Zabriskie Point is the best testimony to the spirit, ideas, cultural climate and youth of the counterculture. It is amazing how Antonioni's eye has captured the soul of this enormous phenomenon. From the counterculture came the computer revolution, the me-too movement and many other traits of modernity. Even corporate America, which forms the backdrop to Antonioni's film and urban landscape, has appropriated the mystique of the counterculture. The same personal story of the two actors chosen by Antonioni to interpret the film is the story of two flower children who have remained so. In the film everything is perfect. It is totally visionary. Think of the depiction of the police, something that went indigestible to the American press and public. Don't the cops who kill Mark have the same cold, insensitive faces, the same "androidity" as those officers who took George Floyd's life? And isn't the final pulverization of objects of mass consumption manufactured by industry at a continuous pace the product of the same detonation caused by the coronavirus on our lifestyles? As the critic Filippo Sacchi wrote, not always tender with Antonioni, Zabriskie Point is in the class of absolute cinema.
Michelangelo Antonioni on Zabriskie Point
It's a difficult film also because America is a difficult country and is going through one of the most complex periods in its history. What is America? In San Francisco you seem to understand one, in Los Angeles another, in Texas another that has all the air of a different continent even. In New York you meet ten others. Perhaps the only clear distinction that can be made is this: America of the old and that of the young. I'm interested in the latter. The main protagonists of the film are in fact two young people.
I'm going to America now to choose the actors as well. When I left for the first of the two trips I made last year to America, I thought I could use Monica Vitti for this film too. Unfortunately I realized that I was not liable. England of Blow-Up was a background, America, for Zabrieski Point, is the very substance of the film. The protagonists are almost symbols of that country and must therefore be Americans. Also because in America you don't double and Monica speaks very good English but obviously with a foreign accent >.
In Italy foreign actors can be used. I did it too for the past, but they were Italian films. The film I'm about to make is American instead. I was therefore forced to give up on her and I am very sorry. You understand each other instantly, by now, and you have such mobility that an imperceptible movement of your face is enough for you to express the feelings I ask you to express. For characters like those in my films, whose expression, rather than words, is entrusted with the manifestation of moods, an actress like Monica is ideal. That's why it pains me to still make a film without her. But I won't always make films abroad and in Italy it will be natural to go back to working together.
Da Unity, 9 April 1968
Antonioni again on Zabriskie Point
We also talk about Zabriskie Point, if you want. Let's talk about it today, time before these lines are printed. There is a march on Washington, American universities are in revolt, four boys have been shot dead on an Ohio campus. It is difficult to reject the temptation to feel, unfortunately, prophets. Instead, I prefer to reflect on some psychological details of violence. I'm convinced that policemen don't think about death when they enter a university or when they face a crowd. They have too many things to do, too many instructions to follow. Policemen don't imagine death any more than a hunter imagines the death of a bird. Likewise, the astronaut is not afraid, not because he doesn't know of the danger, but because he doesn't have time. If the cops thought about death they probably wouldn't shoot.
Shooting a film in America involves only one risk: that of becoming the subject of such a broad discourse as to make one forget the quality of the film. Otherwise, it's a very rich experience. I went to America because it is one of, if not perhaps the most interesting country in the world right now. It is a place where some essential truths about the themes and contradictions of our time can be isolated in their purest state. I had many images of America in my mind. But I wanted to see with my own eyes, and that is not even as a traveller, but as an author.
My film certainly does not claim to exhaust what can be said about America. It is a simple story even if its content is complex. And it's simple because the film adopts a fairytale atmosphere. Now, even if the critics object, I believe one thing: fairy tales are true. Even when with a fairy sword the hero defeats an army of dragons.
If I had wanted to make a political film on youth protests, I would have continued along the path taken at the beginning with the sequence of the student meeting. Most likely, if one day young American radicals succeed in realizing their hopes of changing the structure of society, they will get out of there, they will have those faces. But I instead abandoned them to follow my character on a completely different route. And it is an itinerary that travels across a corner of America, but almost without touching it, and not only because it flies over it, but because from the moment he steals the plane, for Mark America coincides with "the earth", from which precisely be needed to get off, needed to break away. That's why you can't even say that Zabriskie Point is a revolutionary film. Although at the same time it is, in the context of a spiritual dialectic.
In short, what is this coercion that they want to inflict on me to limit the discourse to "what I know", which should then correspond, as Aristotle maintained, to what the public believes it knows, that is, to the probable, taking into account current opinions? , of the majority, of tradition, etc.?
Of course, seen from this old critical angle, the film, especially in the ending, can also seem delusional. Well, as an author I claim the right to rave, if only because today's delusions could also be tomorrow's truths.
I am not American and I do not pretend to have made an American film, I will never tire of repeating it. But don't you think that even a foreign, detached gaze has its legitimacy? A French philosopher famous for his studies in aesthetics said: «If I look at an orange illuminated from one side, instead of seeing it as it appears, with all the nuances of colored light and colored shadow, I see it as I know it is, uniform. For me it is not a sphere with degrading shades, but an orange».
Here, I have looked at America as it appeared to me, without knowing what it is. Let's put it this way, if you like. The fact that after looking at this orange I felt like eating it, this is a fact that concerns my personal relationship with the orange. That is, the problem consists in this: whether or not I have managed to express my sensations, impressions, intuitions, and not whether they correspond to those of the Americans.
The fact that an author internalizes his own political and social choices and then manifests them in a work - in my case in a film - which through images linked to reality by a fantastic thread refers to those determinations, is not enough to judge the film only on the basis of them. It is the path of the imagination that comes into question, and if anything this word: “poetry', regains meaning today (the world saved by poets?), if the poetic attribute is to be assigned to Zabriskie Point (it's not for me to judge), it is in this key that in my opinion the film should be watched.
From Giorgio Tinazzi, Michelangelo Antonioni. Making a film is living for me, Venice, Marsilio, 1994, pp. 91-94
Gian Luigi Rondi
A love story at Zabriskie Point, the lowest and most desolate point in Arizona, a white desert, chalky and chalky like the Dead Sea. The protagonists are two young Americans who are victims of the dissatisfaction, of the hardships, of the anxieties of so many young people today who are victims, at the same time, almost by fate, of the incomprehension of others. He works and studies; he is intolerant, rebellious, but he is not contestant; the diatribes of the protesters bore him, even if he has friends among them and, therefore, frequents them.
Attending them, one day he finds himself involved in a student revolt; he is armed, a policeman dies in front of him, it was not he who killed him, but he is a suspect, a suspect, so he thinks of escaping by stealing a light aircraft. She is the secretary, and perhaps a friend, of an industrialist who must reach Phoenix where there is an important business meeting. She goes away alone, by car, because she wants to stop in the middle of the desert, to meditate; she (she's a bit of a hippy, she indulges in oriental myths).
In the desert, however, at Zabriskie Point, she meets him, who has had to land because he has no more petrol. They are different yet they look alike, so they look at each other, weigh each other, and in the end they love each other, impetuously, instinctively, among the gray and porous stones of that almost lunar region (and the drug, which she resorts to, gives the rite” size from love-in).
Then he, having found the petrol, returns to the base, with the intention of returning the plane (while she resumes her way to Phoenix), but at the airport, where they have mistaken him for an "air pirate" , a shot goes off that kills him. Upon hearing the news on the radio, all that remains is to imagine and dream of the destruction of that world that was their enemy.
Adverse destinies, sinister fatalities, men who are enemies of each other even without meaning to, even without fault: this is the new figure that Michelangelo Antonioni proposes to us, after the trilogy of incommunicability (The Adventure, The Night, The Eclipse) and after the restless but positive acceptance of life affirmed in Blow-Up.
The return to pessimism appears to be motivated by a more discouraged way of looking at things today: at the time of incommunicability, there were men and women who were unable to understand each other, to love each other; blow-up it indicated the era in which young people (studied in England to be the most typical samples of the youth of those years) accepted reality even under certain of its secret dimensions; today's film, on the other hand, tends to take stock of the moment in which the reality of the "real" world no longer accepts young people and rather rejects them.
Antonioni, however, did not develop this new theme with the intention of studying a social phenomenon. He proposed characters, once again typical, in his opinion, of a particular stage of our time, and made them act in their human and psychological context, explaining to us only what was needed to qualify them and, precisely, to typify them : the student environment from which he prevents, the backgrounds hippies which, in part, determine her. For the rest, for all the rest, he let them act in a direct way, meeting each other, loving each other, losing each other, in a climate that never wants to be entirely realistic and which, on the contrary, through the schemes of a fable, tends to reach the confines of a fairy tale: the fairy tale of a very easy love in a difficult world.
By entrusting these characters, with a crude and immediate style, to a simple and sparse narration which, after having accepted, for the presentation of their environments, the improvisations and chronicle rhythms of cinema verite, then unfolds in a slow flow of images in which things and people wear almost identical notes, merging into equal visual stamps that transform reality into a symbol, gradually clarifying the implicit meanings of that desolate desert, of those solitudes, of that love that first exalts and then dissolves into nothingness.
Certainly those who have admired the compact qualities of blow-up, its solid psychological construction, its stylistic splendor, will look here with open perplexity at the intentionally frail schemes of the story, at the deliberate absence of a traditional narrative system, with precise logical connections and firm structures; and even those who will accept the author's theses on today's young people and on those who wage war against them, will find it hard to see them really demonstrated by characters who, despite the clear references, are typical only up to a certain point of the American society from which they would like to express.
However, if the audience is disappointed in this, they will be convinced on several points by the film's figurative merits: those color images, for example, which, when they stop to trace certain slices of life almost from the Far West they look like old nostalgic watercolors and which, instead, when they synthesize, with posters and billboards, the various aspects of modern cities, are directly inspired by pop art (whose showy signs then return in the finale, when the girl imagines making blow up the symbols of the world that opposed them).
