Michelangelo Antonioni (1970)

After using Swinging London for Blow-Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni crossed the Atlantic and headed for California, epicentre of the American counterculture, for his next picture.  Zabriskie Point, named for a location in Death Valley and set in the present day, starts in a crowded room on a university campus in Los Angeles.  A group of students – some black, more white – are discussing plans for an impending protest.  It’s not a typical Antonioni scene.  We associate him with images of few or lone figures in large spaces.  The students’ debate, with words flying thick and fast, is sharply different from the enervated musings of characters in much of his earlier work.  The nature of political engagement here is, for him, unusually explicit:  one of the black students vigorously insists, for example, that middle-class whites aren’t socio-economically qualified to be revolutionaries.  As the camera darts about the room and the students argue, Antonioni seems to be after a quasi-documentary style though you start to suspect his heart may not be in it.   The camera keeps returning to a photogenic white male student.  This is Mark (Mark Frechette), who makes himself unpopular when he eventually speaks, announcing that he’s ‘willing to die, but not of boredom’ for the students’ cause.  He then leaves the room.

Zabriskie Point nevertheless continues with the student protest theme for a while longer.  At first, the priority seems to be to ridicule the police who make arrests at the next day’s demo.  The film’s team of writers includes Sam Shepard and Tonino Guerra (as well as Claire Peploe, Fred Gardner and Antonioni himself) but the humour, in keeping with the setting, is sophomoric – and snobbish.  When an arrested academic gives his job as Associate Professor of History, the cop taking down details says that’s too long and that ‘clerk’ will do instead.  Mark hasn’t taken part in the protest but arrives at the police station to bail out his roommate and manages to get himself arrested.  Asked his name, he replies, ‘Karl Marx’.  It rings no bell and he’s asked to spell the surname.  We then see the form being filled in – ‘Marx … Carl’.  This is such a clumsy joke:  why doesn’t the benighted cop just write ‘Marks … Carl’ without asking for the surname spelling?

The tone changes sharply with a confrontation in which the police tear-gas students and shoot one of them.  A police officer too is shot and killed:  Antonioni’s editing leaves it intentionally unclear whether Mark – who, after being released from custody, bought a gun from an LA shop – is responsible for this death.  At any rate, he now feels he has to Get Away.  He goes to a municipal airport, steals a small aircraft and flies off to Death Valley, the desert beyond the city.  It’s there that Mark meets up with Daria (Daria Halprin), who has been introduced in a parallel narrative.  She’s driving across the desert in the direction of Phoenix, Arizona to meet her boss, the property developer Lee Allen (Rod Taylor).  Mark catches sight of Daria while she’s standing outside her car.  Once she resumes her journey, his plane repeatedly buzzes her vehicle.  After Daria gets out and lies face down in the sand, Mark flies the plane just a few feet above her body.

Although it naturally recalls Cary Grant and the crop-duster in North by Northwest, the buzzing plane is the most rhythmical and dynamic sequence during the first fifty minutes of Zabriskie Point.   Not long afterwards, I walked out of NFT1, for two main reasons.  First, because once Mark and Daria are together in the desert, Antonioni seemed to have already reached his destination.  Images of Los Angeles early on – especially a view out of the office windows of Lee Allen (LA, geddit?) high in a skyscraper – reflect an outsider’s fascination with modern American cityscape, and the fascination is briefly infectious.  In contrast, Death Valley is, on a massive scale, echt Antonioni country.   He regularly ends up in physical and spiritual terrain like this.   Second, Zabriskie Point is, in major respects, feeble.  I admit I went to see it at BFI because I was curious as to why this work of a supposed master had flopped critically as well as commercially on its original release.  It served me right that my curiosity was satisfied quite soon.

The opening credits introduce the film as ‘Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point’, followed by ‘with’ Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin.  Even allowing that both were virtual unknowns, the ‘with’ downgrades the importance of the two main actors to an unusual degree.  (Also unusual, and perhaps another indication of where priorities lie, is that the opening credits cover in detail the music on the soundtrack, not only the original music by Pink Floyd but also numbers by the likes of the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.)   Once you’ve been watching Frechette and Halprin for a while, though, you can understand why the credits considered them subsidiary.  They may be lovely to look at but they can’t act.

While Antonioni’s abiding interest in alienation means it’s possible that the principals’ inexpressive faces and voices are being used to illustrate lack of affect, I doubt it.  Even in Zabriskie Point‘s opening sequence, the flow of supposedly heated debate is repeatedly interrupted by wooden line readings from other young performers in the cast.   In an early scene, Lee Allen (played by a proper actor who, like G D Spradlin as Allen’s business associate, thereby seems almost incongruous) appraises a promotional piece for a planned resort-like development in the desert.  The human figures in this commercial are mannequins.  The sequence makes its point but would do so more strongly if the mannequins were noticeably less animated than the actual people on the screen.   Once Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin got together, I couldn’t face watching them try and fail to interact.

The BFI used as the programme note a 1970 Sight and Sound review by Julian Jebb, one of the minority of favourable reviews the film received at the time.  Jebb concludes by describing it as ‘poetry … I suspect it will prove revolutionary in the history of the cinema’.  It’s a relief to know that his suspicions were unfounded. The only compunction I felt about parting company with Zabriskie Point was that, as I removed my jacket from the back of my seat in NFT1 when I got up to go, I disturbed the snooze of my immediate neighbour, a youngish woman who seemed to have dropped off a while before.  I hope she got back to sleep again soon.

19 February 2019