Zabriskie Point

[oldsheperd]

Cool. I'm of the small minority that laughs when what's his face from Jefferson Airplane gets punched by a Hell's Angel in Gimme Shelter.

[so lightly here]

... I'm just concerned that the hippy-ness of this film will tarnish what is probably an amazingly shot piece...

What is with the hippy backlash? The 70's music and culture that followed was god awful (Yes, ELP, etc.) and only got better at the end of that decade when punk came along. Now we have American Idol with the fabulously "glamrock/tinpanalley" Adam Lambert and Paula sipping something in a red Coke™ bottle. Perhaps people have forgotten there were the early Mick and Bowie - who really were truly fabulously glamourous. (At least the zero's have Antony and the Johnsons.)

Lay off the hippy dissin'!

By the way I was amazed when I saw ZB last in Paris a few years ago it was still a hell of a beautiful film, too bad it is not being released in BluRay.

[oldsheperd]

I dig some of the music from the 60's but I'm not going to make a blanket statement and say it was all bad. I just think that the 60's Hippie culture and it's impact is such an overwrought myth and ultimately a failure as a movement.

The 70's had some great music throughout. King Crimson, Yes is good btw, you just may not be into prog rock, King Crimson, Nick Drake, Neil Young, Faces, Can, Frank Zappa etc, etc, etc.

BTW I dig glam rock. T.Rex, Bowie, all that ish is good. But that's a whole different topic.

The whole hippie myth just bugs the heck out of me and I want to see it for what it is not for what is has been glorified.

[jsteffe]

OK, I just received the new R1 DVD today and sat down to watch it this evening. It looks lovely. To be sure, the colors are not as "hot" as they are on the laserdisc, but the image pops whenever it needs to. The film really benefits from the new HD transfer's greatly increased detail and more precise color separation. The image has a nice texture to it--I picked up a lot of incidental details that I hadn't noticed before.

I hasten to add that DVD Beaver's frame grabs of the desert orgy sequence, which I initially found so disconcerting, don't adequately represent what the scene looks like on the DVD in playback. The colors on the DVD are slightly cooler than the laserdisc, but not unduly so. What you see is a more subtle range of tones in the landscape and dust, which is probably a pretty accurate representation of what it should be. The skin tones certainly do not look "zombie-like" as that one frame grab might lead you to believe. On my monitor--which I calibrated recently with some care--the overal color temperature of the sequence is warmer than what you see on those two frame grabs, and the contrast is more vibrant without looking boosted. Another thing I noticed is that the contrast between Daria's skin and Mark Frechette's notoriously pale skin really stands out on the DVD and less so on the laserdisc.

I think it's really important to watch the whole DVD to get a feel for the transfer.

Count me as satisfied! Now if they ever release this on Blu-ray you can bet I'll pick that up too, with nary a complaint about double-dipping!

[Galen Young]

...I don't have any point of reference for the time expressed in this film and I hate hippies and free love.

Don't let the hippie stuff throw you off by any means. I think of Zabriskie Point as a kind of European art house counterpart to something like Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. Those amazing slo-mo explosions prefigure and remind me of the gorgeous slo-mo in Koyaanisqatsi. (or even those opening shots of Gilliam's Brazil.) Add me to the chorus who think the new R1 disc looks beautiful, I'd buy this again as a Blu-ray without a second thought.

(watching the film again last night got me to wondering -- whatever happened to Rod Taylor? After a quick look around, found he's got a small role in Inglourious Basterds! Glad to hear he's still working at least.)

[jsteffe]

...I don't have any point of reference for the time expressed in this film and I hate hippies and free love.

For me at least, it's not at all clear that Antonioni identifies with the "hippies." The young protagonists are fairly inarticulate and banal:

Mark: This group I was in had rules against smoking. They were into a reality trip.
Daria: What a drag!

I mean, c'mon!

And Mark's acts of rebellion--(possibly) shooting a cop, stealing a plane--are more enacted fantasies of political action than than meaningful statements. I see Antonioni as taking a detached, ironic perspective towards youth culture. Who knows, perhaps the film is really about the failure of youth counterculture.

[Sloper]

Just watched this for the first time, and I loved the pale, sand-covered skin during the sex scenes. If the characters do look a bit ‘dead’, that’s entirely appropriate since, as Mark says, Zabriskie Point itself is ‘dead’. Maybe it doesn’t look that way in real life, but I think it is supposed to here – it would be out of character for Antonioni not to want to de-familiarise the location for American audiences. The actors are so lifeless that for them to look golden and alive while screwing in the dust might have seemed incongruous (maybe not - I almost feel like double-dipping just to see how else the scene might look). As it is, the desert serves as a perfect externalisation of these youths’ state of mind: dead-head nihilism, as natural, unstable and shifting as the sand dunes they run up and down. Zabriskie Point – and the word ‘point’ emphasises this, I think – is the final destination of these characters; it really does feel like an otherworldly setting, resembling an ‘afterlife’ all the more when the other couples appear, like so many corpses strewn across the desert.

Then the tourists arrive and talk about building a drive-in there; at the end, capitalism is epitomised by the sore-thumb house protruding from the mountain, with the businessmen’s faces reflected by the clear, hard surface of their plastic scale model of the desert. There’s a strangely otherworldly feel to those shots as well. This is the setting that encapsulates Rod Taylor and his colleagues, and just as Mark is killed by the guns associated, from the beginning, with the oppressive establishment, and then left trapped in the grounded jet plane, so the house on the mountain is turned into dust and re-assimilated with the desert – this at least seems to be the point of Daria’s fantasy at the end, beautifully expressed by the transition from the explosions to the blazing, annihilating sunset into which she drives. Of course, if the Pink Floyd music were repeated over that ending, the connection would be more obvious. But for most of the film, white sand seems to be a defining image associated with Mark and Daria.

As a 25-year-old apathist with no political views or social conscience, I kind of sympathise with oldshepherd’s anti-hippy sentiment. But this is absolutely not a didactic or self-righteous film, whichever side you’re looking from. What I loved about Blowup – and what really surprised me – was that it wasn’t anything as simple or dull as either a ‘celebration’ or a ‘critique’ of the swinging sixties, which the reviews had led me to think it was. Indeed, if you try to look at the film as such, it falls flat: taken as a social critique, the Yardbirds concert is pretty facile; taken as one fragment within Antonioni’s beautiful mosaic about communication, signification, identity, etc, it is a perfect scene. Moments in Zabriskie Point – like the cop designating the sociology professor a ‘clerk’, or that line from Mark, ‘people only act when they need to, but I need to sooner than that’ – come across as satirical jabs at one side or another of the conflict on display, but these nods to satire are just part of the mosaic, and the overall perspective of the film is so much wiser and more universal than that of any satirist. The comparison with Medium Cool is apt – that seemed to me much more like a film with an axe to grind, with things it really wanted to tell its audience about the society they lived in, and although a great film it’s much more dated than Antonioni’s meditative, alien’s-eye view of 1969 America.

I don’t even see films like Zabriskie Point or Blowup as ‘reflections’ of the period, because Antonioni’s perspective is not an objective one. The brilliant opening shots of ZP illustrate this. For an agonisingly long time, we don’t get an establishing shot of the students’ meeting, just shifting, wavering glimpses of individual faces looking detached, alienated and confused in that way that only this director could get people to do in front of a camera. Even when we see the debate itself, it is punctuated by more shots like this, which distance us from the issues being discussed, and highlight the inescapable solitariness of these individuals longing to belong to a crowd, several minutes before Mark stands up and leaves, underlining the point. I’m not the expert on Antonioni around here, but it seems to me that he’s just as interested in this film as he was in Il Grido, L'Avventura, etc, in the essential truths of the human condition, and just as impatient with mundane things like politics or society. But maybe that’s the apathist in me talking...

I tried to see the Orbison song as ironic, but precisely because Antonioni would never be that obviously ironic, it didn’t work; what a horrible way to end this spellbinding masterpiece.

[Tommaso]

I've seen the German disc now and must admit that after having been very skeptical I can now say that I think it looks pretty good. The Beaver caps indeed seem to be misleading, and over-all, the colours look very convincing and totally suited to the individual scenes.

Zabriskie Point – and the word ‘point’ emphasises this, I think – is the final destination of these characters; it really does feel like an otherworldly setting, resembling an ‘afterlife’ all the more when the other couples appear, like so many corpses strewn across the desert.

Yes, I totally agree. What for Mark and Daria perhaps is a 'sincere' act of love-making is exposed by Antonioni as ultimately futile, as just another attempt to overcome alienation, an alienation that here doesn't reside so much in the characters but rather iin the general world around them: capitalism, the empty phrases of the student discussions and so on. In this respect, the film continues with the issues of the Vitti films, even if it has a far more sympathetic look at the main characters, especially concerning Daria. But the final blow-up only happening in her imagination and the unrelenting glare of the sun in the very last shot makes it clear that nothing can really be done to change the situation. It's a very fatalistic, hopeless film; that's something I had never felt so much when I had seen the film formerly.

I tried to see the Orbison song as ironic, but precisely because Antonioni would never be that obviously ironic, it didn’t work; what a horrible way to end this spellbinding masterpiece.

It really made me cringe, too. The song itself hasn't got the slightest touch of irony and certainly the use of it wasn't meant to be ironic as it might have been in a David Lynch film (even though some bits of "Zabriskie" actually reminded me of Lynch, some of the characters in the desert town, for instance). I guess there's only one way to handle the end when watching the film again: simply turn off the sound completely; I guess Daria's driving away and the final shot of the sun should still work in complete silence; in any case it must be better than this abomination.

[BradStevens]

Haven't seen the ZABRISKIE POINT DVD yet. Can the line "I always knew it would be like this...the desert" be heard immediately after the orgy in the desert? It was apparently removed from the soundtrack (perhaps against Antonioni's wishes) after being greeted with laughter during previews, and is indeed missing from several transfers (including the one shown by the BBC). But it's certainly there on MGM's old UK pan-and-scan VHS tape (which also has the correct music at the end), as well as the version shown by TCM in the UK.

[ellipsis7]

Yes, I've checked my off air VHS from the BBC (circa 2001)- much better closing music: the Floyd, although actually quite brief...No line after the 'orgy', as you say...

[Sloper]

Brad, the line is there on the Warner DVD. It didn't strike me as funny the first time, but it does now - just a little.

In this respect, the film continues with the issues of the Vitti films, even if it has a far more sympathetic look at the main characters, especially concerning Daria.

I'm not sure I agree with you on this, since I don't really see the film as being especially sympathetic to either of its main characters. This seems to belong very much in what might be called the 'nihilist trilogy' along with Blowup and The Passenger, with protagonists who have no stable personality at all.

SpoilerShow

Blowup ends with the hero simply vanishing out of existence, while both ZP and The Passenger end with deliberately anti-climactic death scenes; in neither of the latter two films is it clear when the hero passes from life into death, and this says something about their fundamentally empty identities.

It's so hard to know what to think of Mark and Daria. He's little more than a bundle of shrugs, sardonic remarks and aimless gestures, while she, with her chatter about replacing bad memories with lovely ones, and her insistence that 'nothing is terrible', just comes across as mindlessly sunny (hence, perhaps, the sunset, and the easy listening/light rock/folksy music she's associated with). I actually find the characters in the Vitti films very likeable; in Red Desert, only Giuliana herself remains sympathetic, but she is astonishingly so, a harrowing portrait of suicidal depression. I remember in the Il Grido thread, you talked about the character 'walking into alienation'. With Blowup and his next two films (I'm still trying to figure out Identification of a Woman), Antonioni seems to be moving towards a purer, more direct representation of the void which lies at the end of that road, the void glimpsed only fitfully in his earlier films. Why he described Blowup as an 'optimistic' film I'll never know, because to me the characters in these films embody the notion of 'void'. This may partly be because most of them are portrayed by bad actors.

On that note, Rod Taylor really is very good in this. You could cast him as the child-molesting grandfather in some nervy Dogme 95 film, and he'd still come across as the most charming man in the world.

I guess there's only one way to handle the end when watching the film again: simply turn off the sound completely; I guess Daria's driving away and the final shot of the sun should still work in complete silence; in any case it must be better than this abomination.

I tried this the second time round, but it still doesn't work. Antonioni usually likes to put some kind of scary noise at the end of his films, so complete silence feels wrong. In a word: damn.

[ellipsis7]

The line (which is on the TCM UK, Warner France, Warner Germany & the Kabeleinz Germany versions, but not on the BBC version) actually goes...

MARK: I always knew it would be like this...
DARIA: What?
MARK: ...the desert...

An exchange open to several interpretations, which I suppose does suggest some incongruity and even accounts for some dissent. On the BBC version, it is replaced by a sustain in the Jerry Garcia 'Love Scene' music...