Even the sound must be carefully considered, due to the skilful juxtaposition of very modern rhythms with real sounds and, above all, with sudden, dazzled silences. And it's not just a matter of formal values: they are often inherent to the characters, to the feelings they have to illustrate, to the actions they underline or determine.
Da Il Tempo, March 29, 1970
John Grazzini
For about fifteen years Antonioni was with cinema the most subtle, albeit the most unfortunate, observer of the crisis in which the bourgeoisie is struggling, gripped by the throat from the anguish caused by the collision with the Machine and the impossibility of controlling a socio-economic process transferred from history into the hands of the Mass. Gradually widening the analysis from Italy to the world, from one class to the entire existential condition, Antonioni reached the bottom of pessimism with Blow-Up, in which contemporary man, to save himself, was invited to accept the game of life as a fiction: the civilization of the image, supreme solitude, barely left room for self-pity. Well, with Zabriskie Point today Antonioni opens another chapter, which renews his language, refreshes his inspiration and rekindles his enthusiasm.
Driven by his usual passion and seriousness, Antonioni lifts himself from the bitter contemplation of a gray and dull sentimental landscape, raises his eyes, looks around and discovers that the universal lament is no longer justified: the earth is turning crooked, but he has now found in the powder keg of young people a comfort to the desolation of existing, a dynamic virtue in which the perennial reinvention of life is expressed, with the continuous change of moral perspectives. To convince himself of this, Antonioni goes to the United States, picks up two restless young men, Mark and Daria, from the street, places them against the backdrop of a contradictory America, which hosts both consumerist madness and the delusions of anarchy, and in their brief encounter he sees a summary of the dramatic but fervent destiny awaiting the world of tomorrow.
Both young people are at odds with the system: she, tired of the environment in which she lives as secretary of a Los Angeles businessman, left by car in search of solitude; he, a drifting student, accused by his fellow revolutionaries of bourgeois individualism, after the death of a policeman in a clash at the University of Berkeley, stole a light plane and headed for the desert. After a crazy and poetic flirtation between heaven and earth, they join hands and reach Zabriskie Point, the panoramic terrace overlooking the Death Valley that stretches between Nevada and California, and here they immediately find the scent of love and play of freedom they were looking for.
But in the relationship that binds them for short hours there are new accents with respect to the romantic tradition. Their joyful joking and hugging each other is a way of dreaming, of inventing the future together with all those whom the old society rejects, be they blacks or hippies. Above all, it is the search for a victory over the neurosis of incommunicability, obtained by replacing the myth of the dollar and private well-being with the joy of feeling, intertwined with each other, in harmony with nature, a desert repopulated with flesh fruits and flowers , born of the earth and consumed by the earth.
Burnt by the sun, their idyll is over: driven by the love of risk, Mark, hunted by the keepers of Power, detaches himself from Daria and flies back to Los Angeles. The plane, painted with flowers, barely has time to land when the grip of iron and concrete immediately snaps: a policeman shoots, Mark dies instantly. Daria, having heard the news from the radio, reaches the luxurious villa where her businessmen are discussing new speculative plans, but she immediately leaves. Only she can imagine its explosion, in a pyre that drags all the objects produced by industrial civilization into a fantastic cosmic dance, she frees her from the nightmare. Here is an Antonioni heroine who finally smiles.
Though perhaps I say little or point again, Zabriskie Point is a beautiful film, which finds its polemical roots in Antonioni's ancient theme on the difficulty of contemporary living towards a society that is in many ways absurd and repressive (here the main target is waste and mechanisation), but dries them up and snappy to place the story of Mark and Daria in a lyrical space in which the mysterious sense of history prevails over social and political judgment, the anxiety of being reborn purged of innocence, trees and water, over the dark violence of death.
Anyone who has never spared reservations about Antonioni's cinema can say without suspicion that the American critics, in this case, have made a solemn blunder, out of content shortsightedness. Guided by a visual invention that is miraculous in purifying reality of every psychological waste to restore it to its primitive values, built with a narrative wisdom which, alternating dry and nervous tones with long meditative pauses, harmoniously leads the story from the raw documentary ways of the beginning to the memorable gimmick of the closing, the film is almost all persuasive (the only drawback, some dead time and some failure in the dialogue), but even fascinating in what is its poetic core: the love scenes lived and imagine in the Valley of Death, seen with the silent amazement of those who witness the miracle of the birth of forms from dust. It is here, in the mutual transition from reality to dream, rather than in sympathizing with the radical groups of the new left, that Zabriskie Point expresses its true nature as an angry and sad fairy tale, and Antonioni reveals, widening his breath and marrying softness with cruelty, the full flowering of an ingenuity that the America of young people and immense spaces has helped to get rid of the Po Valley anguish , transfiguring the unattainable hope of an understanding between reason and nature into melancholy. If we are not mistaken, only today, after having been among the most significant authors of intellectual cinema, Antonioni acquires full stature as an artist, communicates with the general public.
Read it as a portrait of the menacing things of America, sometimes just corrected by irony, or as a trembling caress on the face of desperate adolescents, such as the denunciation of the spiral of violence or the sobs of Europe on its museums, Zabriskie Point it is a film that strikes with the authentic weapons of poetry. Even if only specialists will be able to recognize its secret in editing, no one will be able to escape the enchantment that arouses the levity of this magical realism, the alliance between the simplicity of the symbol and the anosity of the sign, the emotional relationship between the environment and the characters in a panorama that, also thanks to the color photography of Alfio Contini, reaches its maximum expressive peak in gray, pink and light blue tones in the desert scenes, the spontaneous acting of the two unknown newcomers Mark Frechette (a former carpenter) and Daria Halprin, interpreters of themselves, the intelligent musical score of Pink Floyd.
Zabriskie Point is one of the most important films of the year. The only one, together with the Satyricon by Fellini and a few others, who leave no doubt about the vitality of Italian authors, and about the fact that there is no crisis for cinema as long as its images, kissed by grace, help us not to escape but to understand the world in which we live, albeit to suffer its indecipherable puzzles.
Da Corriere della Sera, March 20, 1970
Mino Argentieri
In Zabriskie point Antonioni captures some truths about American society but lets slip the thread of the future on the meter of a vision that is more poetic and figurative than critical. The strong limits of the screenplay
What do you think of America? Antonioni also answered the obligatory question for anyone, a stranger to that country, who wants to get to know it up close and judge it. The answer annoyed the American critics, in our opinion, for two reasons: because bourgeois and right-thinking people (such are the reviewers who earn their bread and their bread, working on behalf of the big US newspapers) do not admit that a European doubt the prosperity and superiority of the American capitalist way of life; and why they were scandalized by a film that transplants a theme dear tounderground in Hollywood cinema, the most expensive and prestigious.
Frankness for frankness, Antonioni doesn't excite us about this last one and we write it in clear notes. But the reasons are different from those of the American critics. Their accusation of superficiality is only a hypocritical reproach with which Antonioni is punished for having said unpleasant and unwelcome things about America. Obedience to an artificial dialectic of light and shadow was demanded of him, which would have served to reaffirm, in accordance with an inviolable norm in commodified American cinema, the resilience of the social and political system on its incurable contradictions.
Antonioni, on the other hand, has disappointed the expectations of commentators from overseas and composed a short poem on the irreparable decadence of the country of God, and the seed of hope has gone to fish among the younger generations and among those who react to the nonsense of a civilization dehumanized and struggle in a lacerating dissatisfaction.
Now, in our opinion, he has chosen the bearers of hope badly, juggling abused stereotypes and demonstrating, in the final analysis, that the paths of the American revolution (that is, of the future of America) are more evanescent than they are in reality which is in motion.
Mark and Daria are potential rioters. Mark, a student, participates in the struggles of his fellow university students, even if he is confused and if he is accused of petit-bourgeois individualism. Not without reason, since Mark is bored in discussions, he would rather throw his hands (but he doesn't lift a finger) and he doesn't mind the risk and the emotion. To be a revolutionary candidate, he is a humorous psychic of a literary kind, tender as a finch. Thoroughly criticisable, an example of revolutionary impotence and wishful thinking; but Antonioni is indulgent towards him and transfigures him.
She, secretary of a businessman is tempted to leave shack and puppets, boards of directors, offices perched on a skyscraper, a useless, boring and depersonalized job. Mark, after witnessing a clash with the police during which a Negro is killed and a policeman loses his skin, takes over a plane and takes off, to "get off the ground". Daria, aboard a car, looks for a kind of holy man and walks in the Valley of Death. The two destinies, which have unraveled in parallel, cross in the desert and love blossoms, the indomitable and ahistorical vital element.
Mark and Daria separate. Why is not clear, given that the two like each other and love each other. But the why is there. Without separation, how can Antonioni turn up the volume of the timeless motif of love and death, which pervades Zabriskie point close to a dense frame of notes written in the wake of the most updated, schematized and vulgarized sociological reflection on neo-capitalism?
Meanwhile, logic goes awry. To be a rebel. Mark is a strange guy and is determined to bring the aircraft back to the airport from which he stole it. Sense of ownership of others? Not even for a dream: spasms for the taste of adventure, and then there are script requirements that must be respected. Death must not be only metaphorical - otherwise who mourns over it? — but to materialize in a traumatic and moving event. The thread of love must break, to pinch the entrails, and therefore Mark senselessly throws himself into the lion's mouth and is electrocuted by the policemen as he is landing. Daria hears the news from the radio, goes near Phoenix, to the villa where her employer awaits her, and imagines blowing up the comfortable building, symbol of a mistaken and unfair society.
