When the male protagonist takes off on a plane, you can feel the young man's enthusiasm for breaking through everything and yearning for freedom. Like Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" carrying a carload of "mentally ill" out of the madhouse... yes, this was the America of that era, and it was Antonioni's America. After converging into this "Zabriskie Point": so real and powerful, just like the sentence "Mark" answered "Dalia" in the play: "I needed to get off the ground".
However, this beautiful feeling of pursuing freedom is so short-lived and the price is so painful! Just like Wilde's "Salome", it is full of tragedy. In 1966, Antonioni read the news at the U.S. premiere of his first foreign-language film "Zoom": a young American stole a plane in Phoenix, and after he had become addicted to flying When returning to the original owner, he was shot dead by the police at the airport... This is the prototype of the movie "Zabriskie Point". In Antonioni's eyes, this story is the most "American" symbol. So, a few years later, Antonioni's second English-language feature film was born.
Coincidentally, "Zabriskie Point", like "Zoom in", both focuses on the young people during the anti-Vietnam War in the West, that is, those so-called "hippies". In fact, as far as this specific historical period and social group is concerned, there are already many related movies, such as "Easy Rider" in the late 1960s, "Hot Afternoon" in the 1970s and so on. And unlike such American films: "Zabriskie Point" was shot entirely from a "non-British-American" perspective, in other words, Antonioni interprets an outsider-style in his own unique way. "America".
Let's take a look at what makes him unique: the hero Mark doesn't belong to any group on the show; he's reticent; he doesn't wear out-of-the-ordinary attire like those student activists, let alone drug riots. Mark is more of a cynical bum than a rebellious outlier student.
Not to mention our heroine "Dalia", she has almost nothing to do with those "special groups", she is just a small employee in a large real estate developer. She even said that her dress made people feel a little "rusty". In this way, two young people who were separated from the social group, one stole someone's private plane, and the other drove the boss's car privately, met in that desert-like "Zabriskie Point"...
From this point of view, Antonioni's main purpose is not to express "special groups" in the narrow sense, but to focus on the "generation of young Americans" in the broad sense. What's in a broad sense: All Americans living under the erosion of the postwar market economy - look at the set of those breathless billboards in the first half of the movie - Bethlehem Steel, Danora Ham Bacon, Heller Machinery, Transcom Freight, Desert Spring Bank and more, it goes without saying! This is the core of "An's Film".
Unlike "Zoom", the film was a complete commercial failure, and Antonioni never set foot in the United States to make films. However, now, forty years later, no one doubts the artistic value of any of Antonioni's films, even this atypical "Zabriskie Point". Enthusiasm is like the "red shirt" thrown by the hero Mark to Daria in the sky, burning silently in the desolate desert.
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