Zabriskie Point

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Ken M @troutmask53 Jan 27 I’m rewatching the film on HBO. I last saw it in the mid 70’s and the only thing I remember was the ending with everything blowing up with Pink Floyd’s music. I guess it was a comment on consumerism (there’s a lot of earlier images to confirm this) The beginning of the film with the students and protesters and the police rings true to me as I participated in protests at the same period in high school. Nearly got arrested after Kent State and never did it again. I literally got scared and ran home after a kid smashed a police car. Turns out my right wing uncle in the New York City place sent them out against us! He never knew I was involved. Back in the 80’s I took a trip to Death Valley with a friend and hung out for a few days. It was a fantastic experience and we actually walked around the area at Death Valley that the film is named after. Please visit if you’re in California but do it in the Fall when the temperature is reasonable. See more T B @RT29733144 Jan 21 Looks the part 1970 CA and AZ. Great movie! The lead actor became a bank robber and ended up in prison. He injured himself weight lifting and died. I read this in Wiki. Interesting read. See more Gus B @RT25403822 Oct 29 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point is one of those films that was misunderstood when it premiered and slowly ripened into a cult object, an artifact of cinematic rebellion. On the surface, it is a story about two young people adrift in America’s late 1960s disillusionment. Beneath that, it is Antonioni’s outsider gaze dissecting the myths of American freedom, capitalism, and protest through a lens both critical and hypnotic. Antonioni is one of those rare directors who can step into a foreign world and make it feel native. When he films London, he captures it like a Londoner. And in Zabriskie Point, he captures California and Los Angeles of the sixties as if he had been born there. He sees what locals take for granted, the way the light burns the sky, the way the desert feels like eternity, the way the billboards and highways hum with both promise and emptiness. The film’s greatest strength is its visual language. Antonioni does not tell the story, he composes it. Each frame feels sculpted out of silence, space, and heat. The desert becomes more than a setting, it is a psychological landscape where society’s noise dissolves into nothingness. The contrast between Los Angeles’ sterile corporate architecture and the barren immensity of Death Valley is devastating. Few films have captured alienation with such sensual precision. The performances by Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin are not about acting in the traditional sense. They embody symbols: he, the restless idealist who literally hijacks rebellion, and she, the spiritual wanderer seeking connection amid ruins. Their encounter in the desert, culminating in the surreal love scene at Zabriskie Point, is both absurd and poetic, a vision of innocence and futility blending into one. Then comes that ending, one of the most unforgettable in cinema. The explosion of the modern house, seen from many angles and slowed to a hallucinatory ballet of debris, becomes a pure act of cinematic catharsis. It is the destruction of material America, the ultimate fantasy of liberation. Set to Pink Floyd’s haunting score, it remains an ecstatic collision between anger and beauty, between revolution and dream. Zabriskie Point is not an easy film. It is flawed, slow, and at times naive, but its ambition is cosmic. It dares to ask what America looks like when stripped of its illusions, and that question has only grown more relevant with time. Half utopia, half requiem, it is a film that stares straight into the desert and finds not emptiness but reflection. See more Alec B @Alec97 04/22/2025 It seems purposely designed to appeal to no one. Establishment types/mainstream audiences of the era would have obviously hated its overt counter-culture vibes (i.e. the "Carl Marx" joke, the repainted plane, the repudiation of authority, etc.) and hippie revolutionaries would have been put off by the apocalyptic sexual imagery and the forced distance between the audience and the characters that leaves you with an unavoidable sense of emptiness. Ultimately it might be one of the definitive depictions of that era as Antonioni saw through everyone. See more dave s @RT68722908 02/17/2023 Every great director seems to stumble at some point in their career. In the case of Michelangelo Antonioni, that stumble seems to have come with 1970s Zabriskie Point, a disjointed effort about revolution, alienation, and the chasm between the establishment and the counter-culture in 1960's America. The story is weak (a hippy girl and a revolutionary boy escape L.A., meet in the desert, and then go their separate ways), the acting is amateurish (which makes sense since none of them are established actors), and Antonioni's usually sure-handed direction seems to be decidedly unsure of itself. On the plus side, the soundtrack is great and the locations are beautiful, but that's nowhere near close enough to salvage what is otherwise a mess. See more Shioka O @RT54204327 12/05/2022 I like Antonioni's style, and this his American work lacks tension in my opinion. The ennui his films posses work well in European background. This is hippie, visually stunning though. See more Read all reviews

Zabriskie Point

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