Zabriskie point (the title refers to the place where Mark and Daria meet) is the simplest and most linear film that Antonioni has made: which speaks in favor of the success it receives and perhaps it will be higher than the previous ones. Fascinating stylist, Antonioni weaves an elegiac apologue, which includes the best glimpses in the projection of a scenario of death. In Zabriskie point one breathes an icy air, like a science fiction fairy tale that takes place on the verge of a world plunged into catastrophe, atrophied and having reached a decisive turning point: the end has begun and the beginning of a new era is approaching, of which we can glimpse the embryos.
A forest of electronic instruments announces the petrification of consciences; aseptic architectures are wrapped in a cemetery silence; the guardians of order resemble, caparisoned by helmets with protective visors, new reincarnations of the Teutonic knights of the Nevsky, their violence is cold, implacable, automated, robotic. And the Valley of Death symbolizes no man's land, where the prehistory of humanity ends, but the foundations of history, that is, of tomorrow, do not arise. Nature has returned to year zero after the flood and only love breathes life into it,
Antonioni does not contradict himself either in the sincerity of his offended and resentful humanism, or in the aestheticism to which he stretches the rope. In his film, death is a beautiful death, ruin a bewitching ruin, tragedy an enchanting and rude tragedy. Contemplation and yearning have the pre-eminence and tend to play down and sow buoys suspended in the void; the history and concreteness of social conflicts undergo a process of rarefaction and obfuscation; the myth of innocence crushed and raped and of the vital instinct rises again as opposed to the old and new monuments of death and the elusive borders of the revolution.
The woodworm of decadentism is not inactive and illuminates the causes of dissent against neo-capitalist America, enmeshed in reservations that descend from the matrix of the remote past and barely touch a future project measured with the yardstick of scientific diagnosis. One can look at America with the aristocratic detachment and with the presumption of a European superiority, typical of the Cecchi of Bitter America and of Praz; one can look at it dazzled by the myth to which Pavese and Vittorini lent their faith and passion; but also to free himself from the myth, without being able to master and rationalize the matter of observation. This is what happens to Antonioni when he makes use of history and sociology, but leaves them in the background of the landscape to allow outdated feelings and pre-established convictions that have coagulated around a dated humanistic literature.
Antonioni doesn't always have the vocation of the analyst: if he doesn't lose it, he gives us x-rays like The adventure, if he loses it, he goes into the blind alley of Zabriskie point. Rather he is a poet and, in this respect, we have appreciated and admired Blow up in spite of his compromises with metaphysics. Also in Zabriskie point the reading key is poetic; but it is on the quality of this poem that we do not agree with the praise bestowed on Antonioni. There is too much "poveticism" mixed with glimpses of authentic lyricism (an example of authentic lyricism is the piece of the generalizing and fantastic multiplication of happy couplings).
Think of the banality of the episode of the red shirt that Mark throws at Daria from the plane and the idea of the skirmishes between the two means of transport. If this is not cinematographic gastronomy and novel engineering for young ladies, we are close. How to explain such slips and the ease of annotations on the loneliness of old people, on billboards (propinatic even by sexy — exploratory documentaries), on the former champion unearthed in the most unexpected place in America, on the selfishness and avarice of the shopkeepers, about the monstrosity of the children who besiege Daria and grope her?
How to explain the conventionality of the initial sequence, which seems removed from a film by Samperi on youth protest? At first glance, we explain it to ourselves by also finding in Zabriskie point the point dolens of many of Antonioni's films: a screenplay under the visual context of the work. The contradiction comes back to other incidents, to other misalignments, to other screeching. Antonioni conceives through images and makes the mistake of neglecting the dramaturgical and conceptual component of his films. The constitutional defect, in Zabriskie point, however, is aggravated by a marked romantic revival, which makes this a film set back from the situations it evokes and closed in a vision that oscillates complacently between eros, death and revolution, seeing the most dubious and smoky signs of this, as is fitting to romance.
Whatever our friends and colleagues think, whose enthusiasm we do not associate with, Zabriskie point it is a cultural rehashing for the use and consumption of the most discerning gills of the film consumption industry: it picks up on the repertoires and languors of "hippy" literature and does not notice that even on those sides there are symptoms of a participation in responsibility and in change social; one plays with escapes and suspended times of meditation, which history overcomes and marginalizes every day; lingers on a poetics of discomfort and polishes it to the level of middle cultures. where theunderground American expressed it with disruptive incisiveness and delirious fantasy; stirs in the trunk of love as a source of freedom and joy and is unaware of repeating idyllic hypotheses, libertarian and playful, which are less young than they appear and turn the dissolution of very intricate social knots into a simplistic utopia; it abandons itself to a symbolic explosive pop-informal, figuratively suggestive finale. but which has the imprint of a compensatory and anarchic outburst and a sticky and emotional solution.
Naturally, Antonioni is always Antonioni, just as Fellini is always Fellini and Visconti is always Visconti. Style saves them from the edge of the ravine. The death of Mark, in Zabriskie point, is a page of true cinematography poetry; the scenes of student unrest, shot live, are chilling and so are the sequences in which the excessive power of the police and the advent of a repressive and coercive regime are exemplified. The canvas fascinates and it is logical that it happens, since Antonioni is an excellent painter of cinema.
Nonetheless, the expenditure of pictorial and descriptive talent does not free us from the feeling that, like Fellini and Visconti, Antonioni too is in the throes of a crisis that his stay in America has not helped to resolve. The three greats of Italian cinema are in crisis: of this we are sure and theirs is not a crisis of tiredness or artistic senility but of a critical angle that is affected by the delay with which respectable creators keep pace with changes, in social life and cultural.
Da Rebirth, 3 April 1970
Philip Sacchi
Every day we see more and more that we have never been misinformed in the world as in this era in which, as the means of communication offered by the earth are no longer enough, those of heaven are also used. What did you understand from the first reports of the American public's reactions on Zabriskie Point? Who had irritated and scandalized the way in which Antonioni had defamed American youth, portraying them as a lost generation of idlers and drug addicts, rebels against society, and society itself as a monstrous Moloch who strangles and crushes everything, ideas and cans, men and dollars.
Now, of course, the social forest is also at the basis of this work by Antonioni, as indeed in all times, in one form or another, explicit or latent, it was always at the basis of every work of creation and of thought. He does not at all pretend to give a panoramic and collective image of American youth. At the beginning, we only witness a protesting meeting of young people of various tendencies, who agree only in seeking a subversive tactic of social struggle, but disagree in means and ends. No trace of drugs, but if anything of intelligence. On the other hand, in a very short scene, lasting a few minutes and, by coincidence, who emerges, who will detach themselves and impose themselves on our attention, what we will follow to the end is a block, one who later, when it is time to shoot against a policeman, he will hesitate, so he will be preceded by another, and then he will leave alone, for an escape from which he will return to die.
Mark (actor Mark Frechette) goes to a parking lot for private planes, grabs one and turns towards the desert. We are in fact in Los Angeles, and the desert is nearby. Its route follows the great road that a girl, Daria (actress Daria Halprin) is traveling by car at that moment, to go to an appointment in a luxury hotel, built to offer the lucky ones invigorating holidays in the desert (desert with swimming pool, golf, choice cuisine, bar, etc.), not far from the famous Zabriskie Point. In the desert, a woman getting out of a car can be seen immediately.
Mark sees her and when Daria gets back into the car he starts playing chase after her. He passes her close to the roof, goes up, twirls, comes back, passes her next to her: he makes so many of her that, curious, the girl stops. Landing, two steps. Why wouldn't they go as far as Zabriskie Point which is, so to speak, the lookout over the famous Death Valley? They go there. Below lies the valley which is said to be a sea bed that emerged millennia earlier and remained intact. They go down the slope. They laugh, they chase each other, they fall on top of each other. They embrace.
Here you will say: "I understand, here we are". Instead, imperceptibly, everything shifts to a magical and hallucinatory level. Because they really embrace, cling to each other, kiss, bite, slip on the rocks, curl up against the boulders, roll back to infinity. And strangely they are partly naked, partly dressed. Until at a certain point, as if by an optical game, they split into two couples, and then they go back to being a single couple, and then two again, and in the meantime it is as if little by little we were lifting ourselves into the air and the landscape little by little it revealed itself more and more in all its ghostly whiteness of death, and then you will realize that on all the other slopes of the valley other couples, ten, twenty, thirty couples, all similar to the first, are wrapped around each other in an embrace. And suddenly we find ourselves out of time, a thousand years behind or a thousand years ahead, when on the planet, struck by men, naked human generations will sprout up to multiply in other millennia, until a new destruction.
This gives you the idea of the level of detachment and historical anguish, so far from polemical gossip, on which Antonioni bases his protest. And when, with an almost magical art of passing, he brings us back to reality, and Mark and Daria separate, and Mark, landing in Los Angeles, will find two balls of policemen who will nail him in the cockpit, just because they suspect a crime that he has not committed, and Daria learning it will have a fit of hatred and rebellion against the society that condemns and sends to death because its law requires that someone be condemned and sent to death: here, once again, with a magical, almost Ariosto-esque power of transition from the real to the absurd, the film is transformed again, instantaneously, into an allegory. In front of Daria's hallucinated rage, all the sacred symbols of the affluent society jump: the luxury hotel jumps, the advertising puppets jump, the billboards, the refrigerators, the radios, the super sports cars, the baby toys. It is the apocalypse of a world translated into a fireworks display, of a dizzying coloristic virtuosity: a dazzling final swirl of a civilization.
I hope I have managed to clarify to the reader that here we are already in the class of absolute cinema.