Line isn't in the published Italian script of ZP...

[Tommaso]

I'm not sure I agree with you on this, since I don't really see the film as being especially sympathetic to either of its main characters. This seems to belong very much in what might be called the 'nihilist trilogy' along with Blowup and The Passenger, with protagonists who have no stable personality at all.

That's certainly true. But I had the impression that although the two main characters might be considered as unstable or at least have illusions about their situation (Daria's "Nothing is terrible", which you mention), they nevertheless try to take a position that wants to counter the reality they are subject to. The re-painting of the plane comes to my mind here. It is obviously a futile gesture and one that is illusionary, but I perceived a certain light-heartedness there which made me see them as more sympathetic than, say, Delon's character in "L'Eclisse". But this may be just my perception and not Antonioni's intention. And I too sympathize with Vitti in the earlier films, but more because of her plight and the hopelessness of her situation(s), not because of any strategies or illusions she may make use of.

With Blowup and his next two films (I'm still trying to figure out Identification of a Woman), Antonioni seems to be moving towards a purer, more direct representation of the void which lies at the end of that road, the void glimpsed only fitfully in his earlier films.

I thought the most perfect (because more disturbing) expression of the void was the final sequence in "L'Eclisse", where the void actually appears in what we would expect to be a setting filled with people. Instead we have mostly single persons walking deserted cityscapes, and they are not even aware of the void (or so it seems). In "Zabriskie", Daria at least deliberately walks away from the house, even if its destruction only happens in her imagination and we know that nothing will change. Curiously, I had to think of Pasolini's "Teorema" considering the desert and the void; i.e. the desert seems to become a place for expressing a fatal, but also to a certain degree 'spiritual' truth; whereas this aspect seems absent in "L'Eclisse".

Antonioni usually likes to put some kind of scary noise at the end of his films, so complete silence feels wrong. In a word: damn.

Damn.

[Particle Zoo]

she, with her chatter about replacing bad memories with lovely ones, and her insistence that 'nothing is terrible', just comes across as mindlessly sunny (hence, perhaps, the sunset, and the easy listening/light rock/folksy music she's associated with).

That's The Youngbloods' 'Sugar Babe', one of the finest folk rock songs of the sixties and every time I hear it, I feel like I've mainlined ambrosia...so I guess I'm saying that scene with Daria driving in the desert has the sunny effect on me...but I can't see it/her as negative...

[Sloper]

I thought the most perfect (because more disturbing) expression of the void was the final sequence in "L'Eclisse", where the void actually appears in what we would expect to be a setting filled with people. Instead we have mostly single persons walking deserted cityscapes, and they are not even aware of the void (or so it seems). In "Zabriskie", Daria at least deliberately walks away from the house, even if its destruction only happens in her imagination and we know that nothing will change. Curiously, I had to think of Pasolini's "Teorema" considering the desert and the void; i.e. the desert seems to become a place for expressing a fatal, but also to a certain degree 'spiritual' truth; whereas this aspect seems absent in "L'Eclisse".

I think you’re right that in some ways ZP seems to contain, if not hope exactly, at least a lightness of spirit which makes it less obviously pessimistic than some of the earlier films. I’m with you on the ending of L’Eclisse, truly one of the most chilling sequences in all of cinema, and yes, that run of films from Il Grido to Red Desert presents a stunningly bleak picture. But at least those films are fairly easy to make sense of. You know where you are with the characters, and you can see how the structure, symbolism, and so on all fit together to create a certain impression – to convey a message. Not that they’re dogmatic films, because one of the great things about them is how even-handed they are (for instance Red Desert’s attitude towards industry and modernity, at once horrified and admiring).

But in a film like ZP, this even-handedness is taken to a point where it isn’t clear what Antonioni is saying about capitalism, student radicals, rock music, or anything. Of course it’s possible to construct an interpretation, but I imagine there’s far more room for disagreement about the ‘point’ of the film than there would be with the Vitti tetralogy, and it seems to me this is a symptom of the ‘alien’s-eye-view’ being taken, where lack of meaning and significance really is a ‘given’ before the film has even begun. So in that sense, it’s bleak and disturbing on a deeper level than L’Eclisse. It’s wonderful and beautiful, but I don’t know how to read it, and it leaves me feeling as if I’m not human.

she, with her chatter about replacing bad memories with lovely ones, and her insistence that 'nothing is terrible', just comes across as mindlessly sunny (hence, perhaps, the sunset, and the easy listening/light rock/folksy music she's associated with).

