Cast

Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Paul Fix, Rod Taylor, G.D. Spradlin

Film description

After the success of Blowup, Antonioni got the opportunity to make a film in the United States for Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. The counterculture movement, at its apex in the late 1960s, fascinated the Italian director, featuring an America riddled with protests against the Vietnam War, fervent student protests and riots, hippies traipsing across the country, with paeans to freedom like Easy Rider hits on the silver screen.

Antonioni sided with the rebels, but saw their revolt in an eschatological perspective. Not coincidentally, the film’s scenes play out in Death Valley - the road to freedom is also the road to death.

Zabriskie Point is about the meeting of two young people on America’s back roads. She works for a corporation that wants to build luxury homes in the desert, while he’s on the lam for killing a police officer. The film incited controversy from the outset, with protests from the ‘law-and-order’ crowd accusing it of glorifying lawlessness and the counterculture movement fearing Hollywood would leech its idealism by using it to make money. The filmmakers faced a litany of accusations from all sides – even the FBI opened an investigation.

After its release, audiences and critics alike spurned Zabriskie Point. How does it play in today’s opportunistic times? No one makes this kind of cinema anymore: free, oneiric, capricious… a feverish daydream. All the trials of drifting with the meandering plot are rewarded by the anarchy of the genius dénouement – it is cinema you do not merely watch, but experience.

Bartosz Żurawiecki