Da The Corriere della Sera, 5 April 1970
Alberto Moravia
In Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni many thought they noticed a certain disproportion between the slender love story and the final apocalypse. Indeed, if you read the film as a love story, the disproportion is undeniable. Two guys meet by chance, they love each other and after being together for a couple of hours (the time strictly necessary to make love in a not entirely brutal way) they separate. She continues the journey by car to the villa of the businessman whose secretary she is. He returns to the airport from which he took off, to return the plane he stole there. Bad luck has it that upon landing, the police shoot and kill him. The girl learns of her partner's death from the car radio. And then, in her indignant grief, she imagines that the businessman's villa is reduced to ashes by a thermonuclear explosion.
Especially since the boy's death does not appear to be the result of one of those terrifying American situations of conformism and hypocrisy so often denounced by the novel and cinema of the United States. Mark, it is true, is killed by the police; but his death seems and perhaps is almost a mistake, a coincidence, a fatality.
But there is another way to read the film. In this reading, the love story is but one aspect among many of something very vast and important; just as the police error is also only a detail of a much broader and more complex picture.
In other words, the reading shouldn't be done in the sense of a traditional narrative, with a beginning, a development and a conclusion; but as the representation of the conflict of two opposing worldviews.
read like this, Zabriskie Point it then appears as a balanced film which perhaps only suffers from being, albeit only apparently, "also" a love story.
What is the basic contrast that constitutes the propulsive and truly interesting element of this singular film?
Perhaps Antonioni was not fully aware of this. Perhaps, as is generally the case with artists, he arrived on his behalf, with the "unconscious" means of artistic intuition, to the same conclusions that others had already reached with critical thought.
But there is no doubt, in any case, that the film foreshadows the well-known conflict between the Freudian life instinct and the death instinct. Eros e Thanatos and (perhaps more exactly) between the ludic conception and the utilitarian conception of life.
Seen from this perspective, the story of Zabriskie Point it is organized and articulated in a coherent manner, without any disproportion and thinness.
Life, play, pleasure are activities that are an end in themselves, they have no other purpose than life, play, pleasure.
This explains why Mark, the contestant boy, also contests the contestation, which still has a purpose; and then you steal the plane just for the sake of somersaulting in the sky; and therefore court Daria only because it's fun to court an airplane with a woman who races in a car; and finally make love with the girl because it's nice to play with your own body and with the body of others.
The girl, for her part, acts in the same way: for fun, for pleasure, without, it is appropriate to say, ulterior motives.
This meeting of the two games, of the two Eros, culminates in lovein imaginary, among the sands of Death Valley. What does that scene mean? It means that one should always do so; what play and Eros make one communicate and love; that in short, life should have no other purpose than life.
But the valley where the lovein takes place is a place of thirsty aridity, of complete lifelessness. Not for nothing is it called Death Valley.
And here the death instinct appears, which is opposed by the life instinct, Eros, the game for its own sake.
This instinct is exemplified in many ways throughout the film. It is the police who storm the university; it is the airport where the airplanes are kept, instruments of freedom and play; he is Daria's boss with his building speculation business; it is the village where only decrepit old men and handicapped boys live; it is the grotesque bourgeois family which, stopping on the edge of the Valley of Death, hopes that a "drivein" will arise as soon as possible; they are the businessmen who in the villa of Daria's boss discuss the best way to exploit the beauties of the desert for tourism; finally, the policemen, similar to robots or Martians, who, as Mark lands, kill him for no reason.
Thus the conflict would end, like so many old and recent American films, such as Easy Rider, as Bonnie e Clyde, with the victory of Thanatos su Eros, of utility over play, of death over life.
At this point, however, out of any traditional narrative logic (although already anticipated and prepared by the visionary collective love-in of the Valley of Death) Antonioni's prophetic fury.
Daria imagines that a thermonuclear explosion destroys the villa.
The repetition of the explosion, so pleased and so ruthless, suggests that for Daria the villa is the symbol of the entire consumerist civilization and confirms, if needed, that the film is not only a love story but also and above all, the expression of a feeling of harsh and polemical refusal, according to the European tradition of respect for the human person, which, however, seems to lead to the same conclusions as the Freudian-Marxist diagnoses formulated by the contestation.
Thus the dialectical and psychoanalytical conception of evil as repression is curiously reunited with the moralistic conception of evil as impiety.
It turns out that the Bible and the Gospel had said the same things about Freud and Marx. The link between these two conceptions converging towards the same sentence, must be sought, in Zabriskie Point, in the apocalyptic conclusion.
Of course, the apocalypse is an ancient and far-fetched punishment. But the thermonuclear catastrophe, rendered perhaps fatal by the very internal logic of civilization, has finally restored to it a menacing actuality and verisimilitude.
All the originality of Zabriskie Point lies in this ending, in this prophecy of the atomic disaster that will "punish" the consumerist civilization for having allowed Thanatos prevailed over Eros.
Clearly, America appeared to Antonioni as the place where the end, i.e. man, becomes the means and the means, i.e. profit, becomes the end. Where things are worth more than people even though they are made for people. Where, finally, this fatal reversal of values took place, so to speak, "in good faith", through the mysterious ways of a good (industrial civilization) which in the end turned out to be an evil.
In short, America is an arid place like the desert of Zabriskie Point, in which it is impossible to love and be loved. But what is love if not life itself in its original form? So America, as it is today, is hostile to life.
Here we come to the real substance of the controversy between Antonioni and the American critics.
What critics have reproached Antonioni is not so much for having condemned America as for not having justified the condemnation in a "rational" way.
We take Greed, Stroheim's memorable film, also set partly in the same symbolic Death Valley. The avarice which, according to the director, would undermine the civilization of the United States, is still a serious and plausible reason.
And in a movie like Bonnie e Clyde the two protagonists are at least two authentic gangsters, whose revolt, perhaps justified, could not however fail to end in a catastrophe.
Instead Mark and Daria are just two lovers. Antonioni weighed an entire civilization against love and found it wanting.
According to American critics this operation is illegitimate; a slender idyll cannot serve as a detonator at the end of the world.
But we have already shown that this way of reading of Zabriskie Point, favored, it must be admitted, by the director himself with his metaphorical technique, is neither right nor profitable.
In any case, even if we want to accept the superficial and inattentive thesis of the flirtation which unleashes the apocalypse, in our opinion we need to consider this disproportion between cause and effect not so much as a defect but as the distinctive character that gives originality and novelty to Antonioni's film.
Indeed. Films critical of America have been made at all times and it must be recognized that the first to highlight and condemn the negative aspects of the "American way of life" were American directors.
It will suffice to recall, for example, the aforementioned Easy Rider, in which American racist and conformist intolerance is denounced with a violence of which there is no trace in Zabriskie Point.
Yet the American critics did not attack at all Easy Rider, in reverse. Why this? Why neither in Easy Rider, nor in any other American or European film about the United States was the new and shocking hypothesis ever proposed that a "moralistic" fire could one day destroy the proud modern Babylon, i.e. the United States.
In short, consciously or not, Zabriskie Point is a biblical-type prophecy in movie form. In times when religion still mattered, this kind of prophecy was the norm. Four centuries ago, a painting like the one in which Durer represented Lot, his wife and daughters walking calmly along a rocky path while, on the horizon, torrents of smoke and flames rise to the sky from the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, it described something that had long been thought could actually happen.
Antonioni is probably not a great reader of the Bible, although, obviously, unconscious, remote cultural archetypes have acted in him. But Americans read it or at least have read it until yesterday. It was precisely the disproportion between the detonating idyll and the final conflagration that made them suspicious. They felt that this was not one of the usual controversial sociological judgments but a "prophecy". Hence their reaction.
Cinema is usually narrative, that is, it tells of events that occur over time.
The structural originality of Zabriskie Point it lies precisely in the final curse that throws the film out of narrative duration by means of a powerful moral spurt.
The apparent lack of relationship between the joyful and unaware banquet of the biblical king of Chaldea, Belshazzar, and the mysterious hand writing on the wall the three prophetic words "Manes, Thecel, Phares" (King of Babylon, you must die). No sociological inquiry warned Belshazzar that at the peak of prosperity and power, his kingdom would be invaded by the Medes, and Darius would kill him and take his place on the throne of Babylon.
As in Zabriskie Point even in the biblical story the cause of the catastrophe is not explicitly indicated; but it can be assumed that Baldassarre had crossed without realizing it, in the same way as the Puritan civilization of the United States, the mysterious and controversial boundaries that separate good from evil.
Proof that this is the true meaning of Zabriskie Point it lies, as usual, in its aesthetic success, verifiable in each sequence.
For example: notations on urban life in Los Angeles, descriptive glimpses of American "big business"; the love between the airplane and the car, in the desert; the embraces in the Valley of Death; Mark's death upon his return to the airport, certainly the coolest thing about the film.
But the strong point is still the final catastrophe imagined by Daria when, like Lot's women, she looks back at her boss' villa and sees it explode, disintegrate.
Antonioni wanted to represent the disintegration that had already occurred in our culture with cinematic images: and he succeeded with the memorable final sequence of destruction. All those products of the consumer civilization, from books to cars, from canned goods to clothing, from household appliances to the mass media, which crumble amidst the smoke and flames after the villa has exploded and, projected into the sky , slowly fall down like the ashes and lapilli of an eruption; they give very well the idea of an industrial and technological apocalypse caused by the definitive victory of death over life in our industrial and technological civilization.
There are two stanzas in the astrological centuries of Nostradamus that seem to describe the thermonuclear ending of Antonioni's film:
The finger of fate writes and passes, having written
And neither your mercy nor your wisdom,
They can make it half a line off
Nor all your tears that it erases a single word
The great city will be devastated,
None of the inhabitants will survive,
Wall, sex, temple and violated virgin,
By iron, fire, plague, cannon the people will die.
Antonioni certainly does not "desire" the end of the world; just as, in all probability, Nostradamus did not "want" it. Instead, you have to see Zabriskie Point the recovery, for the purpose of poetry, of a "genre" that could be supposed by now extinct: that of prophecy, prophecy, eschatological vision.
