Zabriskie Point (Carlo Ponti Productions, MGM, 1970)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards TCM showed one of the all-time movie legends for all the wrong reasons: Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, made in 1970 and an odd movie which attempted to combine a film about the youth rebellions of the late 1960’s, especially on college campuses, with a typical Antonioni art film. Zabriskie Point was named one of “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time” in the 1978 book of that title by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss (Medved and his brother Michael did three more books about particularly awful movies before Michael Medved re-invented himself as a Right-wing film critic denouncing Hollywood for abandoning traditional values). One of the book’s strategies was to pick out allegedly awful films by major directors like D. W. Griffith (Abraham Lincoln, 1930 – which turned out to be a quite good movie, especially when the originally cut scenes were restored in the 1970’s), Sergei Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible, 1943-1946, which I regard as a masterpiece despite the Stalinist ban on the kind of quick cutting that had been Eisenstein’s hallmark during the silent era), Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939) and Michaelangelo Antonioni (here).

Surprise: like some other legendarily bad movies (can you say Heaven’s Gate?), Zabriskie Point turns out to be a quite good, if deeply flawed, work. I actually liked it considerably better than Antonioni’s immediately previous film, the more highly-regarded Blow-Up (1966).The first half-hour of Zabriskie Point is a marvelous return to those thrilling days of yesteryear in which college students way too young to know better earnestly debated the finer points of making a Left-wing revolution in the U.S. The film opens at an unspecified college campus in which the Black Students’ Union has declared a strike and a biracial meeting has been called to discuss what support white students can provide in shutting down the campus altogether. Though I wasn’t a college student until the 1970’s, after the brief flurry of student activism had died on the killing fields of Kent State and Jackson State Universities (which caused many students to pull back from activism after they realized the authorities would not hesitate literally to kill them) and the savvy decision of the Nixon administration to end the draft had made ending the Viet Nam war seem considerably less urgent to young people scared of being pressed into service to fight in it, I still remember some of those meetings and the swagger Black participants brought to them in insisting that only they could be the true American revolutionaries since we white radicals could always dive back into our lives of power and privilege.

The two principals of Zabriskie Point – whose script wa written by Antonioni, his frequent Italian collaborator Tonio Guerra, Franco Rossetti, Claire Peploe and playwright Sam Shepard – are Mark (Mark Frechette) and Daria (Daria Halprin). Indulging in a common European casting practice called “typage” – using people with little or no acting experience in leading roles because their real lives were similar to their characters – Antonioni cast novices as his leads and used only one professional actor of Hollywood standing, Rod Taylor, as Lee Allen, land developer and Daria’s father. (So Daria Halprin was playing the well-to-do child of privilege she in fact was – she came from a prominent family in San Francisco – and Mark Frechette was also the footloose hippie spirit he plays in the film.) There’s also a brief appearance by veteran character actor Paul Fix as owner of a diner in the middle of nowhere, whose disconnect from the hippie scene is symbolized by his playing Patti Page’s early-1950’s hit “Tennessee Waltz.” (One of the good things about Zabriskie Point is Antonioni’s artful use of music to symbolize the relative positions of the characters to the counterculture, and for his background score he hired a then little-known British cult band called Pink Floyd, who of course would go on to become superstars.)

Unfortunately, after the frist half-hour Zabriskie Point veers off into Antonioni’s usual maddening obscurity. Mark goes to the local airport and steals a private plane (belonging, it turns out later, to Daria’s father), then he flies out to Death Valley and buzzes Daria, who’s driving a 1950’s-era car. He eventually lands the plane and the two have one of the most bizarre meet-cutes in movie history, and then end up making love in the desert and doing a lot of rolling around in the sand – and Antonioni and cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie get some beautiful artistic effects as the light skin of Mark’s and Daria’s bodies visually melt into the light color of the sand. The two hike out to the real Zabriskie Point, a location within Death Valley, and see the tourist sign explaining the spot’s significance as a source of gypsum, Naturally, the two have only the vaguest idea of what gypsum is. At this point I decided that Zabriskie Point is an updated remake of Rebel Without a Cause, complete with the out-of-the-way location where the central characters meet and have their idyll, and even a scene in which Mark takes the bullets out of his gun and throws them away the way James Dean disarmed Sal Mineo in Rebel. Unfortunately, this being an Antonioni movie, we neer get any explanation of how Mark knew how to fly a plane, and when he and Daria decide to repaint the plane with psychedelic artwork and political slogans (including giant tits on the tops of the wings), there’s never any indication of where the paint came from. (Later we learn that the plane had originally been painted pink because that was the favorite color of Daria’s late mother, so the repainting is at least in part an attack on her parents.)

Mark’s and Daria’s idyll in the desert ends darkly when the two separate and return to their original vehicles, and Mark’s attempt to return the plane meets with disaster when police at the airport decide he’s resisting arrest and shoot into the cockpit, killing him. That should be the climax, but the film drones on for 20 minutes more as Daria walks through the desert where her dad is building a huge development, and ultimately the stunning cliffside houses blow up, one by one. Once again, we aren’t clear whether this is a real development in the story or just Daria’s dream (the first explosion we see is clearly a dream but the others seem to be real, though since this is Antonioni we don’t have a clue as to whether or when or how Daria planted the bombs to blow up dad’s development), and according to a “Trivia” item on the film on imdb.com Antonioni wanted the movie to end with a plane flying a banner over the razed development reading, “Fuck You, America” – only the then-head of MGM production, Louis F. Polk, vetoed it. Later Polk was fired and replaced by James Aubrey, who restored most of the cuts Polk had ordered but refused to put back the “Fuck You, America” ending.

There are plenty of anti-corporate bits in Zabriskie Point, including scenes showing the ubiquity of corporate logos, and neat little comments like the scene in which Mark and a number of student demonstrators are rounded up by police. Mark gives his name to the booking sergeant as “Karl Marx,” and the clueless sergeant writes “Carl.” Another man gives his occupation as “associate professor of literature,” and the sergeant says, “That’s too long for the form. We’ll just write, ‘Clerk.’” One of the fascinating things about Zabriskie Point is that much of it seems horrendously dated, and parts of it don’t seem dated at all. The reaction of the police to any real or perceived threat to their authority is to strike back, hitting people at random and in at least one case killing someone – and that part of this movie seems all too relevant today in the wake of the police murder of Tyre Nichols (and George Floyd, and so many others before him). Zabriskie Point is a weird mess of a movie, very much “of its time” and also very much of Antonioni’s sensibility; reportedly he and Frechette argued throughout the shoot over whether the film would be a serious semi-documentary about the radical student movement (as Frechette wanted) or an art film (as Antonioni wanted). I think Zabriskie Point would have been a stronger work (though it would probably seem more dated) if Frechette had won.

I’ve never been that much of an Antonioni fan, anyway, though my level of respect went up for him when I got a Blu-Ray disc of his second film, The Lady Without Camellias (1952), a well-structured film in which each scene directly relates to what has gone before and the ending is coherent and follows logically from what we’ve already seen. Alas, after that Antonioni started worshiping at the Great Shrine of Ambiguity, and over time his films started making less sense and lost the pointed sense of social criticism that made The Lady Without Camellias interesting, watchable and great.