Zabriskie Point
My first encounter with Antonioni was quite late, 1996, with BEYOND THE CLOUDS. I hated it so much I never watched another until a few years ago, as part of a project that has been stalled by Jacques Demy. The two subsequent encounters were so absorbing that I was willing to give ZABRISKIE POINT a go, despite vaguely remembering some reservations expressed by a beautiful Italian graphic designer whom I knew from about the same time as my viewing of BEYOND THE CLOUDS.
It’s one of the neglected facets of the 1960s that this was a point at which the United States was most open to foreign influences. This was when Antonioni got a multi-picture deal with MGM. Antonioni was that most valuable of things to the pretentious heads of Hollywood studios – he had strong artistic credibility. Antonioni took the opportunity in ZABRISKIE POINT to bite savagely on the hand that was feeding him. This is one of the most visually devastating condemnations of US society ever made for cinema. The vast majority of Americans have long possessed a genuine indifference to the Old World, apart from a few bringing ancestral feuds across the ocean to fester in richer soil. The more intellectual American for decades after being slapped in the face by Antonioni retained some regard for European art and ideas – even those that were a bit difficult to understand. Today, America finally universally treats the great European cultural past with disdain. This hostility is akin to the disappointment Philhellenes felt on encountering real Greeks in the 1820s, as opposed to the Roman statuary that preserved Greeks of the glory days.
About the film, I don’t know if I have a lot to add to what you can read elsewhere. There’s a story here, but that seems incidental to Antonioni’s real objective. He wants to string montages together to present America as a beautiful wasteland. The main characters, the failed revolutionist Mark (Mark Frechette) and the young office worker Daria (Daria Halprin) are basically a linking device to connect the montages. The most fascinating thing is how a film released in 1970, and dominated by the revolutionary dialogue of the turn of the decade, is so prophetic of the subsequent direction of American society. Most fascinating is the American obsession with numbers. Data constantly flows out the radio news and in business meetings to batter the ears of Americans. It’s hardly a wonder that we now live in a world of algorithms, where our value is determined by the numbers we generate. The negative response of American critics to seeing their country so cogently skewered by a foreigner is surely like unto nouveau riche sour grapes towards the insolence of a penurious aristocrat.
The film opens with a meeting of revolutionaries. This scene could be the opening of a documentary. It’s not difficult to see how those who reached voting age towards the end of the 1970s had acquired a strong distaste for the politics of a decade earlier. For all their ambitions, these ‘revolutionaries’ had no organisation for dealing with the mobilisation of the state against them. Their recipe was to create the spectacle of a riot in the hope that this would inspire a spontaneous uprising. Sadly, politics doesn’t work that way. You need organisational skills and an absence of ego, something that is clearly lacking here.
We then receive what is effectively a montage of the corporate art and archtecture of late 1960s Los Angeles, as we follow Mark around the city. He’s eventually forced to leave town, by unconventional means, and winds up meeting Daria on the road in Death Valley. The film turns on what happens at Zabriskie Point, as an orgy manifests from the desert around them. After that, Mark’s existential character forces him to return to Los Angeles, while Daria carries on to her destination, and another montage that encapsulates Antonioni’s real feelings about the world Americans have built.
Frechette and Halprin were newcomers to cinema, and they do well under Antonioni’s direction. But this film is to be watched as a visual experience, a cinematic meditation on the generation gap. The young characters are not bound by the limits that their elders either accept with a pathetic fatalism or impose with great relish. But neither do they have the discipline to succeed in at least ameliorating a destructive system, lacking the wherewithal to overthrow it. I get the sense that Antonioni sees America’s hope in the revolutionary potential of its Baby Boomer youth, but also sees them as a desert flower constricted by a lack of water and good soil. It is a very pessimistic view, a view justified by subsequent events.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
It’s one of the neglected facets of the 1960s that this was a point at which the United States was most open to foreign influences. This was when Antonioni got a multi-picture deal with MGM. Antonioni was that most valuable of things to the pretentious heads of Hollywood studios – he had strong artistic credibility. Antonioni took the opportunity in ZABRISKIE POINT to bite savagely on the hand that was feeding him. This is one of the most visually devastating condemnations of US society ever made for cinema. The vast majority of Americans have long possessed a genuine indifference to the Old World, apart from a few bringing ancestral feuds across the ocean to fester in richer soil. The more intellectual American for decades after being slapped in the face by Antonioni retained some regard for European art and ideas – even those that were a bit difficult to understand. Today, America finally universally treats the great European cultural past with disdain. This hostility is akin to the disappointment Philhellenes felt on encountering real Greeks in the 1820s, as opposed to the Roman statuary that preserved Greeks of the glory days.
About the film, I don’t know if I have a lot to add to what you can read elsewhere. There’s a story here, but that seems incidental to Antonioni’s real objective. He wants to string montages together to present America as a beautiful wasteland. The main characters, the failed revolutionist Mark (Mark Frechette) and the young office worker Daria (Daria Halprin) are basically a linking device to connect the montages. The most fascinating thing is how a film released in 1970, and dominated by the revolutionary dialogue of the turn of the decade, is so prophetic of the subsequent direction of American society. Most fascinating is the American obsession with numbers. Data constantly flows out the radio news and in business meetings to batter the ears of Americans. It’s hardly a wonder that we now live in a world of algorithms, where our value is determined by the numbers we generate. The negative response of American critics to seeing their country so cogently skewered by a foreigner is surely like unto nouveau riche sour grapes towards the insolence of a penurious aristocrat.
The film opens with a meeting of revolutionaries. This scene could be the opening of a documentary. It’s not difficult to see how those who reached voting age towards the end of the 1970s had acquired a strong distaste for the politics of a decade earlier. For all their ambitions, these ‘revolutionaries’ had no organisation for dealing with the mobilisation of the state against them. Their recipe was to create the spectacle of a riot in the hope that this would inspire a spontaneous uprising. Sadly, politics doesn’t work that way. You need organisational skills and an absence of ego, something that is clearly lacking here.
We then receive what is effectively a montage of the corporate art and archtecture of late 1960s Los Angeles, as we follow Mark around the city. He’s eventually forced to leave town, by unconventional means, and winds up meeting Daria on the road in Death Valley. The film turns on what happens at Zabriskie Point, as an orgy manifests from the desert around them. After that, Mark’s existential character forces him to return to Los Angeles, while Daria carries on to her destination, and another montage that encapsulates Antonioni’s real feelings about the world Americans have built.
Frechette and Halprin were newcomers to cinema, and they do well under Antonioni’s direction. But this film is to be watched as a visual experience, a cinematic meditation on the generation gap. The young characters are not bound by the limits that their elders either accept with a pathetic fatalism or impose with great relish. But neither do they have the discipline to succeed in at least ameliorating a destructive system, lacking the wherewithal to overthrow it. I get the sense that Antonioni sees America’s hope in the revolutionary potential of its Baby Boomer youth, but also sees them as a desert flower constricted by a lack of water and good soil. It is a very pessimistic view, a view justified by subsequent events.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
Mini Review: Visually dense, the story is thin and the film is not bound by physical limits. Perhaps best thought of as a primer to the grammar of cinema.
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