This recovery is all the more remarkable as it was carried out by an artist who until now had kept his vision of the world within the limits of an individual thematic. Actually, with the final explosion of Zabriskie Pointquite logically, Antonioni's art also exploded.
The future will tell us whether the director in his future films will take this explosion into account or, as often happens, will take up and develop new themes both in opposition to “Zabriskie” and instead in completely new directions.
Da The European, 25 May 1970
Guido Aristarchus
Blow-Up e Zabriskie Point, beyond any judgment of value and artistic comparison, two key films in the author's work. Looking at his vision of the world, the former closes a period, that of the "adventure of the soul" at the center of the previous tetralogy; and the second - which confirms exceptional expressive qualities, profound and beautiful intuitions - opens another. Already in Blow-Up there were noticeable changes. In challenging a certain way of "making cinema" and photography as the primary element of cinema itself, the director gave the man a nature and weight that was denied in favor of the woman, in the background before Thomas, the main character so linked to his own "camera", to the photographic apparatus, to be pushed "to the point of heroism, the passivity of a witness".
The protagonist, not a witness, is intended to be Antonioni di Zabriskie Point. "My new film will represent for me a more open moral and political commitment," she had promised; «for us directors it is a question of finding a new agreement between reality and imagination». In Zabriskie Point man continues to be, afterwards Blow-Up, the main character, but contrary to Thomas who believes he sees and does not see, precisely because he carries the passivity of a witness to the point of heroism and thus becomes metaphorically blind, Mark wants to see and sees, at least within certain limits; and at the same time his weight balances that of the woman.
Daria, with a "positive" dialectical relationship. For the first time in Antonioni the man is more reflective, more receptive than the woman. As the architect de The adventure, the novelist de The night and the engineer de Il red desert, Mark is also an intellectual. But, contrary to them, he is not immersed in "boredom" and "inattention" understood as a detachment from reality; he is not degraded into an object and he in turn does not degrade woman into an object. Nonconformist and protester, he is willing to give his life to help change the world, he feels the need to do something immediately: he likes to take risks as when, at the beginning, he participates in the university occupation and, in the end, he returns the plane that he had "stolen" to "get off the ground".
Analogously to those of his group, from which he also disagrees (precisely because he rejects "long periods", "theory", waiting), he is linked to reality, or at least that's how he wants to be: he rejects the dream, the "imagination ” resulting from drugs and gives up the cigarette with marijuana that Daria offers him.
Even Mark's soaring in the air, like Daria's journey in a car bought by a friend, turns out to be an illusion. The desert and the valley, despite having the dimensions of the allegory - an expressive element always present in Antonioni - reject the meaning of contrast assumed by the "pink beach", of coral in Il deserto rosso, and Vittoria's flight in an airplane The eclipse. In that place of death, perhaps not even the embrace between the two takes place, it is not real, but imagined by Daria in her dream of sexual freedom.
The physical and inner aridity that surrounds the two young men is already underlined by the megalopolis where the numerous and immensely sized billboards submerge men and houses, and by the desert bar where Daria stops to call: the decrepit ex boxing champion, the elderly customer nailed to the chair who smokes and drinks beer with mechanical gestures, are fossils, inert matter like the mannequins of beautiful women and well-fed children who from television invite you to leave «that sunny asylum in the city ».
It's true, Mark too will be defeated, and we learn the causes: his isolation from the group, from the others, despite having made the choice to belong to one side rather than another, aware that it is necessary to identify the enemy in order to fight him; his wanting to do something right away, anything. The rebellion is individual, abstract, in a certain sense romantic.
However, defeat leads to positive outcomes. From the meeting with Mark, Daria becomes aware of her own restlessness in living in the environment in which she lives, and opposes it, turns her back, after seeing it explode in her imagination, no longer under the influence of marijuana. During the explosions that follow one another in Daria's imagination, first slowly and then with an accelerated frequency and finally with movements, the images from the shape of the atomic mushroom take on informal and pop aspects; in an almost cosmic space, mass media (books, newspapers, TV) and consumer goods and everything else are reduced to weightless floating tangles and fragments. Here too the allegory has a different meaning from the blinding lamp that filled the entire screen at the end of de The eclipse.
We are no longer faced with the "colors of anguish", and of the anguish of the characters in Antonioni's tetralogy, assumed as universal paradigms.
It is a world that explodes this time, not the world. More than a "biblical prophecy" it seems to us the observation of a future that has already begun, the beginning of an era in which many of us are unable to evaluate and master a "phenomenology based on an enormous quantity of images". "The major advances of civilization are the processes that destroy the societies in which they occur," says the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
Antonioni in presenting us with this enormous quantity of images, this phenomenology that many are beginning to no longer know how to evaluate and master, the result to which "symbol, communication and consumption" want to lead us, does not say nor does he presume to say new things; but the way in which he dramatizes the material is important on the level of cultural judgment, and unusual on an expressive level.
Making the magma flash before our eyes in a positively provocative dimension, linking ecology to the manipulation of the authentic and to a process of “alienation”. "Extraordinarily vital phenomena are manifesting themselves everywhere", she says, "and it is possible and desirable that the world in the coming years will be different from today".
Da Cinema New; XIX, no. 205, May-June 1970, pp. 205210
Tullio Kezich
Zabriskie Point marks the lowest point of geological depression in the United States. By choosing this title for his film, Michelangelo Antonioni wanted to give it a symbolic meaning: the United States is going through the deepest crisis in its history. At 58, the Italian director shakes off the existential pessimism of his most famous works and unreservedly marries the cause of young people: the consumer society is condemned to explode, to give way to new forms of life.
As in the times of translations and essays by Vittorini and Pavese, America continues to be «the gigantic theater where everyone's drama is represented more frankly than elsewhere»: Antonioni moves in the Americanist tradition of Italian culture, he too takes the USA as a dilated and flashy metaphor of our reality.
There is no shortage in Zabriskie Point crude notations on the second American Civil War, still ongoing between police on one side and students and blacks on the other; nor are pages of refined figurative lyricism lacking. But it seems to us that the bond between sociological observation and fantastic transfiguration does not take place: so that the film develops on two floors, one embarrassing for the other, and in the juxtaposition of truth and poetry it sins youthfully of naivety.
From Tullio Kezich, The Thousand Movies. Ten years at the cinema 1967-1977, Il Anteater Editions
Godfrey fofi
Judging by American New Left magazines, it's not that Easy Rider both very liked, over there. Opinions differ on Antonioni: a rare few aggressively pit him against Hopper, telling the latter to go to school with the Ferrara native to understand how films about young US people are made, while most criticize them both as fake. The bourgeoisie and the young crowd the halls where Hopper is given, they desert Antonioni. From us too Easy Rider he is much more successful, but Antonioni has the advantage of a visual identification with our advanced bourgeoisie and conquers this share of the reserve.
Neither of the two films convinces us too much, but while the first, together with everyone, strikes us for the strength of a testimony that seems to us quite genuine despite its non-generalizability, the second seems to us to be the work of a constantly provincial director, despite the effort of less emptiness than Blow Up. From a moral point of view, we confess a bias against Antonioni due, in order: to his attitudes of great suffering; at the cost of the film (four and a half billion, with personal appanage of three hundred and more million, and two years of production) especially when compared to that of Hopper's film, born at home and on the cheap; to his ever-present tendency to maximum problems that he manages very badly to control (like nine out of ten Italian directors, who always start off aiming at the sun, to face God Revolution Life Humanity Apocalypse, with the immense ability to transform them into shit and find themselves in the end with his ass on the ground) since he abandoned an autobiography which, moreover, he understood well that it would now be unsustainable; finally to his perpetually approximate being (like ten out of nine Italian directors).
Antonioni in the USA has tried to essentialize an enormous subject, to offer the gist of a historical-social turning point of immense significance, the end of a myth and the tiring birth of the new. He resorted to dreams, utopias, prophecies, abstractions through fairy tales. But few directors are less inclined to abstraction than him, fundamentally sentimental and incapable of seeking and discovering the not so secret but certainly dialectical thread of a specific analysis. Until now, up to the symbolism of the Ravenna film and the London film, he had rightly limited himself to narratives of behavior, to small stories but with the pretension of "illuminating" from a great historical-philosophical-sociological vision.
Without a method of analysis (which can only be Marxist, but, let's grant, also bourgeois with Marxist influence, if intelligent) and rightly dissatisfied with his old means, he wavered in search of a denser way to face the impressive magma and shocking that was in front of him, and he tried to reduce it all to a fairy tale that was extremely significant, yet immediate in its absolute simplicity. But simplicity in this case could only be a gift from the gods of history, and the fairy tale, diluted in fairy-tale morality, all melted into banality devoid of immediate significance as well as that (productive) ambiguity which would allow richer levels of reading.
To find the right relationship between metaphor and realism, which is the only one that should be of interest in cinema today, Antonioni essentially resorted to his, shall we say, poetic vein, much more than to analysis and its essential and non-essential concretization reductive in subject, convinced as always of being able to get to the bottom of the bottoms of the problems by poetic instinct. The clichés of American analytical cinema, of Marcuse's literature (the booklet Daria takes out of her purse is certain to be Marcuse, according to a typically Antonionian-culturalistic convention), of youth protests, of off-Broadway theater and of off-Hollywood cinema, as well as the clichés of the cinematic geography of the classics, parade before us causing a tremendous impression of already seen, lu et knownwith the difference that this operation of synthesis, this evasion into the unmediated totality, is far more presumptuous, more irritating than all the things it remembers or manipulates. (And please let's forget the spurious-sweet symbols and values with which the film is littered).
