Zabriskie Point (1970)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Anthropology student Daria, who's helping a property developer build a village in the Los Angeles desert, and dropout Mark, who's wanted by the authorities for allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot, accidentally encounter each other in Death Valley and soon begin an unrestrained romance.
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What critics compared Zabriskie Point to
And it doesn’t hurt that the cinematography of longtime collaborator Giles Nuttgens is lustrous and dusky in equal measure, capturing dying and dead towns and vast landscape with the acuity of Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” or as a less languorous, less brightly-colored parallel to Wim Wenders and Robby Müller’s “Paris, Texas.”
In 1969 alone, three major European directors made movies in the American West: Jacques Demy made Model Shop, Agnes Varda made Lions Love, and Michelangelo Antonioni made Zabriskie Point.
The end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” was the director’s fantasy of the destruction of America, except that instead of people dying we saw only consumer goods blowing up — a shallow piece of Euro non-thought about U.S. In “Bad Boys II,” we see a long chase sequence along the Florida freeways with cars flying and crashing into one another, being squeezed into tinfoil along a guardrail, running over each other, bursting into flame.
With Gérard Depardieu, Giancarlo Giannini, and Jason Schwartzman in funny bit roles, CQ summons up some of the exuberance, the play, and the self-importance of the auteur era, evoking films from Godard�s Alphaville to Antonioni�s Zabriskie Point, and its ingenuous energy at times overcomes its derivativeness.
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Tramite il raduno Hill delinea la visione di una società utopica, nella quale le bande di strada possano realmente autogovernare nella città di New York – quantomeno nel suburbano – in una convivenza pacifica; ponendosi così come un’organizzazione parastatale figlia del suo periodo generazionale, dei suoi respiri insurrezionali e di un decennio cinematografico apertosi con Zabriskie Point (1970) di Michelangelo Antonioni che trova in I guerrieri della notte la sua degna, violenta e nichilistica chiusura – un inno al caos laddove non arriva l’autorità statale.
This artificiality can perhaps be attributed to German-born Wim Wenders’ perception of the American Midwest (a perception also evident in Werner Herzog’s Stroszek and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point).
We’ve seen this time and time again, whether in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) or more recently in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011).
Among rebellious movies that threaten to blow shit up in the end, V for Vendetta is closer to the confused philosophy of Fight Club than the visual poetry of Zabriskie Point.
Come noto a chiunque conosca l’opera, del resto, si tratta di due facce della stessa medaglia: Tyler possiede problemi psicologici irrisolti, e in lui convivono più personalità (questa doppiezza sarà rielaborata e personificata da un singolo caratterista qualche anno dopo in American Psycho ), e sarà questo a guidare la trama fino al celebre finale, osannatissimo e diventato di culto quasi più della storia raccontata: la distruzione deliberata dei palazzi in cui ha sede il capitalismo, in un delirio di esplosioni a catena che evocano quasi le detonazioni di Zabriskie Point di Antonioni.
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It's as if he'd taken all the famous movies about two self-destructive outlaws films like Easy Rider, Badlands, The Sugarland Express, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Zabriskie Point, even Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat!
When Max blows apart an aggressive robot, everything slips into slow motion, calm and hushed, and, with a flicker of pity in our amazement, we see the machine bloom into a thousand fragments, like the bursting TV set at the end of Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point.”