Zabriskie Point (1970) - film review

Zabriskie Point is an American film first released in 1970, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.  The film stars Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Paul Fix, G.D. Spradlin and Bill Garaway.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.

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Even moral and psychological ugliness is elevated by Antonioni’s art (with its orientation on truth and the ethical impossibility to scapegoat reality) into a monumental form of the objective historical process.  Protagonists, with all their personal uniqueness, signify certain socio-political configurations.  Antonioni’s characters can identify with good and yet create evil but they can never personify good or evil.  The director objectifies their prejudices and behavior and dissolves the human emotions into his epical vision of societal life. Good and evil co-exist, fused with one another inside the very system of living, the very structure of social relations.  It is this truth of the evil incarnated into the very flesh of our norms, values and habits (which we never consider as evil), and of good (which is never too proud of itself and is recognized by us as in sympathy and empathy).

But when evil is reduced to concrete categories of people, and good to what is written on the banners and in commercial advertisements, it means, we live in a place where civilized and democratic life is barely possible. It is the coming of this universe which Antonioni demonstrates in Zabriskie Point.  Daria/Mark is a universal archetype of the potential for love in human life that is destroyed by the indifference and violence of the very organization of life in society toward youth and love. Mark is scapegoated by a system that is only interested in accumulating economic power.  But Daria is saved from becoming a (passive) conformist of this power - at the highest possible cost, the death of her beloved.  By watching the film, we trace in detail how American democracy creates and destroys its own Romeo and Juliette.

Please, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com  to read about Antonioni’s film (with analysis of shots), and other articles on films by Godard, Resnais, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Bresson, Pasolini, Cavani, Bertolucci, Alain Tanner, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

© Victor Enyutin (Seattle USA) 2010

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