The futility of the operation (and its enormity) demonstrate once again how scarce and cheap (but highly paid) are the alleged revolution and the alleged suffering of certain directors. Tied to the bourgeois existential unease of a firm and coexistent neo-capitalist era, apparently devoid of a non-"alienated" future, Antonioni believed like many other "poets" before and after him that his unease could perennially represent that of the world and of history and was not at most that of a class in a precise time (according to a shameless verse of a narcissus, which almost all uncontrolled bourgeois poets sooner or later rewrite, "he wept and suffered for everyone was his motto") and, stimulated by certain unconscious philosophers, he took himself more and more seriously.
When he saw that history didn't stop at all, especially that of the revolution, he desperately tried to catch up, but without rediscovering the values of modesty at all. Wasn't being a poet enough for him to grasp and then render the whole and the essence of him? Hearing him speak today of a revolutionary prophecy (taken on by that other Banalone from Moravia) can only make us smile: irreparably out (unless there is a more serious revolution of which, however, like eleven out of ten Italian directors, our Isaia seems constitutionally incapable) he can only mix the well-known, with the slick touch of a Vogue photographer, the doctoral haste of a Life columnist and the bad metaphysics of an Antonioni film, and when his thoughts don't make everyone cry out to the masterpiece, withdrawing into the disdainful and useless sadness of the misunderstood artist. Business of him.
Da Piacenza notebooks, n. 41, 1970
Georges Sadul
The protagonists are two young Americans. Mark (Mark Flechette) is a university student tired of protest, fascinated by the idea of "getting off the ground": for this he steals a plane and tries to find his release in flight. Daria (Daria Halprin) is a city-weary office worker who seeks an escape on the deserted streets of the province.
Both escape from the reality of their usual daily life towards new dimensions. Their destinies meet. After a day spent in the light of freedom and love in Death Valley, Mark is killed by the cops. Daria abandons herself to the imagination of a global contestation of reality. She meditates to explode what represents her power for her: from the villa of her employer, to the shelves of books, to the rich wardrobes.
Antonioni, interpreting the condition of young Americans, constructs an apologue against capitalist society. Shot with skill making the most of the means that American cinematographic technique offers, Zabriskie Point, opposed by American critics, but also by European ones, still represents a stage in Antonioni's poetics, continually sensitive in portraying the existential charge and the search for being of his characters, always individuals, but never extraneous to the society that surrounds them .
Da Movie dictionary, Florence, Sansoni, 1968
Nicola Ranieri
The almost continuous, dominant mobility of the camera characterizes the construction of the sequences throughout this first part of the film. At the initial overviews, indoors, slow or fast, horizontal or oblique, alternated by the succession of barely perceptible cuts of shots which, presenting the figure now on the right now on the left, give the impression of camera movements, follow those, outdoors, of gigantic billboards, of heterogeneous colors and materials: the accelerated, and therefore very fast and distorting, turn of the camera gives a circular motion to wandering around the urban spatial limits, a whirling rotation.
There are also shots that flatten the images in the sagittal direction and others of slightly concave (the rear-view mirror) or convex (the front bonnet) reflecting surfaces which, despite being "fixed", capture the "mobility" of reality, contract or they dilate the space; they seem to perform the same function (for example) as the monuments with stainless steel material by Attilio Pierelli, conceptually linked to the theory of relativity, to the "visualization" of non-Euclidean geometries. In the car, Allen and another manager like him, while talking about the records of billionaires, are flattened between the reflection of the buildings and signs on the paint of the bonnet and that of the traffic on the glass of the rear view mirror.
The incessant syncopated mobility - of the camera or of the reflection of shapes and colors - are followed by tracking shots on the desert: the relaxation of what is contracted. A different geometry describes points, lines, parabolas, their intersection in a different medium, the "void". Which is, at the same time, allegorical signifier of the indeterminacy in the establishment of relationships and space created hypothetically to experiment with chance and necessity, without the deafening friction of "noise" and dispersive counter-forces; it opposes the “full” medium, in which vain wandering dominates, which apparently gives it meaning.
Two characters, united by the flight to «think their thoughts» or to «get off the ground», are “isolated” from the emerging “new”, “abstracted” and placed in another context, where they are “casually” brought together, to see what form of necessity arises and what consistency, in terms of awareness and lucidity, has the "new" that also expresses itself through them; indeed, they are the extreme points. Moreover, after the initial phase of their interaction, in the Mojave desert, the environment changes further with a greater rarefaction of the "full", the verification takes place at Zabriskie Point, in nothing".
Three places and spaces therefore.
The Metropolitan chaotic-strident: Los Angeles, megalopolis par excellence, born for "self-germination", unruly, noisy, violent, a magma of metal structures, colors, debris, pylons; industrial landscape of advertising and business, governed by police and private arms for the defense of property in the name of order.
The desert, periphery of the former which tends to take possession of it by unloading all sorts of useless materials: old, now useless, like the former boxing champion; traumatized and violent children; carcasses of cars and musical instruments; old american dreams, underlined by Tennessee Waltz — the motif sung by Patti Page –; the entire Ballister scene exemplifies this. Or, it is "valued", again as a "gold" vein, in Phoenix (for example) where the Sunnydunes of Los Angeles builds the "holiday paradise".
Finally, the desert in the desert, his “heart” so to speak, Zabriskie Point, impracticable, unlivable; “nothing”, absence of life, as the sign says. “An area of ancient lakes, dried up five to ten million years ago. Their beds have been pushed up by underground forces and eroded by wind and water. They contain borate and gypsum." This differentiated spatiality, to which different geometries correspond, does not extend by linear contiguity, but proceeds discontinuously as by successive, circular, inscribed and concentric stratifications; starting from the superficial, flashy, deafening one, it passes through the median - Ballister and Phoenix -, reaches the internal one where thinking is possible.
«Making a void out of fullness» This seems to be one of the fundamental rules of Antonioni's cinema. Underlying here too is the disposition of "places", which take on a temporal value and become similar to "moments", levels towards depth, knowledge. The journey unites and differentiates the two characters. Both have the desire to escape from the discomfort they feel in the first layer of reality; they are looking for another reference system to think or to see from above, in order to relativize a sphere that appears absolute at first sight. They head, one towards the "place" of meditation; towards that of solitude, where one can prove one's consistency, the other.
The latter more for the idea of recklessness, risk, rebellious impatience, wishful thinking, will return to Los Angeles to be killed having experienced the impossibility of action even in the desert and not before turning it into provocative radicalism. The frustration of acting vows him to death from the outset and reveals the persistence of the same identity: "ready to die, but not of boredom". Daria, on the other hand, to escape, used as she is to artificial travel, to drugs, to country rock music, she keeps her company: she refuses to listen to news, she tunes the radio to situations that always broadcast the same musical genre; she wants to be alone and leave everyday life behind for a while, wander.
The paths of these two souls of individualism "casually" intersect. A determination arises: Mark's impossibility, or incapacity, to act turns into self-destruction; research, progressive lucidity are triggered in Daria. She is the character in which the "new" is synthesized, for different stages, highlights itself. Red and yellow become its internal conflict with a dominance, finally, of the first, but both are contained in the enigma of light. The "new" is a magma which, in successive stages, shows its dominants self-critically overturning; however, the result is not a certainty, nor a fixed point, if anything, a movement towards knowability.
The journey through the "places, similar to moments", is revealed in Zabriskie Point structural element connected to the rule of "empty a full". Of allegory, in the sense attributed by Walter Benjamin to this "figure", it has the fundamental characteristics: the "decisive" temporal category of a movement that sinks towards the "primeval" landscape, the enigma and ontological mediation; although Antonioni is not tied to theology, to which Benjamin instead refers to distinguish the allegorical from the symbolic, which has profane origins. Within the secular vision of the director, this "figure" allows spatiality to be built along a temporal axis towards depth, as if eliminating what is initially conspicuous. But the semiotic structure of history and discourse does not direct space and time towards the "primordial" and, therefore, towards the pre-existing "divine light"; but in the sense of emptying; towards cognitive inexhaustibility, the enigma of light.
Going through spatialized moments is equivalent to a procedure in which the following layer "illuminates" the previous one, without the desire for the beyond to calm down.
«A city can be seen from the periphery». This reflection by Benjamin seems applicable to Los Angeles. The magmaticity of the megalopolis, which appears - in the surface "place" - entirely cohesive, reveals itself, observed from the second layer, from its desert periphery, as an artifice (Phoenix), as wrecks and outcasts (Ballister). But that's not enough. The rarefaction of the "full" and the disarticulation of the apparently cohesive continue: the further verifications take place in an increasingly coherent "continuous" space. Zabriskie Point it materializes the concept of emptiness, it is the abstract in a real situation; the third layer towards the depth, where the component substances are visible - borate and gypsum - the beds of "lakes dried up five to ten million years ago": the very root of the desert, "the primeval landscape" as zeroing of the urban one .
In this different medium - according to another geometry - the two characters interact, or better still, the concepts in which they reach extremes. The love of one the action at any cost of the other - both mirror reverses, direct or indirect, of the private and police violence of the "opulent society" - disaggregated from the original context, removed from the "noise", they are "chemical" reagents that reciprocally visualize each other as a game of love or death.
If the second layer reveals - decontextualizing them from the apparent organization - the artificiality and consumerism of the first, the third verifies the consistency of the ways of rebelling or of dreaming up an alternative idea, not before arriving on the journey towards the "primeval" , to the substances making up the desert.
Coming out of a cave, Mark shows Daria what's in his hand. "Hey! Look what I found.' «Borato?», she asks approaching and, while he nods, she licks the thin and transparent stone, looking through it, she kisses him; then he observes the white veining of a hill: «And what is that plaster?». “Salt isn't,” Mark replies.
