扎布里斯基角

在美国学生组织的一起关于反战和争取民主的学生革命运动中，马克（马克弗雷切特MarkFrechette饰）和同学、老师一起被当局逮捕，在愈演愈烈的双方对抗中，马克打死了一名警察，当局即刻展开对他的追捕，马克在机场偷盗了一辆小型飞机后开始了逃亡之旅。在商业公司当秘书的达莉亚（达莉娅斯普莱林DariaHalprin饰）正驱车前往菲尼克斯，途径沙漠的时候恰巧被马克发现，他从空中向她扔下一件红色的衣服。两人结伴同行，达莉亚答应开车带马克去找汽油，他们于路无话不谈，马克告诉她自己的那些革命经历，在一处名为“扎布里斯基角”的荒地里他们疯狂的亲昵。飞机加满油后马克将飞机画上奇怪又明艳的图案，并与达莉亚愉快地分手。达莉亚继续开车前往菲尼克斯，却收到了马克被警方击毙的消息……

With the final scene of Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni made film

history. The main character Daria drives away from the villa into the desert.

Fantasy is overheating. Daria stops, gets out, and looks back angrily at this

stronghold of consumerism and commerce, now engulfed in a ball of fire.

Then the villa reappears and the spectacle repeats itself over and over again.

The embellishments of modern prosperity go up in the burning mushroom

cloud. The detonation of the outside world is the explosion of the imaginary.

Antonioni shows himself to be a resourceful “blaster,” staging a slow-motion

aesthetic of destruction. Freezer and television, clothes and whole interiors

disintegrate in one surreal movement. Through Daria’s eyes, the audience

experiences the transformation of functional objects into useless fragments,

which rearrange themselves in bright spaces into wonderful images with

instinctive precision. The explosive effect is sublimated into an immaculate

execution of colors and forms. Several minutes later, the time-suspended

apocalypse reverts back to the desert landscape. Daria glances at the smoking

ruins, turns, starts the motor, and drives away into a red sunset.

Zabriskie Point was released in spring 1970 and was supposed to be

Antonioni’s commercial triumph in the United States. Instead, it was a complete

disaster. It came to a conflict after the Metro Goldwyn Mayer film company

intervened in the soundtrack—which was especially important for the

director—adding the sugary Roy Orbison song “So Young” to the final scene,

with the car driving away against the red horizon. The contrast to Antonioni’s

original intention to show an airplane writing “Fuck You America!” in the sky

at the end could not have been greater. In addition to this artistic nightmare,

the film was also a commercial flop. In 1968, at the start of filming, the images

had been in tune with the current mood, but by 1970 they no longer were.

The film encountered a wave of rejection and ridicule among the counterculture

and New Left, whose psychographics Antonioni had wanted to

express in emotional images. The accusation that Antonioni had copied elements

of avant-garde films and commercialized the counterculture’s aesthetic

potential for Hollywood cut deep. The establishment also reproached

the film for its anti-American statements and filed several lawsuits, albeit

unsuccessfully.

Source: Jacob Tanner "Motion and Emotions" from "1968 in Europe: A Histroy of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977"