Zabriskie Point (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Zabriskie Point |
| Original title | Zabriskie Point |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1970 |
| length | 107 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Michelangelo Antonioni |
| script | Michelangelo Antonioni, Fred Gardner , Sam Shepard , Tonino Guerra , Clare Peploe |
| production | Carlo Ponti |
| music |
Jerry García Pink Floyd |
| camera | Alfio Contini |
| cut | Franco Arcalli |
| occupation | |
| |
| synchronization | |
Zabriskie Point is a 1970 film by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni . It is named after the viewpoint of the same name in Death Valley and is a tribute to the flower power and hippie movement of the late 1960s.
action
Student Mark leaves a heated debate between black and white students in Los Angeles . When he tries to visit a lecturer who has been arrested by the police in the police station, he himself is temporarily arrested without breaking any law. Because he fears that the police might shoot at demonstrating students, he gets a revolver . Shortly afterwards, a teach-in is actually broken up by force. Shots are fired, a black student and a policeman are shot. Because Mark thinks he is suspected of killing the policeman, he steals a plane and escapes with it.
The employee Daria is driving to a conference in Phoenix . She stops at a lonely gas station in the desert to call her boss Lee Allen and ask for directions. As she leaves, several male youths throw stones at the gas station, breaking a window. Daria runs after the youngsters, of whom more and more appear. The youngsters come from a home for hard-to-educate city children in LA. The harassing looks and sexist remarks by the boys make them hurry up.
During their onward journey, Mark repeatedly flies his plane very just over their car. After he lands, he asks her to take him with her. They stop at Zabriskie Point, leave the car and stroll through the natural landscape and rock formations, discuss, enjoy a joint, philosophize, romp around and love each other. At this point, Antonioni weaves into the film on a further level of reality, the subjective perception of the couple under the influence of the joint, scenes from dozens of other couples who love each other in rock and dust - a " love-in ". The rocks seem to awaken to human life too.
Then both meet a police officer. While Daria is getting rid of this, Mark has already drawn the gun in case he is discovered. Daria sees this and, when asked, learns his story that preceded their meeting. Despite Daria's concerns and the offer to take her to Phoenix, Mark decides to bring the stolen plane back to Los Angeles and paints it with her in psychedelic colors and political slogans as a bird-like hybrid before the return flight . With his start, both separate, Daria continues to Phoenix.
When he lands in Los Angeles, the police are waiting for Mark. After a short chase on the airfield, a policeman shoots Mark. Daria hears the news on the radio, stops by the roadside and mourns for a moment before continuing her journey through the desert. She arrives at an ultra-modern villa on a cliff high above the desert, parks there and sneaks into the house. Her boss Allen is in a business negotiation that is not going as planned. Her boss discovers her and assigns her a room where she can freshen up and change. When she meets an Indian servant, Daria runs away from the high-tech villa, gets into her car and drives a short distance away. From the street she looks back at the villa.
The meeting continues in the house. Suddenly you can see the house exploding silently in an intercut without sound, before Daria can be seen again. After a longer shot in the car, she gets out and looks up at the - undamaged - villa.
The camera switches between Daria and the villa, which now explodes again, seen through Daria's eyes - this time with sound, but in slow motion. The explosion of the villa is shown thirteen times from different angles. The sequence turns into a long passage in which various everyday objects, such as a refrigerator, explode at a slower pace and its contents - such as a turkey or a champagne bottle - are seen floating in the room against a blue sky.
Pink Floyd's music ends abruptly with a cut to Daria's satisfied, relaxed face in the sunset. She gets in the car and drives away while the camera pans to the sunset and the music fades in again.
background
When Antonioni presented his film Blow Up in the USA in 1966 , a surprise success, he came across a newspaper article according to which a young man had stolen a small airplane and was shot while trying to return it in Phoenix, Arizona . The incident inspired the director to draft a script that was further developed by Sam Shepard , Franco Rossetti , Tonino Guerra and the British writer Clare Peploe, the future wife of Bernardo Bertolucci .
The actors included Rod Taylor and GD Spradlin , who was cast in a feature film for the first time after numerous television roles, Kathleen Cleaver, a member of the Black Panther movement, and Paul Fix , a friend and coach of John Wayne . Filming began in July 1968 in southern downtown Los Angeles . The exterior shots still show the Richfield Tower , an Art Deco high-rise that was demolished in November 1968. The entrance scene to the student assembly was filmed at the Contra Costa Community College in San Pablo, California . Further scenes were made in Carefree (Arizona) and in Death Valley as well as in the Mojave Desert . For the explosion scene at the end of the film, a villa in Carefree called Boulder Reign, designed by Hiram Hudson Benedict and his wife Lois Grace for Carl Hovgaard, called Boulder Reign, was rented for the interior shots and was recreated as a dummy by Paolo Soleri on the site of the local Southwestern Studios . Soleri moved to Scottsdale, Arizona in the mid-1950s , where he became the founder of arcology (eco-architecture).
Before the love scenes were recorded in Death Valley, there was a rumor in Hollywood that Antonioni was going to hire 10,000 extras. In fact, he hired actors from the Open Theater , an experimental New York company that played from 1963 to 1973. The US Department of Justice was investigating whether the filming violated the Mann Act , a law that forbade bringing women to other states for the sex trade. However, since Death Valley is in California, this accusation did not apply, apart from the fact that there was no sex to be seen. Nonetheless, the California government warned Antonioni against "prostitution and immoral behavior". The FBI picked up the film because of its political stance and the Oakland community was alarmed because the director allegedly had started a real street riot.
