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| USA 1970 |
A greatly underrated film, one that has influenced many artists and filmmakers, from Rodney Graham and Bruno Dumont to Ed Ruscha and The Smashing Pumpkins. When it was released, Zabriskie Point split the critics: Time Magazine’s Richard Corliss called it “the most entertaining of Antonioni’s films… the most intelligent, compassionate probing of the radical young in recent American film,” but many others dismissed it. Only recently has it been reevaluated by scholars and commentators, some of whom claim it is one of the director’s most profound works. Zabriskie deals with Sixties student unrest in southern California, specifically with the son of a rich LA family who “drops out” and steals a gun, intending to kill a policeman. When his plans backfire, he takes an airplane on a joyride and lands in Death Valley, where he encounters (and, in a renowned sequence, makes love to) a young woman who works for a property developer. Antonioni’s vision of America offers semiotic splendour and surprisingly contemporary truths; like so many of his films, it looks more radical – formally, thematically, politically – than it did when originally released. Some find it risible and impossibly passé, but it puts to shame most recent attempts to catch the tenor of the times. — Cinematheque Ontario Though Michelangelo Antonioni's only American film was very poorly received when it was released in 1969, time has been much kinder to it than to, say, La Notte, which was made a decade earlier. Antonioni's nonrealistic approach to American counterculture myths and his loose and slow approach to narrative may still put some people off--along with the uneven dialogue (credited to Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe, and the director)--but his beautiful handling of 'Scope compositions and moods has many lingering aftereffects, and the grand and beautiful apocalyptic finale is downright spectacular. — Jonathan Rosenbaum |
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