Zabriskie Point

Gary Fike
I give this move 5 stars for personal reasons. If you peer ever so closely at the panoramic 'orgy in the desert' shot, you will see me groaning with "her" in the sand. While there was no actual fornicating going on within my range of vision, I can tell you the gal next to me was asking out loud for it! Damn! I miss those incredibly naive, self-indulgent days. It was, I believe, October of 1968 and I was a senior in a Las Vegas high school. I answered the casting call for extras. Miracously, my father allowed me to miss a week of school to "train" with a feely-touchy dance troupe from NY. When shooting started MGM would bus us from Vegas to the Point every morning at 5am. Most of my time on the set was spent gawking at Diana, Antonioni, and all the wild movie equipment. They even imported fine silk sand to blow around. I guess Death Valley sand was not european enough. I remember Antonioni, in full archetypical director mode, chasing Mark F. off the sound set for laughing at our feeble...

a film that doesn't play by the rules
Zabriskie Point is stunning as a piece of visual art. The campus scenes, the office interiors, the strange billboards and roadside stops along stretches of barren highway, the desert scenes, the world looked at from a small plane ...all of these visuals captivate the mind. Like many Antonioni films, the cinematography is a dream and individual stills belong in an art book/museum.

The characters are incomplete, only cursorily imagined, and the narrative is desultory and vague. In a way this works if one sees the film not as a critique of capitalist society or a study of radical political solutions to western materialism but as a record of what it feels like to be young and alive to possibility. To the young characters everything seems strange and alien and fails to meet their expectations of what life should feel like--to me that is what the film is documenting and that is what I like about it. The main character is not particularly drawn to politics nor does he feel in any...

Let's Set Some Matters Straight
Pursuant to reviews below, (1) John Cassavettes DID NOT DIRECT THIS FILM. (2) BLOW UP made no pretensions to being a 'crime film'- it was a perceptual mystery. (3) Mark Frechette died shortly after, and Daria Halprin is missing in action. Zabriskie Point missed its beat by about three months, when a political shift presaged its arrival and its anarchic sentiments seemed suddenly arch and dated (and remain so since, immersed in acceptable materialism as we are). Antonioni THE DIRECTOR has always been a champion of the natural world, and the intrusion of man-made things on human values and the sanctity of relationships, and he suceeded well with these themes in L'AVVENTURA, L'ECLISSE, LA NOTTE, and BLOW UP. One does sense he was slightly out of element coming to America to make ZABRISKIE POINT; it does read like an outsider looking in, and he hasn't suceeded at that as well as a UK director like John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) managed. Always a master of sound,...

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