Notes on Zabriskie Point

Beauty

Zabriskie Point is a film of astonishing beauty. Antonioni has the ability to place a series of landscapes, objects, or (most importantly) faces in a majestic arrangement of patterns that send me into an oneiric trance. The success of his films depend on this, because it’s essential that the dreamy turns his narratives take (orgies in the desert, exploding houses, magically appearing men with magically appearing cans of paint) appear natural to the development of the film, so that these ruptures aren’t an abandonment of narrative logic but work as a development of Antonioni’s unique mode of storytelling. Narrative is not left behind in his films; it just heads to unexpected places. One becomes wowed by the beauty the frame contains, and astonished by the way Antonioni frames it, so that the car, the mountains, hair, fire, a TV set, and on and on, all become interchangeable. A landscape is a face, a face is an object, an object is a landscape.

Acting

Are Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin bad actors? It depends on your definition of the word bad. There’s no doubt that the way they move through the landscape feels unreal, that their voices are stilted and that most traces of charisma have been scooped out of them. But if we see them less as actors and more as models, their casting makes perfect sense. Mark and Daria are important because of what they represent, not because of what they are. It is essential that they behave as vacantly as the faces adorning the endless billboards in the city and as blank as the parched landscape of Death Valley.

Escape

Zabriskie Point is deeply concerned with the futile desire to escape. Wherever these bodies move, Antonioni ensures that they are always folded into a landscape or set off against it. In the city their bodies are framed in tight close up, the camera whizzing past people as they mesh together in a haze, whilst their voices swell to one long, unrelenting rumble. The city is jammed full of adverts, on billboards and TV and radio, rendering all bodies lost in a sea of information. The move to the desert leads the camera further away and higher up, turning them into insects as they yet again disappear into their surroundings.

Suspense

The famous scene from North By Northwest in which Cary Grant is attacked by a mysterious jet in a vast expanse of Indiana countryside finds its modernist echo in Zabriskie Point. The suspense is drained. Animated peril transforms into a vacant smile.

Utopia

Is the desert a utopia? This article published in Senses of Cinema suggests so, and tends to reduce the film into a series of binary oppositions in which the city/cops = bad and desert/students = good. This sort of attitude not only dampens the power of this film but short changes the complexities within. For sure the film falls cleanly on the side of the students, but Mark’s boyish adventure into the desert is hardly a revolutionary act. Daria prefers to listen to rock music than be politically active, and her final act of defiance is shrouded in fantasy. There are policemen in the desert and students in the city, and while the orgy takes place there is a reality that exists a few miles away.

Endings

Reaching out towards a pure cinema: