Zabriskie Point: A Fever Dream of a Movie

Zabriskie Point: A Fever Dream of a Movie
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Warner Home Video
By Steven Rosen

(Published 7-31-09 in SonicBoomers.com)

During what most people consider Hollywood’s last golden era -- the early to mid-1970s -- so many good movies true to their times came out they couldn’t all be assimilated by the culture at the time.

Like America, they were hip, sexy, druggy and rebellious, but also downbeat, violent, soul-searching and (fitting for the Watergate era) political.For every celebrated All the President’s Men, Five Easy Pieces and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the New Hollywood also gave us an unjustly overlooked Cisco Pike, Blume in Love or Friends of Eddie Coyle.

In today’s active retroculture, we’ve been kept busy with rediscoveries, restorations and revivals of films of that era that got missed the first time around.But Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, which has just been released by Warner Bros. Pictures on DVD, is a different case. It got plenty of attention upon its 1970 release -- and was so roundly rejected by audiences and critics alike that it has become one of the New Hollywood’s most celebrated turkeys, like Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie or William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

The movie went into hiding.Yet seeing it today, one realizes Zabriskie Point’s bad rep is largely a bad rap. Cinematographically, it is a visionary, hallucinatory interpretation of the fever dreams of the era’s counterculture. It finds poetry in the California of desert road-trip lore, while also finding ugliness in the Los Angeles (any city, really) of industrial clutter and sprawl. Seeing it now, with America struggling with a recession so deep many doubt the possibility of a return to normalcy as we know it, one realizes what the film is: a requiem for our lifestyle, ahead of its time.

One with great music, by the way -- as an expanded soundtrack put out by Rhino in 1997 already proved.

Today, Antonioni’s ideas of the America of that time seem artfully sharp if intellectually dispassionate. He saw the country locked in a war of ideas and values, maybe a shooting war. But he was more interested in looking at it as in creating a polemic about it. The resultant film is fascinatingly original yet mysterious, like a David Lynch movie.

It would be dishonest, however, to call it a masterpiece -- Antonioni wanted unknowns for his leads, and their lack of acting experience shows in their stilted line deliveries. This was the first American movie for Antonioni, the Italian director whose films had a sexy, existential flair and who in his 50s had discovered youth culture, rock ‘n’ roll, swinging London and full-frontal nudity in his previous film, 1966’s classic Blowup. Like Blowup, Zabriskie was an MGM release, and the company had high hopes for it.

The principals are an alienated college student, enamored of revolutionary ideas, named Mark (Mark Frechette), and the cheerfully beatific hippie Daria (Daria Halprin), who works among “straights” as a secretary at a development firm. They meet in the desert and make love at Zabriskie Point, which overlooks an ancient lakebed in Death Valley National Park.

The symbolism seems evident -- however empty America had become, youth could still find beauty in its “death” throes. Kids may have thought Zabriskie would be Antonioni’s Easy Rider, but they had never seen his earlier Italian films, especially Red Desert and L’Avventura. So they were confused by the enigmatic way he let his camera, rather than his characters or his story, be the film’s star.

There was also a political problem. The film begins with protests at “California State College” in L.A. in which a policeman gets shot and killed by a student. It appears that Mark is the student who shoots the cop, although it’s not absolutely clear. Antonioni doesn’t seem to care much about it, one way or another -- it’s just a way to get Mark out of L.A. and toward Daria. It gives the film (and Mark) a coldness the hot desert just can’t melt.

Antonioni got credit for the spare, minimalist screenplay along with fellow Italians Franco Rossetti (aka Fred Gardner) and Tonino Guerra. American playwright Sam Shepard and Clare Peploe, Antonioni’s assistant who later married Bernardo Bertolucci, also contributed.

Some of the dialogue is pithy. For instance, when police book college activists after a violent confrontation, one arrestee identifies himself as an associate professor of history. “That’s too long,” a cop says. “I’ll just put down ‘clerk.’”