Cut. Lying on the ground facing an arid valley and the corrugations that surround it, «Do you want to come with me?», «Where!», she exclaims; «Wherever I go», «Are you asking me seriously?», «Do you answer me seriously?». On Mark's last question the love scene begins in a natural way, which "is" at the maximum point of "depth"; it draws on the primeval sources of the formation of the world, the root of being. And it seems to be about dying and regenerating the possible: a movement of the camera from a dried stream stops for a moment on two heads of petrified lovers, one with the color of the components of the desert. Cut to: Mark and Daria are in love.
Their love has a "place", the bottom of the valley, where they arrived descending a corrugation, each with a synthetic gesture of the concept he carries. He, rushing, challenging the risk, remains motionless for a few moments, lying with open arms, foreshadows death. After taking a cigarette to smoke, she calmly follows a less impervious path. From the bottom they will rise, going against the sun, small, distant, again on the top of the corrugation; they will re-emerge where they left the car, they will walk (in a flattened perspective shot) “above” the red color of a cabin.
Having arrived, each according to their previous identity, at the "place" of the "primitive", after having "touched" its components, they verify the possibility of the concepts they bear. Mark's color becomes dominant, but he remains identical to himself. He takes aim again at a policeman and ascertains the incapacity to act. Daria, on the other hand, feels an initial transformation. The policeman asks: «Where is your car?», replies: «I forgot it over there with… my driving licence, checkbook, credit card, insurance policy, birth certificate and… » : all the signs of belonging to the urban space.
The policeman goes around the horizon with his eyes, he sees absolutely nothing; Daria's “down there” doesn't exist for him. His bewildered face, stupid, denotes the extraneousness to any reflection; his tour of the horizon and a reconnaissance overview to ascertain order in a sunny and strange place that induces him to postpone. A place that invites the tourist - perfectly decked out as such, "equipped", and with him his wife and son, according to advertising models that refer to the works (for example) of Duane Hanson - to exclaim: "They should build us a drive-in!" .
They are all elements, together with the roar of an airplane, of the re-emergence towards the second layer, peripheral to the urban one, with a little more awareness in the two characters, tested in consistency. Mark ascertains the impossibility or incapacity to act, he buries bullets and a weapon near the red of the cabin; he will have long hair, the provocative way of painting the stolen aircraft and getting killed by bringing it back; it's consistent from start to finish. Daria feels an initial awareness: "over there" she has not only left the signs of belonging to the urban space - and she ascertains this by re-emerging there -, but also a way of dreaming, previously considered alternative. All the long subjective of the game mansions group (accompanied by a guitar motif by Jerry Garcia) wanted to oppose the police violence of the "opulent society" and at the same time, above all, the game of death which Mark carries.
Even this idea of life, of freedom, remains "down there", dissolved because it is finally known. At the end of the point-of-view, after making young bodies that love each other on the aridity of the desert “bloom” with the power of imagination and drugs, Daria, with her head on the chest of the sleeping Mark, thinks: she sees getting lost in the dust, like “fog”, the collective, hippie dream of love. What seemed to be an alternative to the death and violence of the system and the opposing mechanical sounds, a fantastic ideal of life against those incurably "connected to reality", dissolves revealing itself - in the "place" where thinking is possible - as a specular reverse of the system; from this, within certain limits, tolerated.
Da Vacuous love. The cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Chieti, Métis, 1990, pp. 64-71
Lino Miccichè
Unfortunate peoples who are afraid of poets. They risk not even recognizing them. To most US reviewers of Zabriskie Pointit seems to have, in fact, been totally overlooked that Michelangelo Antonioni's latest film is not a "pamphlet" against America, but a "poem" about America. Certainly it is not a playful and joyful poem; indeed it is excruciating and painful. But the pitiless metaphorical representation is based on human emotion: it is an act of desperation which is also an act of love. And just as the face of America that murdered John and Robert, and Martin Luther and Malcolm might not be desperate; the America of the Song My massacre, of the Negro and Puerto Rican ghettos, of segregation and of the Ku Klux Klan; the America that, at the Chicago convention, sends its students armed with "the guns of the trees" to prison or hospital?
Undoubtedly there is another America. And in fact Mark and Daria "poetically" represent it. Not only in being Against the one and out the other, with respect to the official one of the boards of directors, of the speculative plans, of the roulottes tourist. But also in the common aspire to a return to nature, indeed to the earth; in their warm and playful rolling on the pristine desert dust, in the lovein made where a passing family would like to build a Drivein. But this America is killed by the former. Or physically, like Mark, killed for not having understood that he doesn't play with other people's toys. Or existentially, like Daria, a prisoner of her dreams, who - similar to Bill "the liar" and the guys from If — he blows up symbols and realities of oppressive well-being with his imagination, to then return to withdraw into his own inner world made up of oblivion and private escapes.
However, this reading stops only at the zest of Zabriskie Point and runs the risk, if not of agreeing with the American reviewers, of moving along their lines, albeit reversing their judgement. The profound reality of Zabriskie Point is that, although it is a "poem" (not in any case a "pamphlet" or treatise on sociology) about America, the film is far from having that relationship of intense sociological determination with the environmental reality in which the islands, the coast and the landscape of the South ne The adventure, Milan and Brianza ne The night, Rome and the EUR ne The eclipse , or the oil plants in Ravenna Il deserto rosso.
Antonioni has always been a radiologist of the soul more than of things; but in him the environment and the landscape have always replaced the actual sociological discourse, acting as a solid support for that "inner neorealism" that was heralding itself from the beginning: just think of the irreplaceable function of the Milanese background of the first work , Chronicle of a love , or to that, no less essential, of the Bassa Padana ne The Scream. This environmental significance has often misled the critics, who often interpret it as such situation environmental as a sociological will, reproached the director for insufficiencies precisely in that sociological direction that Antonioni only proposed as an accessory to the characters.
But after Il deserto rosso — and the significant as well exploit less than The audition, preface a The three faces — a movie like Blow-Up should have dispelled any misunderstanding. Here the Antonionian gaze on the swinging London frequented by Thomas is exempt even from the suspicion of sociology, and indeed it is precisely this characteristic that makes the film identify the symptoms of a notable turning point in Antonioni's filmography, whose cinema, precisely with Blow-Up, seems to almost completely cease to have sociological implications and metonymic meanings to place itself in a clearly metaphorical context. In this sense, indeed, we could say that the London setting of Blow-Up it serves Antonioni to purify his own gaze of any sociological immediacy and to communicate this gaze, full of amazed mystery and innocent consternation, to the spectator.
However, the sense it has in is largely analogous Zabriskie Point the American setting: as in the London film la swinging London it serves to better connote the mystery of Thomas, so in the American film the 'student revolt' serves to better connote the adventure of Mark and Daria. There as here the setting is simply functional to another x-ray of human destiny. And in both cases - but with greater evidence than elsewhere - the elements of chance, of encounter, of love and of death recur which, in fact, compared to Antonioni in the 50s and the tetralogy , appear almost completely rarefied of sociological concreteness, a by now evident sign of a transition from a cinema that — still strongly influenced by neorealism — oscillated between metonymies and metaphors, to a cinema that has decisively taken the path of great metaphors.
The limit, and the source of the misunderstanding, in Zabriskie Point if anything, it arises from the incompleteness of this choice; or rather from Antonioni's failure to evaluate the objectively sociological significance that certain "American" data (the dispute on the campus, the generational clash, the revolt of the Dropout, repression) have, in the USA and throughout the West, so as not to allow their purely phenomenological representation, without overloading it with "sociology" and "politics". So much so that the highest, and most convincing, moments of Zabriskie Point are precisely those least polluted by this objective emergence of the sociological on the phenomenological: the amorous dance of the plane on the car, the lovein collective, the destructive dream of Daria; that is to say whenever the film is oriented in an anti-psychological and anti-sociological sense, asserting itself instead as a "dream", indeed as a dreamy utopia of an oppressed innocence that reality destroys or makes unrealizable. Behind the appearance of a linear and compact "discourse", "realistic" to the point of didacticism, Zabriskie Point it is, in fact, the sweet, heartfelt and painfully astonished poem of that innocence and that oppression.
Da Italian cinema of the 70s, Venice, Marsilio, 1989, pp. 65-68
Zabriskie Point, Antonioni and Pink Floyd
The project Zabriskie Point came upon Pink Floyd's plans totally unexpected. In the autumn of 1969 the band was going through a complex period, the result of the search for a musical liberation and identity that was not the reflection of Syd Barrett. Ummagumma it had just been published in the UK and the boys were already thinking about a new project, something big and demanding, a work that included the use of an orchestra. Steve O'Rourke received a call from the Metro Goldwyn Meyer offices. Subject: an offer of collaboration for the new film by Michelangelo Antonioni.
The manager made such a high request that it was initially rejected but was later accepted due to the director's determination to have the Floyds for his work. The project Zabriskie Point it upset the plans on the agenda, it shook spirits and aroused enthusiasm. It could have been the occasion of the great leap in fame; Antonioni's previous production, Blow-Up, had hit the box office and the caliber of the director would have given the new work the right amount of international appeal.
The reciprocal artistic paths met after touching several times. Already in 1966 Antonioni had the opportunity to see Floyd live while wandering with Monica Vitti in a crazy London night at the Roundhouse, for the concert organized for the launch of IT. In the summer of 1968, while the crew was in California to begin filming Zabriskie Point, the band was touring the States to promote the release of A Saucerful Of Secrets. The Floyds were considered hip, especially in California, and Antonioni sensed opportunity by inserting a close-up of the back of Saucerful in the film's first shots shot that summer.
Although Michelangelo Antonioni was the age of an elderly father or a young grandfather for the boys of the time, he was a very attentive person to changes, constantly in search of the new, striving to understand its mechanisms. To turn blow-up, and even more for this new production in California, he surrounded himself with young people, consulting them, observing them and elaborating their ideas, forming the youngest working group ever in Hollywood history. Which greatly concerned MGM's upper echelons.