That's The Youngbloods' 'Sugar Babe', one of the finest folk rock songs of the sixties and every time I hear it, I feel like I've mainlined ambrosia...so I guess I'm saying that scene with Daria driving in the desert has the sunny effect on me...but I can't see it/her as negative...

Though the song (like Daria) doesn’t have that effect on me, I liked it, and my remark came off as more pejorative than it was meant to. But I think Antonioni does associate this kind of music with a certain ‘emptiness’, not necessarily in a negative sense; think of the Yardbirds in Blowup, of course. I don’t see that nightclub scene, or Blowup generally, as a ‘satire’ on 1960s’ culture; indeed, as I’ve been saying in this post, it’s hard to know what Antonioni’s stance is in these works. I was really just having a stab at ‘interpreting’ Daria, and no doubt I’ll see her differently next time I watch the film.

[Tommaso]

that run of films from Il Grido to Red Desert presents a stunningly bleak picture. But at least those films are fairly easy to make sense of. You know where you are with the characters, and you can see how the structure, symbolism, and so on all fit together to create a certain impression – to convey a message. Not that they’re dogmatic films, because one of the great things about them is how even-handed they are (for instance Red Desert’s attitude towards industry and modernity, at once horrified and admiring).

But in a film like ZP, this even-handedness is taken to a point where it isn’t clear what Antonioni is saying about capitalism, student radicals, rock music, or anything.

I think that is perhaps one of the greatest advantages of "Zabriskie". Of course I wouldn't want to say that "L'Eclisse" hammers its message in (though to a certain degree it does), but the openness of ZP makes it more of a 'meditation' on the modern world and capitalism, both for Antonioni and (foremost) for the viewer, who has to come up with his or her own interpretation. In this respect, I do agree that lack of meaning is a given in ZP, but what is not given is how to react to it. It's difficult for me to decide whether the 'aliens-eye-view' has something to do with how Antonioni shows the US in this film; I simply don't know how much different the lifestyles of Europe and the US were at the time. When I watch the film today, I must say that a lot of it reminds me of Europe as I perceive it today...

It’s wonderful and beautiful, but I don’t know how to read it, and it leaves me feeling as if I’m not human.

I wouldn't put it that drastically. It makes me sad, rather, but it is a sadness that to a degree is enjoyable (wrong word) simply because it contains a lot of truth. If the world of ZP is difficult or impossible to interpretate, I think the same goes for the world we live in now.

[ellipsis7]

Not to become embroiled in the minutiae of this discussion, however I do reccommend reading Pascal Bonitzer's excellent article "Desir Desert"/"Desert Desire" from Cahiers du Cinema No. 262, January 1976... Can also be found in the Hors-Serie Bergman/Antonioni special issue from 2007, and in the English version of that issue available online... Is quite a piece...

[Particle Zoo]

Sloper and Tommaso, I'm really enjoying reading your thoughts on ZP, particularly the issue of how much sympathy Antonioni has with his youthful protagonists.

Tachen's 'Michelangelo Antonioni The Complete Films', (Chatman/ Duncan) has the following quote from the man himself:
'If one is instinctively brought to make common cause with America's rebellious youth, perhaps it is because one is attracted by their natural animal vitality. When in Chicago kids with blankets over their shoulder and flowers in their hair are seen being bashed by grown men wearing helmets, you come very near to forming, without reservations, a total alliance with them.'

I don't think Antonioni presents Mark and Daria 'without reservations', but I do sense more sympathy for them and the youth culture of the sixties, than has been expressed by other posters. Which is not to say I think they are wrong, maybe it's just that I have a great fondness for that time and culture, even though I was only five when the sixties ended.

[Tommaso]

That Antonioni quote is interesting, because he says "you come very near to forming" that "total alliance"; the good thing about Antonioni is that his artistic detachment saves the film (or any other by him) from actually taking this final step of identification; something that some reviewers apparently didn't get. Even the generally very readable Glenn Erickson in hisDVD Savant review of the new disc writes:

Zabriskie Point imposes a foreign artist's leftist political interpretations on a stylized American landscape. The beautiful but alienated leading actors are little more than placeholders for disaffected youth. [...]
The actual story of Zabriskie Point is a pretentious trifle.[...]
Neither the real student demonstration footage nor the staged violence makes much of an impact. The rancor in the 'revolutionary strategy meeting' (scored with Pink Floyd's "Heartbeat Pigmeat") is 100% accurate to this reviewer's experience, with furious, incoherent rhetoric thrown about by zealots incapable of listening to one another.

