A masterpiece.

Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN
11 November 2001
I know that this is an unpopular position concerning Zabriskie Point, but I LOVED this film. I know, I know - I can legitimately be called an Antonioni fanatic. I love L'Avventura, I love La Notte, I love L'Eclisse, I love Red Desert, I love Blowup, and I love Professione: Reporter (aka The Passenger). The only Antonioni film that I don't love, the only one I've ever given less than an 8/10 (and one of only three that I have given less than a 10/10, La Notte and L'Eclisse being the other two, though I fully acknowledge that I have to see both of them again), is Beyond the Clouds, which can fairly be called an awful film. However, there is not better awful film, if you catch my drift. So if you're NOT an Antonioni fan, you should only logically ignore me. If you are even a casual fan, though, and you are wondering whether this particular film, whose name, when spoken, is often followed bya spit, which is generally despised by even Antonioni's admirers, is at all worth seeing, the answer is YES.

Okay, the reason that people tend to hate it is because 99% of film watchers care ONLY for the narrative of a film. Well, that's not exactly true. If a film is amazing in a particular aspect, say acting or cinematography or direction, and just decent in its narrative, film watchers might very well love it. But a film can be the most amazing visual masterpiece and have a lame or illogical story - that's another thing that has ruined the cinema over the years: logic - then they absolutely hate the film. I will actually agree with that in some ways. As much as I may dislike it and want to change my view, it really is difficult to love a film whose narrative I perceive as poor.

However, other people tend to get annoyed at a loose narrative. This is certainly what must drive viewers away from Zabriskie Point. I could relate the story to you, but you probably would just think it was nonsensical. It is, actually, but, to me, that just made the whole endeavor more fantastic and beautiful. I'd actually compare it favorably to 2001, which is my favorite film. However, 2001 is perfectly coherent compared to the rambling narrative of this film.What Zabriskie Point has in spades is mood. The music helps a lot; the score includes a lot of acts of the day, including Pink Floyd. The mood is kind of similar to the moods of Antonioni's other masterpieces, filled with loneliness and desolation. Also the freedom that comes from that. The best sequence in the film is when the lead man and woman (her name is Daria, I know, but I don't remember his name) pull over in their vehicle next to a historic marker on a desert highway. There is, beyond the stone wall that has been erected to keep cars from flying off, an ancient lakebed. It's basically a rocky desert, and the two go to play in it.

The setting is enormously beautiful. The woman says: "This is such a beautiful place. What do you think?" The man: "I think it's dead." There's no inclination to whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. This is a lot like sentiments expressed in other Antonioni films - characters are constantly wanting to disappear or become invisible. Instead of David Locke, the protagonist of The Passenger, fed up with journalism, we have the young hippie sick of his friends' politics - he thinks they talk too much and don't act out what they feel is right, or at least he says he does. It seems to me more like he just wanted out of the situation.

The film is also simply amazing visually. Antonioni's films are all identifiable by just a few frames, but his visual style was always building. I like The Passenger more than I do Zabriskie Point, but Zabriskie Point might be his ultimate accomplishment in that aspect. Well, that might sound odd - L'Avventura and Red Desert are amazing pictorially. I think it's the camera movements that are particularly amazing here. He obviously made a ton of money on Blowup, which was the biggest arthouse hit of its day, the biggest ever at that point. He spends it well here, especially with his aerial shots. One of the film's greatest sequences involves the man, who has stolen a man's private airplane, dive-bombing Daria in her car.

The one thing that can be fairly criticized is the film's politics. They're certainly facile. Not that hippies were facile, but that Antonioni's vision of hippies - there weren't any in Italy, of course - are bizarre and, well, filtered through a foreigner's eyes. There's a rather childish criticism of advertising, but it's a criticism that still exists today. I say, can't you people just ignore it? What does it hurt? Are you walking around buying things you don't want because of billboards? Or there is also the criticism against capitalism. Daria, a secretary, works for a company that is stealing the land in the desert - the land that she and the man enjoyed to themselves - in order to make cheap, suburban homes for families. Rod Taylor, a very underrated actor whose most famous roles were in The Time Machine and The Birds, plays her boss. The ending, which I won't ruin - you've got to see it - is almost offensively cheap. I can, though, understand the treatment of police officers. Not that I disdain them generally, but they were awful at the time. They can still be awful now. They've always had too much power.