In the summer of 1969, the long Roman parenthesis dedicated to the editing of Zabriskie Point, Antonioni had returned to the States with a series of commitments on his agenda. Among these, the most urgent was the creation of an adequate soundtrack that was up to the footage. Destiny was being fulfilled. During one of his wandering California nights, the director showed up at the KPPC FM Radio Station in Pasadena, the most listened to free radio station in the area, at the time located in the basement of the Colorado Boulevard Presbyterian church: he wanted to meet Don Hall, the most famous DJ of that radio, which hosted its music program from 20pm to midnight. The great director found a person of undoubted interest in that volcanic American and invited him to go the next day to the Metro Goldwyn Meyer studios in Culver City to watch the film. After a few days Don met the director again at the Beverly Hills Hotel and handed him a list of songs by various artists that he often played on his radio show. After almost a month of silence, Don suddenly received, almost simultaneously, a letter from Rome in which Antonioni confirmed almost all the pieces on his list and a call from MGM which hired him for the role of music consultant for the film, inviting him to join immediately Antonioni in Rome.
Thanks to the pieces selected by Don Hall, Zabriskie Point he already had the backing track for all the minor desert scenes. Now Antonioni wanted the most important scenes of the film to be described by original music written specifically for the film. The Band and the Rolling Stones were contacted, but nothing came of it. Robertson & Co's manager declined. Antonioni without much conviction asked the Stones for three or four songs. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger judged the commitment onerous and to change their programs they asked for a large sum and expressed their intention to write the entire soundtrack. An agreement was reached only for the possible inclusion in the film (but not in the official record) of youGot the Silver, one of the pieces reported to the director by Don Hall.
October was winding down and MGM, which had already spent a fortune on Zabriskie Point, increased the pressure on Antonioni aiming to release the film for Christmas. It is at this juncture that the director was struck by Pink Floyd. Accomplice was the companion of Antonioni himself, the English Clare Peploe, also co-screenwriter of the film, who had returned from a trip to England with many new records, among which Ummagumma. The album was listened to on a small stereo in the director's home, in the presence of his partner and Don Hall. Antonioni listened and listened to the opera with interest. He was particularly impressed by careful With That Axe, Eugene and confided to the American DJ that a special version of the piece could have been an optimal solution for the final scene of the film. They soon decided to try and sign Pink Floyd.
After the agreements made with MGM, in early November 1969 Steve O'Rourke flew to Rome alone to organize the details of the trip. A first obstacle was the daytime unavailability of the International Recording Studios in via Urbana, booked for months. Given time constraints and pressure from MGM, the band was placed in the late night slot. The designated hotel was the Massimo D'Azeglio, just over three hundred meters from the studios, the same one where Don Hall also stayed and the same one where the boys will stay for the concert at the Palasport in June 1971. Other formalities as well organizational arrangements were finalized in a few days, just as some commitments on the calendar were canceled to allow full availability for Antonioni's project.
On November 16, the Floyds arrived in Rome accompanied by their faithful Alan Styles and Peter Watts, recently gratified by the presence on the back cover of Ummagumma. That same evening they all met in Studio 1, the largest of the International Recordings: there were Pink Floyd, Alan and Peter, Don Hall, Michelangelo Antonioni and the technician made available by the studio, Maurizio D'Achille.
It began with a first screening of the film. The scenes already covered by the music suggested by Don Hall and those for which Pink Floyd had been hired were shown. Appropriate precautions were taken, as the Italian technician told us: Antonioni had in fact wanted to darken the windows of the studio to prevent prying eyes from enjoying a preview of the film. In particular, the director asked to compose original music with a strong emotional charge but not too invasive so as not to obscure the impact of the images. In order: the opening scene, the accidents on campus, the takeoff and flight to Los Angeles, the long love scene and the spectacular final scene.
At this point something important happened. Steve O'Rourke and Roger Waters pulled apart and talked for a while. Then Steve asked Antonioni if Pink Floyd could "try" to score the entire film score. The director, who believed Ummagumma a masterpiece, he agreed. Don Hall, at this point, explained to the boys what kind of songs they should compose for the scenes in which the music always came from the radio or jukebox: the same scenes covered by the list of songs that he had previously shot at Antonioni. The music shouldn't have anything demanding, but "smell of America". Give the idea.
It is important to underline how this was the first and only time Antonioni really thought of entrusting the entire soundtrack to a single group or artist.
The idyll, however, did not last long. The first symptoms of intolerance came as soon as Pink Floyd got comfortable on stage to the right of the big screen and began their rituals of approaching the new studio, dragging it out a bit between chords and small instrumental fragments. The director probably expected the kids to plug in the jack and start producing music all at once, perhaps with ideas already worked out. But the band hadn't brought anything prepared, and everything he produced in those days he pulled out of nowhere, as he knew how to do. This, however, had his times, times that were certainly not those of Antonioni. Don Hall had his hands full that first night on the job, explaining to the Maestro that what he was hearing were only chords of a progressive band and not the music they were really going to propose. The first sleepless night ended, therefore, with a beginning of cloudiness that began to obscure the extremely positive vision that Antonioni had of Pink Floyd. The director told Don Hall that maybe the kids were too British for that soundtrack.
The séances came alive during the following nights. The working titles were chosen by Pink Floyd and largely based on the scenes to be set to music. Initially the band produced an unexpectedly copious amount of music compared to the norm. It was noted that the group of very kind English used to pedantically collect even the smallest piece of tape to take to the nearby hotel at the end of each session. Antonioni, faithful to his habits, managed the sessions with the intention of maintaining almost total control over the musical production: the musicians had to be like instruments that had to play as he wanted. The Floyds found here a totally different environment from their experiences with soundtracks.
In this case they worked for MGM - a major major -, for a great director who would also have had problems with groups such as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, supported by a musical advisor such as Hall, who in part even followed them to London. Antonioni was attentive to every little detail and attended almost all the Roman recording sessions. According to the stories of the studio technician, the director had even prepared a cot next to the director's booth to rest during the technical refinements of the pieces.
Full satisfaction there was immediately for the execution of Explosions, working title of the revised version of careful With That Axe, Eugene. Real problems, however, arose during the attempts to set the love scene to music. “Yes, nice. I like". But inexorably, shortly after, the director confided in Don Hall that the match between the images and the proposed music was unacceptable. For obvious reasons, Don always tried to avoid putting certain utterances too directly. For the love scene, multiple attempts were made, including a nearly eight-minute blues, a solo vibraphone piece, and a yearning solo piano melody. Eventually he prevailed Love scene, the psychedelic and dreamlike song, the one that the Floyd presented first and of which there are multiple versions.
Antonioni kept asking for adjustments, corrections or new versions. Three attempts were made to take off and fly over Los Angeles. Curiously, the working title of the take-off scene, take-offs, it was used in the French edition of the disc instead of the definitive title Dark Star of the Grateful Dead, present in the rest of the world. For the desert scenes, the ones that Pink Floyd would try to set to music with the director's permission (scenes other than those expressly requested by the engagement), they chose to follow a classic theme method: composed a couple of songs, the theme would be rearranged from time to time for the various scenes. Almost immediately Antonioni decided to leave the campus accident scene without musical commentary. Richard Wright had composed The Violent Sequence, a poignant and melodic piano carpet that was the counterpart to the bloody police beatings. Rejected by the director, the song remained in the drawer for a few years, to then resurface as a melodic basis in one of the best-known pieces in Floyd's discography: Us and Them.
At the end of the operation, the director's complete liking remained only for careful With That Axe, Eugene, redone for the final scene. All this despite the large amount of music produced and the continuation of the sessions well beyond the scheduled programs.
Pink Floyd returned to London in early December, packing a large number of eight-track tapes from which to make final versions for eventual inclusion on the official soundtrack album. They worked at Abbey Road on the pieces selected by Antonioni, convinced they would be used. The two country tracks were completely re-recorded, while the others were enriched with overdubs and stereo mixes. In the end, there were eight pieces prepared, six of which were shipped with the final titles to Don Hall, California in late January 1970.
What the boys didn't know was that in the meantime Antonioni continued to look for something better. During the month of December, the director had asked for original pieces from Musica Elettronica Viva, Kaleidoscope and John Fahey, aiming to have something else, especially for the love scene. Ultimately, the Pink Floyd pieces released on the official soundtrack were only three. The eight original pieces are what they are known among Pink Floyd fans as The Zabriskie Point Lost Album: Zabriskie Point's lost album.
The totality of the known pieces of the sessions for Zabriskie Point it has three different sources. The first is of course the three-song official soundtrack released in April 1970. The second is the Omayyad bootleg released in 1972, which made three more songs known to the world. The origins of this bootleg are very curious: between February and March 1970 Don Hall broadcast from KPP-CFM radio in Pasadena those three pieces plus the complete version of Crumble Country, which had been discarded at the last moment.
Someone taped the radio broadcast. The tape later reached Trade Mark of Quality, the first pirated record label, who made it Umayyad, unofficial disc of unreleased tracks. The third and most conspicuous source is Rhino Records' work on putting together the extended version of the soundtrack in 1997. Four pieces were released in the collection as outtakes, thirteen others spilled out somehow and we will find them again two years later in a Titled bootleg CD A Journey Through time and space, section Outer Zabriskie. Everything circulates among the fans in the various collections, of which the most complete and updated version is titled A Total Zabriskie Point of View, which also includes The Christmas Song.
From The Lunatics (Nino Gatti, Stefano Girolami, Danilo Steffanina, Stefano Tarquini and Riccardo Verani), Pink Floyd. History and secrets, Giunti Editore, Florence, 2014
