Zabriskie Point [DVD]

I saw this film when it first came out in the very early 70s and enjoyed it back then. Since then I have seen it, probably, another three or four times and I have understood it, and appreciated it, a bit more each time. This latest release is excellent. As well as being wide-screen, it also has subtitles so you can make out all of the dialogue. This is particularly useful at the beginning of the film during the student meeting where it's hard to tell what people are saying (but that might be my ears!). This is basically a film about idealism and youth culture versus commercialism in 60s America. The desert scenes and the music soundtrack are excellent and the final few minutes of the film are worth the price of the DVD on their own (once you've seen this, you will never forget it). This may be Antonioni's "flawed masterpiece", but it's still a masterpiece.

I lived through (and took part in) the student activism and "alternative culture" of the 1960s and the dawn of the 1970s as a student myself (at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and at the all-too-explosively alive Kent State University). I remember how we despised the acrid and shallow materialism of the prevailing culture of the "UniTIGHTASStates of AmeriKKKakapeepee" and how we longed to see it all blow up in the faces of the U. S. of A.'s besotted leaders and of the easily deluded citzenry that kept on (and continues) voting them into office. That has happened, at last, with the implosion of the U.S. economy near the beginning of the 21st Century; it is a pity that this collapse, that makes an arrogant nation seethe with poverty and frustration, thus doomed soon to powerlessness, did not occur sooner, to have limited all the victims of AmeriKKKan power and greed between the time of the film, 1970, and that of AmeriKKKa's financially and militarily agonising doom. When Daria, seething with resentment for Mark's needless death (although his carelessness certainly brought it upon him), fantasises that the very symbol of the bourgeois fatuity of AmeriKKKan callousness and vulgarity, the garishly opulent corporate facility (and/or mansion) set high in the desert surface with joltingly sudden violent force explodes to smithereens (with visions of explosions of urban artificialty of many additional sorts added to this), it is a breathtaking vision of justice come to a besotted and unworthy AmeriKKKan culture of excess and greed.

I like the natural touch of the two leading actors using their real first names for their roles. Mark and Daria are the only natural humans in the film, doing what comes naturally to them, even if by thoughtless whimsy (e.g., Mark's theft of the aeroplane) at times as well as by following their feelings to moving expression of what they experience at every moment, leading them, unafraid, to such natural sexuality and joyous revelry in each other, amidst the artificial constructs throughout the film, from which they stand aloof, of crazed student ideological excess, ruthless law enforcement, business and corporate cupidity, and so forth. Some of this may be naive, and doubtlessly is, but it is such a relief to find these two young adults in this film who do not fall into the "cookie-cutter" patterns of AmeriKKKan popular and corporate culture. Alas, Mark in the film dies for daring what he does, from an insistence on following his impulses (for better and for worse) in unfettered freedom, which his society quickly crushes brutally and without immediate sufficient cause (i.e., for him having "borrowed" without permission the aeroplane which he is returning). Mark Frechette himself, whose performance in the role is so edgily convincing (and who was the gay lover of American-Québécois writer, Robert Dôle, also a young hippie during those years, before Antonioni filmed "Zabriskie Point", Dôle having departed by then to live in Québec) was a true counter-cultural rebel who lived out his convictions (none too wisely, but very intensely) and who died all too young for living out what he believed.

This is a wonderful film, redolent (of course!) of its era, but surprisingly relevant for the decades to follow and for present times of such bitterness and of justice that too long has been delayed. A mere account of the film's action simply cannot convey the richness and untrammeled irony of what Antonioni accomplished thereby in this masterpiece of cinema. I wish that the DVD edition that I acquired (or any other one) had included supplementary material and an appreciation of what Antonioni accomplished (but only if it were well done and worthy of him) but I also am simply pleased that this DVD is available at all, being a film, as it is, which does not flinch from judging the crassest kind of modernity that Southern California, Arizona, and the U. S. of A. as a whole, embody and came to represent to the entire world.

I saw ZABRISKIE POINT the first time in 1971 as a film critic in Holland. It made a great impression as a portrait of America in the Sixties. 40 Years later it still is not only a superior reflection of Bob Dylans song Times are changing but also a classic movie about love as an answer to a capitalistic and reckless consuming world. Antonioni proves his point with this movie and can be called one of the greatest directors of all time.The actors are also wonderful and especially Daria Halprin made a great impression.
Reg ten Zijthoff (Netherlands)