These trite arguments against the American way of life still don't effect my opinion of the film much. I find this filtered view of America extremely interesting. I really don't think a hippie would have disagreed with Antonioni. 10/10.

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An Italian in California: a technical masterpiece with sub-par substance

Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
19 September 2004
There aren't too many times when I see a film and go, "huh, what?", but this was one of them. Maybe after seeing Zabriskie Point I felt much the same way Woody Allen felt after seeing 2001- he only liked the film after seeing it three times over a two year period, realizing the filmmaker was ahead of him in what was going on.

Michelangelo Antonioni, in one of his few tries at making films inside of the US (after Red Desert, he did Blow-Up, this film, China, and The Passenger, all filmed outside his native Italy), I could sense he almost tried to learn about the ways of the country through his own mastery of the medium. The results show that he doesn't lack the means to present images, feelings, tones, colors, sounds, and a visual representation of this era. "A director's job is to see", Antonioni once stated. Whatever that means, he doesn't disappoint for the admirer of his post-fifties work (I say post-fifties since I've yet to see any of his films from before L'Avventura).

What he does lack is a point, at least the kind of point that he could bring in Blow-Up and The Eclipse. You get the feeling of what is around these characters, what the themes are bringing forth to their consciousness, however in this case the characters and the actors don't bring much conviction or purpose. Antonioni, coming from the school of hard-knocks,neo-realistic film-making,does do what he can with his mostly non professional  cast(those who look most like real actors are subjugated to the roles of the corporate characters but the two stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin seem as if Antonioni's under-directing them. Perhaps that was the point.

The story's split into three acts, thankfully not too confusing, as Mark escapes his existence around the boiling, dangerous campus life going on in the circa late 60's LA area, and Daria is sent out from LA to drive to Phoenix for some business meeting. They meet by chance as Mark's plane (how does he know how to drive, maybe a little background info there?) and Daria's car meet up, and they spend some time together in an existential kind of groove out in the desert. Aside from a stylistically mesmerizing if bizarre sex scene, much of this act isn't terribly interesting.

The two leads are fair enough to look at, but what exactly draws them to each other outside of curiosity? The ideas that come forth (in part from a screenplay co-written by Sam Shepard) aren't too revealing, except for one brief instant where drugs vs. reality is brought up. Then the film heads towards the third act, as Mark decides to do the right thing, under disastrous circumstances, and Daria arrives at her boss' place, only to be in full disillusionment (not taking into account the infamous last five minutes or so of the film).

Although the film took its time telling its story, I didn't have as much of a problem with that as I did that the story only engages a certain kind of viewer. I understand and empathize with the feelings and doubts and fears as well as the self-confidence of the "anti-establishment", but maybe Antonioni isn't entirely fully aware of it himself. In some scenes he as director and editor (and the often astounding cinematography by Alfio Contini) find the scenery and backgrounds more enlightening and fixating than the people in the foreground. Not to say the technical side of Zabriskie Point isn't involving to a degree (this may make some feel drowsy, as Antonioni is probably far greater as a documentary filmmaker as he is a theatrical director like say Francis Ford Coppola is).

The deserts, skies, city, and even the faces in close-ups are filmed with the eye of a filmmaker in love with the art of getting things in the frame, bringing us in. The soundtrack is equally compelling, with a master stroke including a sweet Rolling Stones song at one point, and then a crushing, surreal Pink Floyd song (re-titled from 'Careful with that Axe Eugene, one of their best pre-Dark Side) in the explosion sequence. If only the performances weren't so one-sided I might find this to be on par with Blow-Up or The Eclipse. It's an unconventional stroke of genius on one hand, and on the other a boring take on what was the hippie/radical movement of the late 60's. But hey, what may be boring for an American such as myself born in the eighties may not be to others outside the US, such as say, Italy. And it does ask to not be discarded right away after one viewing.

