Zabriskie point antonioni 05.png

Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in a scene filmed at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley

• Mark Frechette: Mark
• Daria Halprin: Daria
• Paul Fix: Roadhouse owner
• Bill Garaway: Morty
• Kathleen Cleaver: Kathleen
• Rod Taylor: Lee Allen
• G. D. Spradlin: Lee's associate

Harrison Ford has an uncredited role as one of the arrested student demonstrators being held inside a Los Angeles police station.

Production

While in the United States for the 1966 premiere of his film Blowup, which had been a surprising box office hit, Antonioni saw a short newspaper article about a young man who had stolen an airplane and was killed when he tried to return it in Phoenix, Arizona. Antonioni took this as a thread with which he could tie together the plot of his next film. After writing many drafts, he hired playwright Sam Shepard to write the script. Shepard, Antonioni, Italian filmmaker Franco Rossetti, screenwriter Tonino Guerra and Clare Peploe (wife of Bernardo Bertolucci) worked on the screenplay.

Neither Mark Frechette nor Daria Halprin had any previous acting experience. Most of the supporting roles were played by a professional cast, notably Rod Taylor along with G.D. Spradlin in one of his first feature film roles following many appearances on national television in the U.S. Paul Fix, a friend and acting coach of John Wayne who had appeared in many of Wayne's films, played the owner of a roadhouse in the Mojave desert. Kathleen Cleaver, a member of the Black Panthers and wife of Eldridge Cleaver, appeared in the documentary-like student meeting scene at the opening of the film.

File:Zabriskie point antonioni 04.png

Actor Rod Taylor in a downtown Los Angeles office setting with Richfield Tower in the background, filmed shortly before its demolition in 1968

Shooting began in July 1968 in Los Angeles, much of it on location in the wider southern downtown area. Exteriors of the art deco Richfield Tower were shown in a few scenes shot shortly before its demolition in November of that year. Various college campus scenes, excluding the scene of the student meeting, were filmed on location at Contra Costa Community College in San Pablo, California. The production then moved to location shooting near Phoenix and from there to Death Valley.

Early movie industry publicity reports claimed Antonioni would gather 10,000 extras in the desert for the filming of the lovemaking scene, but this never happened. The scene was filmed with dust-covered and highly choreographed actors from The Open Theatre. The United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act (which forbade the taking of women across state lines for sexual purposes), however no sex was filmed and no state lines were crossed for that segment of the production, given Death Valley is in California.

During filming Antonioni was quoted as criticizing the U.S. film industry for financially wasteful production practices, which he found "almost immoral" and compared to the more thrifty approach of Italian studios.

Music

The soundtrack to Zabriskie Point included music from Pink Floyd, The Youngbloods, The Kaleidoscope, Jerry Garcia, Patti Page, the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones and John Fahey.

Rejected tracks

Pink Floyd's song "Us and Them" (which later appeared on The Dark Side of the Moon) was written for the movie in 1969 by Richard Wright, who at first called it "The Violent Sequence." Antonioni rejected the song because it was unlike "Careful with That Axe, Eugene" and instead, synchronized a re-recording of the latter with the film's violent ending scene.

Antonioni visited the band The Doors while they were recording their album L.A. Woman and thought about putting them in the soundtrack. The Doors recorded the song "L' America" for Zabriskie Point, but it was not used.

Critical response

Decades after its widely panned 1970 release, Zabriskie Point garnered critical praise for its cinematography. Halprin and Frechette can barely be seen in the left of this scene filmed at Zabriskie Point

Following prolonged publicity and controversy in North America throughout its production, Zabriskie Point was released in February 1970, almost four years after Antonioni began pre-production and over a year and a half after shooting began. The film was panned by most critics and other published commentators of all political stripes, as were the performances of Frechette and Halprin. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby called Zabriskie Point "a noble artistic impulse short-circuited in a foreign land." Moreover the counterculture audience MGM hoped to draw had by then shifted, the film was ignored by moviegoers and taken altogether, the outcome was a notorious box office bomb. Production expenses were at least $7,000,000 and only $900,000 was made in the domestic release. In 1978 it was listed in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, a book co-authored by radio host Michael Medved. Over 20 years after the film's release Rolling Stone editor David Fricke wrote that "Zabriskie Point was one of the most extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history." It was the only film Antonioni ever directed in the United States, where in 1994 he was given the Honorary Academy Award "in recognition of his place as one of the cinema's master visual stylists." Following early 21st century screenings of pristine wide-screen prints and a later DVD release, Zabriskie Point at last garnered some critical praise, mostly for the stark beauty of its cinematography and innovative use of music in the soundtrack, but outlooks on the film were still mixed.

External links

• Zabriskie Point at IMDb
• Zabriskie Point at AllMovie
• Zabriskie Point @ pHinnWeb
• Return to Zabriskie Point: The Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin Story at Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict