The U.S. half sheet for the 1970 film Zabriskie Point.
By MIKE TEAL
Fifty years ago today, on February 9th, 1970, the renowned Italian arthouse filmmaker Michaelangelo Antonioni’s first American film, Zabriskie Point, was released. It was a story about two young counter-culture radicals who steal an airplane and then travel to the desert to escape.
Four years earlier, Antonioni’s first English-language film, Blow-Up, had become a huge international hit, its sexual content influencing the abandonment of the old Hollywood Production Code in 1968, in favor of a new MPAA film rating system.
The next year, 1969, saw the release of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, about two young hippies who travel across the western U.S. in search of America. That was also hugely successful and set the stage for a “New Hollywood”, driven mainly by young auteurs working with low budgets, and aimed at the counter-culture. Surprisingly, the highly anticipated Zabriskie Point bombed at the box office after mostly scathing reviews. The film’s male star, Mark Frechette, even admitted on Dick Cavett later that, “Much was attempted that wasn’t achieved.” The film’s female lead, Daria Halprin, would later marry Dennis Hopper.
A few months after Zabriskie Point‘s failure, Orson Welles wrote a piece about the New Hollywood, called “But Where Are We Going?” for Look Magazine, in which he pointed out its partly Italian origins and gave special emphasis to Fellini and Antonioni:
In Italy, the very minute Mussolini quit the war, the white telephone, that celebrated trademark of Fascist high-society soap opera (for many years the principal Italian film product), went into the garbage can. The garbage can itself can become the symbol of the new ambiente. Italian directors, too poor to work in the old sound studios, took their cameras out into the streets to make Open City and Shoeshine. Rossellini, De Sica and the rest, under the flag of neo-realism, marched on the international film market. Hollywood kept the big money, but now, in every important sense, Rome was the movie capital of the world.
Cinematic births and rebirths, breaking forth since then all over the globe from Stockholm to Tokyo, have taken off a lot of the shine. But even today, it can’t be said that all the gold has gone from Italy. Not as long as Fellini continues to get money for—and money from—those marvelous and very costly personal extravaganzas of his. Should fairness force me to include the name of Antonioni, that solemn architect of empty boxes? Must I admit that, as much as he maddens me, there are still serious film-lovers throughout the world who take him almost as seriously as he takes himself. I can’t deny that between them, these two have changed the shape of the horizon.
In place of the old movie star, there towers over us now another sacred monster: the Great Director. As far as popular mythology is concerned, when Fellini hired his country’s foremost male star to play Fellini in a Fellini film about Fellini — his 8½ — the sun may be said to have set on the day of the actor. Wherever the gold may be, in this epoch the glamour is mostly behind the camera.
By that time, Welles had already begun filming The Other Side of the Wind‘s “film-within-the-film” segment, about two young radicals with a bomb who eventually wind up in both an abandoned Hollywood and the desert.
Not coincidently, Welles filmed some scenes in an Arizona home located next to one used by Antonioni in Zabriskie Point.
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