Zabriskie Point (1970 )
Zabriskie Point(IT/USA) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Written by Michelangelo Antonioni; Sam Shephard; Franceso Rossetti; Tonino Guerra; Clare Peploe. Starring Mark Frechette; Daria Halprin; Rod Taylor
Famous for scenes involving a wildly abstract desert orgy in the sand, and a conclusion with a slow motion explosion imagined by one of the protagonists, Zabriskie Pointwas the second of Antonioni’s three picture deal with MGM and Italian producer Carlo Ponti that included Blow Up (1966) and The Passenger (1975). With a messy script that was the end product of the contribution of no less than five screenwriters (including Sam Shephard and Clare Peploe, Antonioni’s companion at the time), this 7 million dollar (a huge sum at the time) film was a critical and box office disaster. Though in retrospect the film serves as an interesting allegory for the era, there is also little doubt that in terms of actual story, grounded so much in Antonioni’s perception of the now of the period, it hasn’t aged well. The visuals, on the other hand, are a different story entirely. For his first film actually shot in The United States, Antonioni (and his cinematographer Alfio Contini) obviously set out to document California and the American southwest in the late 60s with an outsiders view of everything from urban billboard signage, industrial plants, long stretches of rolling highway, to its wide, sweeping desert vistas, and it is all shot with an artists eye for color, scope, and composition. The title, in fact, comes from a location in Death Valley. Antonioni cast mostly non-professionals and the majority of the performances are stilted and wooden. The plot (if one could call it that) revolves around Mark (Mark Frechette, an occasionally employed carpenter, who was cast after being spotted on a Boston street), a college dropout radical who is participating in a campus protest when a cop is shot and killed. He is suspected of the crime, steals a plane, and eventually crosses paths with Daria (Daria Halprin), a beautiful young woman on her way to rendezvous in Phoenix with her boss/lover, older executive Lee Allen (Rod Taylor). The soundtrack includes contributions from Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead, and Gerry Garcia, Floyd, and The Doors all wrote original music for the film (though The Doors song L’America wasn’t used). Frechette and Halprin (the real-life daughter of a wealthy, well-known architect father and dancer mother, Anna) wound up as a couple, and for awhile lived on a radically political commune run by folk singer Mel Lyman before Frechette was arrested for a politically motivated bank robbery in Boston in 1973 and was sentenced to 6-15 years in prison. He later died while incarcerated under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Halprin would eventually marry Dennis Hopper and have a child with him.