This last perception is accurate, of course, but it seems that Erickson wants to say that the 'incoherent rhetoric' was not perceived as such by Antonioni and that it is in the film precisely because Antonioni wants to expose its incoherence, and not because he subscribes to what is being said.

One more from Erickson:

The legendary Italian filmmaker remained true to his vision of America as a spiritual wasteland ruled by soulless capitalists, but his superficial interpretation of youth in rebellion was rejected by almost everyone. Antonioni 's artistic reputation was unaffected.

I simply don't believe that Antonioni talks only about America in this film, and I assume that the negative reactions against the film at the time of its release came about not only because the film was a rebellion against 'soulless capitalists', but also because its hopelessness offered no viable alternative and ultimately rejects viewer identification, despite our (or only just my) general sympathy for Mark and Daria.

And as I generally know not too much about Antonioni, the man: can it really be correct to describe him as a 'leftist filmmaker'? From his films only, it seems almost absurd to put him into that category. The coupling with Bergman as in the Cahiers special issue that ellipsis7 mentioned above seems much more to the point to me, although in this case it was probably prompted by their deaths at almost the same time. But both filmmakers were concerned with that spiritual void as one of their themes.

[ellipsis7]

'Deux grands modernes' is how Cahiers appositely headlined them - Antonioni would have considered himself left wing, but of course started as a critic under Fascism, publishing one or two misguided pieces at that time... So disillusioned with feature filmmaking following the making of and reception of ZP, he turned to documentary with CHUNG KUO CINA, enraging the Chinese Communist regime who called him a capitalist lackey and distorter of facts ('A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks'), to which Antonioni protested his left wing (and WWII Resistance) credentials... I actually have several very interesting accounts of the making of ZP, the negative response of the NY Times, Antonioni's published reply to that etc... He enjoyed a fractious relationship with many US journalists during production - the writer from LOOK magazine so irritated, MA inserted a copy of the mag being blown up in the explosion sequence (can be spotted if you look carefully)...

[Sloper]

the openness of ZP makes it more of a 'meditation' on the modern world and capitalism, both for Antonioni and (foremost) for the viewer, who has to come up with his or her own interpretation. In this respect, I do agree that lack of meaning is a given in ZP, but what is not given is how to react to it.

‘Meditation’ is exactly the right word for it. One qualification of a great artist, in my book, is that if they’re dealing with ‘big ideas’, they should be more interested in exploring them than in making dogmatic statements about them. One of my favourite examples is Henry James’s novel, The Bostonians: it’s about feminism, and I’m sure that James himself had strong opinions on the subject; I suspect he identified more with the old-fashioned, male chauvinist Basil Ransom than with the uptight, crusading Olive Chancellor. And yet the story’s content is determined by aesthetic, rather than ideological, considerations, and no one side is privileged over the other. I think this sense of balance is key to the aesthetic pleasure we get from a lot of art works, perhaps because a balanced perspective comes closest to the truth, to showing the world ‘as it really is’ – which, as Tommaso says, is confusing and hard to interpret. It feels like a rather decadent thing to say, but all you can really do with the world is explore it and meditate upon it, and the artist who does this well, though they might not produce something dramatic or exciting enough to possess mass appeal, will provoke far more activity in the mind of the beholder, and this is the kind of art that keeps you coming back, still asking the same old questions.

It doesn’t surprise me that Antonioni sympathised with the ‘rebellious youth’. So does Rod Taylor in the film, just as David Hemmings seems to sympathise with the band of protesters/mimes in Blowup (on the youth issue, you might also consider Betsy Blair's little sister in Il Grido, and compare Maria Schneider at the end of Passenger to Daria at the end of ZP; and of course the younger woman in Identification). I agree that we have a very general sense that they are to be liked; but the cops are not all demonised in ZP (think of the one Daria stands in front of to prevent Mark from shooting him), and Antonioni’s balanced, meditative stance means that any interpretation has to be provided by us, the viewers. Hence I like to see the film as critical of Mark and Daria, while others think it celebrates them. By his own admission, Particle Zoo has a prior sympathy for this period and culture, and I’m guiltily prejudiced against it.

Antonioni’s films are often about the way that, when people embark on a relationship with something or someone else, what they get out of that relationship really consists of nothing more than what they bring to it themselves: David Hemmings’ struggle to interpret his photographs, and his subsequent loss of them and himself, is a very potent metaphor for this idea. It might seem like a bit of a stretch, but in a way we (or at least I) have a similar relationship with these films. By engaging with provocative, controversial issues, but refusing to commit to a point of view on them himself, as he does in ZP and The Passenger, Antonioni forces us to confront the fact that our own reactions, opinions, interpretations, etc, come from ourselves, and not precisely from anything in the films. He makes us question what we do get out of these films, beyond such bleak insights into incommunicability, which do not in themselves guarantee a film's quality.

The great thing about the symbolism in MA’s films is how organic it is. The trees are both symbols and real trees – that is, they’re symbolic in a very natural, unobtrusive way, and interpreting them always feels like a betrayal. A film like ZP has this same organic quality, to an even greater extent. It’s like a symbol that doesn’t quite symbolise anything, or a type of beauty that, far from expressing truth, negates the whole idea of truth. I hate the word ‘visionary’, but this is one director who really could change the way you look at and interpret the world around you, in unsettling and not entirely pleasant ways.

I’m a little sleep-deprived, so forgive the waffle. Anyway, Particle Zoo – since we're quoting critics, you might want to take a look at Roger Ebert’s damning review of Zabriskie Point, which essentially sees the tragic flaw as lying in Antonioni’s having sided with the rebellious youth but remaining unable to identify with them. Though I disagree with him wholeheartedly, it’s a telling review, especially if you read it with this comment in mind:

I assume that the negative reactions against the film at the time of its release came about not only because the film was a rebellion against 'soulless capitalists', but also because its hopelessness offered no viable alternative and ultimately rejects viewer identification, despite our (or only just my) general sympathy for Mark and Daria.

ellipsis, thanks for the article recommendation, I will seek it out (can’t seem to find it online, though). And from your account of Antonioni’s political leanings – and from the words of the man himself in various interviews – it sounds as if he was a little bit too much of a meditative intellectual to really take sides or make anyone happy. But maybe that’s just what I want to think.

[ellipsis7]

That Cahiers special (in English) from their site - click on e-Cahiers du Cinema link on LHS, and then navigate through 'The kiosk' to the relevant Bergman-Antonioni hors-series issue for sale (@ just €6)...

[Tommaso]

It feels like a rather decadent thing to say, but all you can really do with the world is explore it and meditate upon it, and the artist who does this well, though they might not produce something dramatic or exciting enough to possess mass appeal, will provoke far more activity in the mind of the beholder, and this is the kind of art that keeps you coming back, still asking the same old questions.

I think this describes not only Henry James well, but a lot of literature and arts commonly considered to be amongst the greatest of the 20th century. I had to think of Proust, of Musil's "Mann ohne Eigenschaften" and Joyce's "Ulysses" especially. Perhaps it is not least this meditative quality that makes Antonioni such a 'chief' modernist; you of course also find the quality in Wenders, and it's perhaps one of the reasons why the two of them got along together so well. "The Passenger" especially looks like a blue-print for Wenders' road movies (but is much better, of course).

A film like ZP has this same organic quality, to an even greater extent. It’s like a symbol that doesn’t quite symbolise anything, or a type of beauty that, far from expressing truth, negates the whole idea of truth.

Yes. In this respect I was almost shocked about this little moment early in the film where what we perceive as a beautiful natural landscape is revealed a few seconds later as being not more than a painting on a fence; the colours on the painting and the way it is filmed both suggest we see reality while we don't. A good reminder that we should always question the images we see in the film, especially if they are as beautiful as these.

Thanks for the Ebert link; well, it surprises me that everything we regard as essential for the film is seen by him as something that is a fault on Antonioni's part, as a curious slip in acting, narrative, and filmic technique even. I'm baffled because he obviously stopped at the surface appaerance and didn't give Antonioni at least the benefit of the doubt, that he never even seems to think that what he criticizes could be intentional and could have a good reason. This reminds me a lot of the initial reactions to Powell's "Peeping Tom".

