Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in "Zabriskie Point," Warner Bros., 1970

Another rescue operation: the overdue DVD release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s "Zabriskie Point" (1970), the infamous auteur brick wall with which the world-famous Italian attempted to suss out the very essence of America, in a cultural moment when the nation was eating itself alive with war, riots, assassinations, screaming commercialism and generational venom. Most famous to many budding cinephiles as one of the Medved family’s "50 Worst Films of All Time," Antonioni’s feature is nothing if not a rumba with its historical moment. (Its production, complete with violence, public outcry, political rumors, FBI harassment, Black Panthers and all kinds of "unrest"-ed skullduggery, is recounted vividly in J. Hoberman’s magisterial "The Dream Life.")

What the pseudo-Christian nabobs and cult-stud contextualizers don’t tell you is that "Zabriskie Point" is, in its visual essence, a great and harrowing statement about the American landscape, as rich and eloquent as Baudrillard’s "America" or any play by Sam Shepard. (Antonioni folded in some alarming riot footage as well.) The story -- an antiauthoritarian young guy and girl defect, "Breathless"-ly, from the West Coast campus skirmishes and drop out, man, into the desert, to groove and screw and contemplate the new era -- is baloney, concocted by too many screenwriters (credits go to Shepard, Antonioni, Claire Peploe, Tonino Guerra and spaghetti western hack Franco Rossetti, as "Fred Gardner," which was also the name of a contemporaneous activist/playwright and co-founder of Jane Fonda’s "F.T.A." anti-war tour).

And Mark Frechette, a beautiful carpenter/ex-mental patient Antonioni found in Cambridge, is simply awful. But the images, which I confess to never having seen in good condition before, and which are the meat and bones of any Antonioni film, are masterful, satiric, wicked. Antonioni’s playing sardonic anthropologist here -- it’s his funniest film by far -- and everything he sees in the landscape is astonishing and soulless, from the giant car lot statues to the promotional real estate film populated by mannequins to the cloverleafs, billboards, automated stock-price readouts, all-glass corporate buildings, desert highways littered with burned car chassis, and so on. Predictably his compositions are startling and flawless. Antonioni shot California as if it were the very edge of civilization, succumbing to entropy and greed and the desert sun, and there still may not be a more powerful visual portrait of that dying frontier anywhere.

The notorious ending -- an orgiastic montage of consumerist objects exploded in slow motion -- is both chilling and fascinating, and offers a scary notion of what real anti-establishment revolution would entail: wholesale destruction of material wealth. Did he mean it? Why not? When a refrigerator explodes and a whole raw chicken slowly sails by the camera in sharp focus, amid the flying detritus, the question seems moot.

"Philippe Garrel x 2" (Zeitgeist Video) and "Zabriskie Point" (Warner Home Video) are now available on DVD.

[Additional photo: Johanna ter Steege and Mireille Perrier in "I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar," Zeitgeist Films/Film Desk, 1991]

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