Influences

Ce film participe et contribue largement à l'avènement du Nouvel Hollywood. Comme Easy Rider, Zabriskie Point met en scène des tabous du cinéma américain, tels que le sexe, la drogue, la violence et la contestation politique.Il est un genre de road-movie mais aussi de drame psychologique. La longueur des scènes et la recherche esthétique montrent une exigence poétique, inspirée notamment de la Nouvelle Vague française.

Zabriskie Point tend à faire éclater les règles qui régissaient jusqu'alors Hollywood.Dans l'immédiat, il influencera un réalisateur comme Peter Watkins, qui tourne en 1970 son uchronie Punishment Park. Par la suite, on retrouvera la technique de l'alternance de plans longs et courts, de bruits et de silence, se retrouve dans le film Paranoïd Park de Gus Van Sant.

Références
 
Analyse de Zabriskie Point [archive] sur le site Il était une fois le cinéma, consulté le 15 août 2012.
 
-Jean-Louis Corcos. Psychanalyse et culture, Autres Temps. Les cahiers du christianisme social,1990,vol. 26, n° 1, pp.71-74
-ROPARS-WUILLEUMIER Marie-Claude. Pour un cinéma littéraire: Réflexions sur les possibilités actuelles de l'expression cinématographique, dans les Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises, 1968, N°20. pp. 221-237
 
Commentaires
 
Après Londres (avec Blow-up), Antonioni pose sa caméra sur le sol américain en 1970 pour Zabriskie Point. Fermement ancré dans son époque, mais gros échec commercial et critique, le film dresse le portrait d'une jeunesse américaine en pleine révolte.Le cinéaste choisit de s'attarder sur deux individus, une étudiante et un militant, et sur leur histoire d'amour passionnée au milieu du paysage désertique de la Vallée de la Mort. La bande-son fait la part belle aux groupes de l'époque : Pink Floyd, The Youngbloods, Grateful Dead...

Zabriskie Point par Vanessa Bonnefont

Dans une « AG » (réunion d’étudiants à tendance révolutionnaire), des jeunes gens parlent, font des discours, mais se parlent sans vraiment s’écouter, premiers signes de l’incommunicabilité propre au cinéma d’Antonioni. Première scène à la précision quasi documentaire qui nous fait rentrer dans l’univers bien réelle d’une jeunesse en colère. Car dans Zabriskie Point, tout comme dans Le Désert Rouge – où le personnage de Monica Vitti est perdue dans un univers industriel assourdissant – la société est une source de conflits, de luttes, et aliène ceux qui ne la combattent pas. La solution que propose le cinéaste poète face à la décadence identitaire d’une société au bord de l’explosion : l’amour (éphémère). 

Zabriskie Point est en effet le film d’un réalisateur italien au regard extérieur, détaché et ironique dans sa vision de l’Amérique. Il revisite ainsi le mythe des grands espaces – le désert, immense – et par la même occasion celui du road-movie US des années 70. La société américaine, vue sous l’angle d’Antonioni devient caricaturale (les réunions devant des publicités grotesques), inculte (le policier tapant à la machine le nom que lui donne Mark : « Marx Carl »…), asservissante, mais aussi destructrice (les morts). Pour survivre – et vivre pleinement – il faut donc s’en éloigner. Par ailleurs, on peut voir dans la fuite de Mark – qui rejette ses parents et la société–une relecture d’un mythe d’Icare qui tente de s’approcher du bonheur : l’amour mais fini par se brûler les ailes et dont l’envolée lyrique finira par la mort…

Mais, même dans Zabriskie Point, film dans lequel Antonioni prend franchement parti, sa recherche plastique et esthétique est ce qui marque le plus : l’univers sonore très travaillé et la caméra stylisée et novatrice du cinéaste transcendent ainsi cette société stéréotypée. Parce que dans le cinéma du cinéaste, la forme n’est jamais détachée du fond, la forme participe de la construction du fond. 