Plenty of movies that have been set in Los Angeles see the city’s beauty: the beaches, the hillside homes that overlook the glittering lights below, the Hollywood neon and the glamorous people it attracts. Antonioni and cinematographer Alfio Contini see, however, the mundane clutter and detritus. There’s a revealing montage of industrial-related signage and junkyards. The film does feature a lovely view of the Richfield Tower, a black-and-gold downtown L.A. Art Deco treasure demolished at about the same time as the film was made. Seeing it makes one bemoan all that has been lost in L.A. -- or any American city where “progress” trumps preservation.

Zabriskie Point follows two parallel stories for awhile. Daria, on a mission to deliver material for a conference at the desert retreat of her boss (Rod Taylor), gets waylaid en route. The sun is bright and the people and buildings are both colorful, folkloric relics -- an old-timer in a roadhouse smokes as “Tennessee Waltz” plays on the jukebox.

Mark, meanwhile, flees the campus shooting by hijacking a pink airplane, lifting off over the traffic-clogged, smoggy sprawl as a snippet of the Dead’s “Dark Star” jubilantly plays. In the desert, he sees Daria driving and goes down low to buzz her, again and again. The widescreen cinematography turns this into a maniacal mating ritual, plane over car, that provides a rush both scary and erotic.

But it’s nothing compared to the Zabriskie Point lovemaking. The dusty, dry landscape suddenly sprouts a mirage of young people, in various couplings and stages of undress. The fight, claw, laugh, and have sex to a dreamy guitar piece by Jerry Garcia. (The Open Theatre of Joe Chaikin provides the bodies for this site-specific “performance.”) It’s a poetic way of externalizing the internal -- when in love; Daria and Mark feel as if the whole world is, too. Even in the desert.

It’s a pretty radical scene for a movie that appears, up to that point, to be naturalistic. But there’s more to come. Mark flies back and is promptly, matter-of-factly shot to death by police. Antonioni films it as fait accompli, not worth romanticizing. Daria learns of it while driving in the desert; the radio interrupts John Fahey’s “Dance of Death” to announce it.

She then arrives at the company retreat, a modernist home nestled into rocks on the side of a cliff, while executives are planning a new subdivision. She goes outside, looks back and -- boom -- the house explodes. Not once, but repeatedly, from different vantage points. As the camera studies in slow motion the “dance of death” of all the material inside it -- a newspaper, lawn chairs, even a loaf of Wonder bread -- Pink Floyd’s screaming “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up” (also known as “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”) plays.

The explosions are apocalyptic and mesmerizing, mournful and beautiful. They leave you stunned and weirded-out. And then the movie is over with a long gaze into the Western sunset.

Incidentally, MGM tacked on a kitschy romantic ballad, “So Young,” sung with soaring heartache by Roy Orbison. His career was stone cold at the time, and MGM -- his label -- may have wanted to give him a hit. According to the liner notes of the Rhino soundtrack, Antonioni hated it.

Today, even given its faults, Zabriskie Point is invigorating. And it leaves you wondering, after all these years, if Antonioni looked at America at that time and found hope…or hopelessness. Whichever, was he right?
— 07/31/2009

Surprises Await in the Rubber City

By Steven Rosen

(This originally ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer in April, 2009)

The tendency here in southwest Ohio – and in the nation as a whole – is to view Akron as a Rust Belt casualty, a crumbling northeast Ohio city filled with vacant factories, foreclosed homes and potholed streets.

Not to discount the very serious economic problems facing Akron – facing all urban centers – but the Rubber City is actually a lively, lovely place for a weekend visit, or even longer. Especially in spring or summer, when the flowers and trees are in bloom at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens – for this writer’s money the most beautiful country estate/historic-house museum in Ohio.

The former home of Goodyear Tire & Rubber founder Franklin Seiberling, Stan Hywet (Old English for “stone quarry”; pronounced Stan Hee-wit) was built in the Tudor Revival style from 1912-1915 and donated to the public in 1957. It is open April through December and admission is $12 per adult; $18 for a guided tour. It stretches for 70 acres on Akron’s north side.

