ARTS Antonioni in Death Valley
PENELOPE HOUSTON
A colleague's hard-line comment this week on Michelangelo Antonioni, apropos Zabriskie Point (Empire, 'X' London), was that while Antonioni is undeniably an intellectual he is not perhaps particularly intelligent. I'm no critic of Antonioni's intelligence. It is the image of the intellectul film-maker which seems to me due to be called in for a check-up; and while Zabriskie Point makes dazzlingly clear what he's up to (and has been, perhaps, for his last three films), critics as so often seem hesitant about unpinning a label satisfactorily affixed a decade ago.
Antonioni's films have always been sur- rounded by the paraphernalia of intellec- tualism: the press statements and inter- views, sometimes tolerably opaque in trans- lation, the themes of alienation, pounced on by interpreters, worked on and overworked because they fitted so many critical pre- occupations of the time. And the convol- uted, hypnotising, Jamesian sentences which Antonioni was writing with his camera, through L'Avventura and La Notte and L'Eclisse, undoubtedly mirror an intellectual novelist's sensibility. But Antonioni's mind has never seemed to me to work through concepts (as, for instance, does that of Stanley Kubrick, a copper-bottomed intel- lectual film-maker), but through intima- tions. His tools—architecture, space, light— have always been a painter's. Even the famous objective correlatives of landscape have seldom worked all that directly. It never did, for instance, to assume that when Antonioni showed little figures and large buildings he was taking an orthodox con- demnatory line about dehumanising modern architecture.
Deserto Rosso added colour to the equip- ment; and it seems to me entirely uncoin- cidental that since then Antonioni has been filming progressively less like an intellectual and more like a painter: less, if you like, in the manner of James and more in that of Virginia Woolf. Characters no longer set up a tension with a landscape; they become part of it. Verbal definitions drop out—and, of course, Antonioni has made Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point in a foreign language. Novelistic threads of plot and dialogue are progressively and decisively weakened— which doesn't, incidentally, mean that the structural control is less sure. In Blow-Up Antonioni showed himself suggestively aware of the risks of seeing life through a camera; and still accepting them. Zabriskie Point is the result: a series of perceptions and intimations about America at explosion point, pessimistic and yet elating, banal and intensely aware. It is a much more open film, I think, than many reviewers have allowed, because while people -can be per- suaded by argument no one can be forced to share your perceptions. And it's a film that you simply can't see if you are perpetu- ally trying to look through or beyond it for the old intellectual novelist's ratiocinations.
American criticism has been condem- natory sometimes to the point of hysteria; as though the film were a kind of Medium Cool gone wrong, an attempt to tell it realis- tically which has somehow lost its reason along the way. But an instance of what I think Antonioni isn't doing comes early in the film, when we drive through a Cali- fornia of ubiquitous advertisements, vast oversized hoardings, a kind of ballet of bill- boards. Reduced to a theoretical statement about America, here's the ultimate banality; and, despite the Times, I credit Antonioni with the intelligence to realise that there's no percentage left in simply telling us these are the united states of advertising. His actual movie statement is quite different: grotesque, in a wry way rather beautiful, an unsettling confusion of textures and sur- faces, like a wax museum fantasy where you can't tell attendants from exhibits, a painted landscape run mad, fronting a real land- scape perhaps run madder.
Violence is again a conflicting impression. One of those incoherent student debates, involving Black Panthers and others, sug- gests that given the tools one or two of them are prepared to finish the job. But Antonioni leaves that sequence on a very quizzical glance. The policemen lobbing gas grenades through a broken window to winkle out campus dissidents are more un- answerable: grotesquely uniformed, comic strip hallucinations. Away from the excite- ment of the usual head-thumping newsreel shots, violence looks much colder; and the tear-gas canister rattling across the floor could be the bomb that's going to finish us all. It is because the images and the ideas come so close, without the usual gaps for interpretation, that they can raise the hairs on your head.
The student drop-out (Mark Frechette), who has intended a kind of acte gratuit in killing a policeman but who seems to be forestalled by another marksman, steals a light aircraft and heads for the Arizona desert. Simultaneously, Dania Halprin, half- hearted secretary to a big property devel- oper, drives off with some form of medita- tion in mind. They meet in an astonishing sequence in which plane beats up car—a kind of innocent exhilaration of hazards, contrast to the gun and the gas-mask and the cold machine Not coincidentally, this sensationally euphoric encounter is preceded by the most Antonioniesque episode in the entire film: the girl's wayside meeting with some disturbed and exceptionally disturbing children, and with an old man sitting in a roadside bar like some calm but perhaps not quite sane old-timer for whom this world's well lost.
Zabriskie Point (a rock formation in Death Valley, for the curious) is of course the quintessential paradox of an Antonioni landscape: all that eroded, fiercely blazing rock across which 'the pioneers struggled now made over to the tourists, extravagantly beautiful under Alfio Contini's camera and yet somehow excessive. (Two mysterious metallic red boxes, looking like seismo- graphic equipment left on the moon, turn out to be labelled 'Men' and 'Women'.) But Antonioni does somewhat wreck it with the girl's vision of hippy couples and three- somes grappling all over the rocks. Caked in sand and pallid make-up, suggesting floured fish laid out for frying, they are grotesque as well as unlovely intrusions; as though Antonioni's vestigial puritanism had some- how chosen this unlikely moment to come to the surface.
If Antonioni is suggesting that sex and drugs aren't all they're cracked up to be either, then the point isn't, shall we say, well taken. If not, then this sequence rates, I think, as one of those crashing collapses of sensibility to which the super-sensitive are sometimes prone. Antonioni is using his exceedingly unprofessional young actors as vehicles for his own perceptions; and per- haps their mistiness as characters becomes a liability only when he risks the double vision of seeing through their eyes. Certainly, the film's images of exhilaration are mostly associated with the old-fashioned, innocent machinery of the light aircraft (an old An- tonioni love, one supposes, remembering the airfield sequence in L'Eclisse). Even the death of the boy, shot on landing by trigger- happy policemen, is unerringly filmed as the death of a plane: the frivolous, plaintive painted bird down among the hard black and white police cars.
Youth is killed; youth takes its revenge. The last of the film's simple ideas and com- plex, multiple perceptions is of materialism exploded—Wowing up absurdly, frighten- ingly, elegantly, and in slow motion. Bang goes the property man's cliff-top house, the wardrobe with its festooning dresses, the TV set, the refrigerator, sending chickens and lobsters and cornflake packets eddying to- wards eternity. The more ominous shots come before the explosions: empty, silent, end of the world shots, lonely glimpses of corners of the house, exactly reminiscent of the great last sequence of L'Eclisse. One might take this as an intimation that if Antonioni had chosen he could have ended his film more threateningly—no one in an entirely apocalyptic mood, surely, would have blown up that lobster. Is the girl smiling, even a litle smugly, as she drives away from her imagined holocaust? I find this a very undogmatic ending to a film which sees the monstrous innocence of America as well as its guilts.
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