Après des débordements à la fac, Mark, accusé du meurtre d’un policier quitte la ville et décide de « prendre de la hauteur » et de s’enfuir en avion. Pendant ce temps, Daria, elle aussi quitte son travail et emprunte à un ami une voiture pour s’échapper dans le désert avant de se rendre à Phoenix. C’est donc un jeune homme révolutionnaire hors du système qui s’apprête à rencontrer une jeune secrétaire un peu trop ancrée dans le système. Leur rencontre, au centre de ce film construit en trois partie (le combat de Mark, l’amour, le rêve de Daria) est à la fois poétique et abstraite. C’est ici la « scène de l’avion » de La Mort aux trousses – autre grand mythe américain – qui est revisitée et se transforme en parade amoureuse surréaliste entre Mark, pilote habile de l’avion Lilly 7 et Daria, conductrice intriguée et séduite.

Ensemble ils se rendent ensuite au « Zabriskie Point », étrange phénomène géologique au centre de la vallée de la Mort et seul relief d’un désert écrasé par le soleil qui nous fait parfois ressentir un certain « vertige horizontal ». C’est dans ce lieu magique – paysage glorifié par une caméra nous montrant une Amérique des origines – accompagné par une musique mystico-planante, que la célèbre scène de l’orgie se déroule. Des corps, sableux et poussiéreux, s’enlacent sur des dunes. Ils dansent, s’étreignent, fusionnent et redécouvrent la vie, simple, sans contraintes, c’est une ode à « l’amour fou ». Car, en effet, pendant cette séquence, le temps semble être arrêté et les autres couples, nés du fantasme de Mark et Daria. La caméra d’Antonioni parcourt ces êtres exaltés qui ne vivent pleinement qu’en dehors du monde. 

Et puis, parce que le temps de l’amour se termine,et après avoir repeint l’avion en un"animal exposant ses organes génitaux", Mark repart rendre l’avion. Il fait alors le choix de se livrer aux mains d’une police sur la défensive et trop bousculée par les manifestations étudiantes révolutionnaires et pacifistes de ces années-là pour faire preuve de lucidité. Et, au sein de cette société paranoïaque, les voleurs d’avions récalcitrants sont abattus comme du gibier, ou, à l’image de la scène de meurtre devant la fac, comme un noir…

La troisième partie du film commence alors et nous montre la fin du périple de Daria qui, après avoir appris la mort de Mark, décide d’aller rejoindre son patron là-bas. Là-bas, résidence bourgeoise et high-tech en plein milieu du désert – et miroir d’une société américaine bien trop portée sur l’apparence – elle découvre un monde artificiel et futile où les gens semblent pourtant « heureux ». 

C’est alors que dans deux séquences successives Antonioni démystifie et détruit tout les symboles de la surconsommation. Après la grande demeure – qui, dans un refus chimérique total et désespéré de Daria, explose une fois, deux fois, dix fois – c’est au tour de télévisions, tables, livres ou vêtements d’êtres détruits et transformés en œuvre d’art abstraite (une « chorégraphie de la destruction »), révolutionnaire et explosive. Zabriskie Point est donc un film engagé et critique (et aussi un peu utopique) sur le désir de transformer la société grâce à l’amour, la révolution et l’art. Enfin, la beauté formelle et la mise en scène d’Antonioni rendent ce film superbe et contribuent à la création de cette impression onirique de voyage initiatique et cinématographique sans fin.

Profession:reporter

Seizième long-métrage d'Antonioni, et considéré comme un de ses films majeurs aux côtés du Désert rouge, de Blow Up et de Zabriskie Point, Profession :reporter marque le retour du réalisateur italien à la fiction après un long documentaire intitulé Chung Kuo, la Chine.Il s'agit également du premier scénario de MarkPeploe, qui connaîtra la consécration avec Le Dernier Empereur et Little Buddha.

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