Mark says, “I always knew it would be like this.” “Love?” Daria asks. Garcia’s guitar slows, the camera leaves the other couples in a wide shot in the sand and cuts to Mark and Daria sitting on the top of a ridge in a postcoital moment of calm. Jerry Garcia's improvised guitar solo washes over the soundtrack, and this, combined with the spontaneous and sometimes awkward improvisational movements of the actors, gives the scene a rough-hewn feel. The extras were cast from Joseph Chaikin’s experimental acting troupe Open Theater, and there is an exaggerated theatricality in their movements. This is accompanied by the spontaneous appearance of several other young couples in various stages of undress, playfully rolling around. After exchanging some words, they run wild in the desert, shouting, philosophizing, and eventually making love in the gypsum and sand. Daria reads the National Park Service informational plaque next to the overlook, “This is an area of ancient lake bed deposited five to ten million years ago.” She is impressed he is indifferent. It opens with Daria and Mark, the film’s two good-looking young protagonists, arriving at Zabriskie Point. It has been referred to variously as the “love scene,” the “desert scene,” the “orgy scene,” and the “desert orgy scene,” but the orgy itself is not what lends the sequence its impact-rather, it is how those moments are contrasted with those that come directly before and after. The most powerful portion of the film for me, however, is that which actually takes place at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. This ending is powerful, not only because it is visually remarkable but also because it makes a graphic statement about the stunted force of a generation’s frustrations: you can fantasize that the house explodes, but in reality it will always loom there. Perhaps the most obvious highlight sequence is the finale, a fantasy slow-motion destruction of the modernist house on the desert hill, repeated from various vantage points over dreamy Pink Floyd music. The debate verges on the mundane, filled with in-fighting and unnecessary details, yet it is very much alive, somewhat reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman's institutional documentaries of the same period such as High School (1969) and Law and Order (1969).
The first is the opening, in which a vérité-style camera follows a debate between white liberal hippies and Black Panthers (led by Kathleen Cleaver of the actual Black Panthers) as they plan an intervention on their college campus. There are three standout sequences in the film to which I frequently return. Everybody just slunk away.” History has been kinder to the film and its unpolished portrayal of late 1960s counterculture youth, and while there still might be some stigma of shame attached to admitting it is your favorite Antonioni film, it's at least now acknowledged as a crucial piece in a great director's oeuvre. It was the most embarrassing thing that I'd ever been to. Chester Crill, a musician from the band Kaleidoscope (who contributed to the soundtrack), remembered how horrified everyone was after seeing it for the first time: “There wasn't a person who left that was looking anyone else in the eye. When it was finally released in 1970, the film was panned by critics. Antonioni’s anti-capitalist sentiments had the studio and government officials on alert and it took an epic two years to complete. The production was highly scrutinized: it was Antonioni's first film made in the United States. Inspired by the wild success of Blow-Up, MGM produced Zabriskie Point for $7 million, an extremely high budget for the time (for perspective, Blow-Up, also produced by MGM just a few years before, cost $1.5 million). Zabriskie Point is arguably Michelangelo Antonioni's most divisive work.
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