Ellipsis, thanks for the comments on Antonioni's political stance; I knew that he wrote a notorious laudatory review of Harlan's "Jud Süß" in the early 40s, which is certainly unforgivable from a political perspective now, but even there he basically praises the film's visuals (which is understandable). But that perhaps already indicates that his basic interests were aesthetic, not political ones. I haven't seen the China film, unfortunately, but the reactions you quote seem to indicate that there he was also primarily interested in formal questions and in a 'meditation' on the Chinese society without a message, which the Chinese authorities must have necessarily seen as a 'distortion' of what they perceived as their ideologically grounded, 'correct' reality. Perhaps it all comes down to how you define 'left-wing'; I guess you can be very much aware of social problems and against capitalism and consumerism without commiting yourself to direct political action or left-wing party politics.

[Sloper]

Thanks for the Ebert link; well, it surprises me that everything we regard as essential for the film is seen by him as something that is a fault on Antonioni's part, as a curious slip in acting, narrative, and filmic technique even. I'm baffled because he obviously stopped at the surface appaerance and didn't give Antonioni at least the benefit of the doubt, that he never even seems to think that what he criticizes could be intentional and could have a good reason. This reminds me a lot of the initial reactions to Powell's "Peeping Tom".

Yes, the superficiality is pretty typical of Ebert, as is the obsession with identifying movie clichés. But in a way I sympathise with his reaction, having had similar negative feelings about The Passenger, which I think is a pretty vapid film (though great in some ways). But I'm determined to dig deeper with that one, and will keep watching it until I damn well enjoy it.

As a teenaged film enthusiast, I grew up on critics like Ebert, Kael, Halliwell, Chris Tookey (don't judge), the various contributors to old editions of the Time Out film guide, etc, most of whom were very dismissive of Antonioni. This may have something to do with the fact that most of them came of age in the '60s, and so tend to look back on its fads with a certain scepticism/embarrassment. This is why I put off seeing MA's films for so long, but looking at them now I think they've aged better than any other '60s culture I've encountered. Zabriskie Point must have looked very different to Ebert in 1970 than it does to a twentysomething today, and I've no doubt it would appear absurd to me if I approached it as an attempt to engage with the issues of its day, rather than as a work of art which transmutes topical material into something alien and beautiful. The comparison with Powell (and Pressburger) is very appropriate: you really have to scratch the surface with these films, and attune yourself to their modes of expression - and also, I think, forget everything you know about other films of the period - otherwise they just seem silly.

[Tommaso]

But in a way I sympathise with his reaction, having had similar negative feelings about The Passenger, which I think is a pretty vapid film (though great in some ways). But I'm determined to dig deeper with that one, and will keep watching it until I damn well enjoy it.

Yeah, I'm not fully sure of "The Passenger", too. As always, it's visually striking and certainly a very good film, but I didn't have the feeling that the film had to say much that Antonioni hadn't said before in a more striking way. But I've only seen it once, and will surely have to revisit it to come to more differentiated thoughts about it. Still, like many people I think that Antonioni's art somewhat declined in his later years. "Oberwald" is an interesting experiment, but Antonioni and Cocteau together really makes for a very odd coupling; the play on which it is based is one of Cocteau's weakest and only seems to come alive when the main character is played by Marais, as in Cocteau's own film version. "Identification of a woman" didn't work very well for me either after seeing it again after some twenty years, and finally "Beyond the clouds"...oh well... I never really understood what could be the point about this film. A pale shadow of his earlier efforts even in the visual department. The best thing about that film are the Wenders-directed interludes.

Zabriskie Point must have looked very different to Ebert in 1970 than it does to a twentysomething today, and I've no doubt it would appear absurd to me if I approached it as an attempt to engage with the issues of its day, rather than as a work of art which transmutes topical material into something alien and beautiful.

Yes, and this quality of transmutation is probably responsible for the film having aged so well (or rather, it hasn't aged at all, like P&P's films), especially if I don't forget about the other films from that period. I watched Godard's "One plus One" a few weeks ago, for instance, which in some respects shares some themes with "Zabriskie" (think of the Black Panther sequences), but that film left me completely at a loss and had me laughing out loud more than once in what were probably the wrong moments. I thought to myself: "Damn, Jean-Luc, you can't be serious, this MUST be irony", but actually, I'm not so sure about this.