The counter-public that MGM wanted to reach largely ignored the film. At a production cost of at least $ 7 million, the film grossed only $ 900,000 in the US.
Cinematically, Zabriskie Point draws two clearly defined worlds: one of extreme technological progress with well-organized social controls [the city]; and one of disaffected romance [nature].
Rodenberg sees Antonioni's narrative intention as follows: The scenes of the student protest [serve] as a foil for Antonioni's actual concern, to tell his essentialist criticism of the alienation of the modern world, of the emptying of all utopia in consumer society and of the profit-oriented exploitation of nature. Martin Seel sees Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory "taken at its word". The explosion is - "an uprising of space and time against their economic reshaping.": "The products of the world of goods are transformed into sculptural objects that emancipate themselves from all practicality."
The stages of the film plot reveal their socially critical meaning “make love, not war” only when their symbolic-metaphorical level of meaning is deciphered. The background to the narrative of the film is the hippie movement and the study “ The One-Dimensional Man ” by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse from 1964. Put simply, the hippie movement of the early 1960s consisted of taking one's own needs and desires out of repression to free themselves to live without regard to the moral code and ideas of those upper and middle classes, of whose bigotry and materialism one was disappointed.
Reviews
The film was accused of making radical left and anti-American statements in the United States , and various lawsuits were brought against it (unsuccessfully).
“Antonioni's film, which was made in America, tells in partly allegorical-visionary images of the myth of a wonderland, of the fascination of its unlimited possibilities and of the symptoms of its decay, whereby utopian dreams suddenly turn into deadly nightmares. The heroes' radical attempts at liberation correspond to an experimental narrative style that consciously combines the glaring effects of action cinema and colportage with elements of pop and advertising aesthetics. "
“A dropout film from the director of bourgeois- existentialist cinema from Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni. Could that go well? No. Only the aesthetic implementation is remarkable. The intention, however, to criticize the student movement and what it rebelled against, namely the western materialistic consumer society , shows the helpless point of view of the liberal esthete . "
“The film apparently wants to maintain a critical stance towards both the culture of protest and consumer terror, but what comes out of it is an indefinable mishmash of ideologies. In their wooden simplicity, the dialogues sometimes push the limits of what is bearable. Nevertheless, of course, for no cinema lover, the path leads past "Zabriskie Point". "
“Michelangelo Antonioni tries his hand at a portrait of the United States: around a simple love story between a typist and a student, he built skyscrapers and desert sand, consumer posters and pop music, police officers and rebellious youth. But the “nightmare America” turns out to be more colorful than agonizing, more beautiful than frightening. In spite of everything, "Zabriskie Point" is one of those films that shouldn't be ignored. "
The Rotten Tomatoes website evaluated 24 reviews and got 67% positive reviews.
Soundtrack
A soundtrack was released for the film in 1970, but it does not contain all of the songs that can be heard in the film.
- Pink Floyd : Heart Beat, Pigmeat
- The Kaleidoscope : Brother Mary
- Grateful Dead : Dark Star (excerpt)
- Pink Floyd: Crumbling Land
- Patti Page : Tennessee Waltz
- Rolling Stones : You Got the Silver
- The Youngbloods : Sugar Babe
- Jerry García : Love Scene
- Roscoe Holscomb: I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again
- The Kaleidoscope: Mickey's Tune
- John Fahey : Dance of Death
- Pink Floyd: Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up, a version of Careful with That Ax, Eugene
Trivia
- After the film was completed, the two leading actors, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, moved to Mel Lyman's Fort Hill Commune in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Roxbury, Boston .
- Harrison Ford had a supporting role in the film as a clerk at the airfield, but his scenes were cut out in the released version and are considered lost.
- The villa is the work of architect Paolo Soleri . The architecture is based on the villa in Alfred Hitchcock's The Invisible Third , which in turn was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's desert houses.
Web links
- Zabriskie Point in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- Review by Benjamin Happel on filmzentrale.com
- Review ( memento from January 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in the Dirk Jasper Filmlexikon, u. a. with contemporary reviews
Individual evidence
- ↑ Homage to the hippie movement: Hans Peter Rodenberg in: Helmut Korte: Introduction to Systematic Film Analysis, pp. 94-102
- ↑ Simone Brott: Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real , Farnham 2011, p. 61
- ↑ Modern San Diego dated [1]. Retrieved August 4, 2018
- ↑ The standard of November 26, 2010 Urban eco-utopia in the desert [2] accessed on August 4, 2018
- ^ In: Robert Lyons: Michelangelo Antonioni's Neorealism: A World View New York, 1973, p. 187; quoted n .: Hans Peter Rodenberg: Historical context and the contemporary viewer: Michelangelo Antonionis Zabriskie Point (1969) pp. 75–118; in: Helmut Korte: Introduction to systematic film analysis , 2004/3, pp. 73–118
- ↑ In: Korte, ibid., P. 85
- ↑ Martin Seel: Die Künste des Kinos , Frankfurt 2013, unpag.E-Book
- ↑ Rodenberg, ibid., P. 95
- ↑ a b Quoted from Dirk Jasper Filmlexikon ( Memento from January 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Antonioni classic "Zabriskie Point": Naked in the desert sand . In: Der Spiegel , May 28, 2009, accessed October 1, 2013
- ↑ Evangelical Press Association, Munich, Review No. 385/1970.
- ↑ Entry on Rotten Tomatoes
- ↑ Presentation of the villa's architecture, accessed on July 3, 2013