The manor house, comparable to a British country estate, has more than 65 rooms and 25 bathrooms. These are in immaculate condition and showcase all sorts of unusual design features – a billiard room with an insulated humidor for cigars, a “plunge” or indoor swimming pool, and a bathroom shower with pipes around its sides to forcefully spray water at its occupant.

Were that all there is to Akron, it alone would be worth a trip. But the downtown, while comparatively small, shows the results of progressive urban planning, especially a dynamic public gathering space known as Lock 3. It’s located next to a tourist destination – the restored Akron Civic Theatre, a rare surviving example of a Moorish-influenced “atmospheric” movie palace whose ceiling evokes a star-lit sky and which now hosts live entertainment.

Lock 3 celebrates Akron’s canal-boat days with an indoor exhibit, while an outdoor stage and grassy lawn allow for weekend concerts, many with small admission fees. We visited on a weekend night last summer when nearby Main Street had been closed for the (admission-charged) annual National Hamburger Festival (this year’s fest is July 19-20; see www.hamburgerfestival.com). The Stone Pony Band was playing the songs of Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny on the Lock 3 stage.

Beyond burgers, Akron has one of the more sophisticated, cutting-edge restaurants in the state, one earning international attention. It’s rock musician Chrissie Hynde’s The VegiTerranean, featuring vegan cuisine in a sleek, modernist setting with a soothingly expansive outdoor patio. It’s on the first floor of a new residential loft building in Akron’s compact, renovated Northside District. (Northside also has a depot for the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, featuring vintage train cars traveling through Cuyahoga Valley National Park.)

Hynde, an Akron native who long ago left for England to find fame in England with the Pretenders, decided to help her hometown with this restaurant, which opened in 2007. She believes vegan food can be presented as artfully and deliciously as French, and dinner entrees like Gardein (a trademarked garden-grown protein) scaloppini picatta prove the point. Plus her Chrissie Fries may be the best French fried potatoes in the world. Our polite, enthusiastic server said Hynde might open branches in Columbus and Las Vegas; it’d be a great, progressive replacement for Pigall’s here.

The most important addition to Akron’s skyline is the new wing of the Akron Art Museum on South High Street, which opened in 2007 and connects to a more modest older (1899) structure. The first American public building designed by the Viennese firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, the dramatically cantilevered structure makes a startling post-modernist appearance to anyone driving down South High.

Divided into three sections – a warming glass-enclosed “crystal,” a windowless aluminum-paneled “gallery box” and a hovering aluminum-wrapped steel “roof cloud” – it seems like a radar station floating in space, busily tracking alien transmissions. The permanent collection features interesting examples of contemporary and American Impressionism, as well as work by Akron modernist painter William Sommer, who died in 1949. (Visit www.akronartmuseum.org for programming details.)

Downtown also has one of the earliest – and still oddest – examples of creative reuse of an industrial building, the hotel off South Broadway known as Quaker Square Inn. It was radical when it opened in 1975; all the rooms are round, carved out of 36 sturdy grain silos that once belonged to Quaker Oats Company and held 1.5 million bushels. The University of Akron bought the inn, on the National Register of Historic Places, in 2007.

When we stayed there, the public spaces (and the continental breakfast) both needed updating, but it definitely felt like a one-of-a-kind place. If you stay there, try to have oatmeal for breakfast – this is where it was introduced to America. Chrissie Hynde would approve of that Akron culinary contribution.

IF YOU GO:


Akron is an easy drive from Cincinnati. Just take Interstate 71 north, through Columbus, and then go east for not quite 22 miles on Interstate 76 until reaching Akron. It takes about four hours. To get to Stan Hywet, 714 N. Portage Path, from downtown, visit www.stanhywet.org or call 1-888-836-5533.

Akron Art Museum, www.akronartmuseum.com or call 1-330-376-9185, has hours from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday and Friday-Sunday; until 9 p.m. Thursday. Admission is $7 adults; $5 seniors.

For reservations at The VegiTerranean, at 21 Furnace St. in the Northside just north of downtown, visit www.thevegiterranean.com or call 1-330-374-5550.

For information about downtown hotels, including Quaker Square Inn, see www.visitakron-summit.org or call 1-800-245-4254.