Wave bye-bye to an era

Marianna 2022-03-21 09:03:26

With the final scene of Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni made film

history. The main character Daria drives away from the villa into the desert.

Fantasy is overheating. Daria stops, gets out, and looks back angrily at this

stronghold of consumerism and commerce, now engulfed in a ball of fire.

Then the villa reappears and the spectacle repeats itself over and over again.

The embellishments of modern prosperity go up in the burning mushroom

cloud. The detonation of the outside world is the explosion of the imaginary.

Antonioni shows himself to be a resourceful “blaster,” staging a slow-motion

aesthetic of destruction. Freezer and television, clothes and whole interiors

disintegrate in one surreal movement. Through Daria's eyes, the audience

experiences the transformation of functional objects into useless fragments,

which rearrange themselves in bright spaces into wonderful images with

instinctive precision. The explosive effect is sublimated into an immaculate

execution of colors and forms. Several minutes later, the time-suspended

apocalypse reverts back to the desert landscape. Daria glances at the smoking

ruins, turns, starts the motor, and drives away into a red sunset.

Zabriskie Point was released in spring 1970 and was supposed to be

Antonioni's commercial triumph in the United States. Instead, it was a complete

disaster. It came to a conflict after the Metro Goldwyn Mayer film company

intervened in the soundtrack—which was especially important for the

director—adding the sugary Roy Orbison song “So Young” to the final scene,

with the car driving away against the red horizon. The contrast to Antonioni's

original intention to show an airplane writing "Fuck You America!" in the sky

at the end could not have been greater. In addition to this artistic nightmare,

the film was also a commercial flop. In 1968, at the start of filming, the images

had been in tune with the current mood, but by 1970 they no longer were.

The film encountered a wave of rejection and ridicule among the counterculture

and New Left, whose psychographics Antonioni had wanted to

express in emotional images. The accusation that Antonioni had copied elements

of avant-garde films and commercialized the counterculture's aesthetic

potential for Hollywood cut deep. The establishment also reproached

the film for its anti-American statements and filed several lawsuits, albeit

unsuccessfully.

Source: Jacob Tanner "Motion and Emotions" from "1968 in Europe: A Histroy of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977"

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Extended Reading
  • Skyla 2022-04-21 09:03:46

    The master has also punked, and his anti-social temperament is not inferior to the contemporary angry youth. The female protagonist os: "Kill my man, my mother will level your land!" In the last episode of the upgraded shot + the stream of consciousness of death metal, true art is an explosion. Of course, the biggest highlight is still photography. The intimate part of the wilderness has a primitive beauty of ancient Greek style.

  • Amelia 2022-04-20 09:02:48

    Very American, the desert versions of "Wild Weeds" and "Bad Land", the plane part is quite difficult to shoot. ★★★☆/7.3

Zabriskie Point quotes

  • Male White Radical Student #1: What was any revolutionary without other people? What was Lenin without his organization? What was Castro without his organization? Even anarchists spent most of their lives talking in meetings, for christ's sake.

    Male Black Radical Student #1: You ought to take him and go back and start teaching him out of the Red book or somthin'. Teach him the first page. It teaches about if there's going to be a revolution there must be a revolutionary party. That bourgeois, bourgeoisie individualism that he's endorsing, man, is going to get him killed.

  • Cop: [Mark being arrested] Name?

    Mark: Karl Marx.

    Cop: How do you spell it?

    Mark: M-A-R-X.

    [Cop types: Marx Carl]