Michael Antonioni's - ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

...phew!, what a looong, strange trip it's been - MojoTV's gin-soaked psych-o-delic summer of love trips festival opening salvo triple bill continues with another largely ignored cult classic...

Zabriskie Point a 1970 film by Michelangelo Antonioni that depicts the U.S. counterculture movement of that time. It sympathetically tells the story of a young couple — an idealistic young secretary, and a militant radical — to put forward an anti-establishment message.

This cult film stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, neither of whom had any previous acting experience. The screenplay was written by Antonioni, fellow Italian filmmaker Franco Rossetti, American playwright Sam Shepard, prolific screenwriter Tonino Guerra and Clare Peploe, wife of Bernardo Bertolucci. The film was the second of three English-language films that Antonioni had been contracted to direct for producer Carlo Ponti and to be distributed by MGM. The other two films were Blowup (1966) and The Passenger (1975).

The film was a notorious box office bomb, attacked by critics and ignored by the counterculture audience that the MGM was courting. The film cost $7 million to produce, and made less than $900,000 in its domestic release. In the booklet that was released with the CD soundtrack, it is unsympathetically declared that

... [c]ritics of all ideologies — establishment, underground, and otherwise — greeted the movie with howls of derision. They savaged the flat, blank performances of Antonioni's handpicked first-time stars, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, and assailed the script's confused, unconvincing mix of hippie-buzzword dialogue, self-righteous, militant debate, and free-love romanticism.

The name refers to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, the location of the film's famous desert love scene, in which members of the Open Theatre simulate an orgy.

Today, free of the heavy air of debacle that haunted the film at its release, Zabriskie Point can be seen as a fascinating period piece with some startling qualities. It is combative in its thematic intentions, even for its time. Violence is presented as a justifiable tool in social change: Frechette buys a gun and attends a campus protest with the expressed purpose of killing a cop (almost 25 years before the rapper Ice-T outraged the conservative establishment with his revenge fantasy "Cop Killer"). Antonioni's contempt for commercial imperialism is symbolized by the long, ugly parade of advertising billboards and brand-name logos visible through Frechette's windshield as he drives through Los Angeles

But nothing symbolizes the grand designs Antonioni had for Zabriskie Point more -- and the lengths to which he would go to achieve his ends -- than the movie's musical soundtrack, a remarkable mélange of abstract sound sculpture, expansive solo-guitar reveries, full-blown psychedelic rock, old-time country ballads, and 1950s jukebox corn. Even Easy Rider, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's 1969 smash about two bikers on an ill-fated cross-country odyssey, featured a relatively orthodox rock soundtrack comprised of music (by Jimi Hendrix, The Band, and Steppenwolf, among others) that Fonda pulled from his personal record collection. In Zabriskie Point -- a film about the collision of youthful innocence, hardboiled commerce, and social mutiny -- bizarre bedfellows such as Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, the Eisenhower-era siren Patti Page, the brilliant guitarist John Fahey, the ethnic-folk-rock fusion band Kaleidoscope, and the hillbilly country singer Roscoe Holcomb could all be heard in strange but effective juxtaposition.

...mungo says: i love the super-slow mo explosions of consumer items as the soundtrack kicks off... POETRY, MAN, mmm...

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