With time having passed and perspective having come into focus, we can now look upon the defining films of the counter cultural late 60s and early 70s and see which movies really captured the zeitgeist and spirit of this turbulent era. One look at Michelangelo Antonioni's (almost) film maudit "Zabriskie Point" should answer all the questions to an open-minded viewer.

"Zabriskie Point" has not been favorably greeted by the American press. The reasons were obvious. Antonioni has been experimenting with film form ever since he started. Throughout his entire career he has been more interested in capturing moods and conveying emotions rather than tell classically constructed narratives. It should therefore not have been a surprise that "Zabriskie Point" mostly discarded a plot and concentrated on making the viewer experience a certain time and place. We don't get to find out much about Daria and Mark, the ostensible protagonists of "Zabriskie Point", but rather follow them on a trip through consciousness and 1960s iconography. It should also be noted that Mark and Daria were the actual names of the actors who played these characters (Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin), who function more as models for concepts and ideas than characters in the traditional sense (something that they share with the people in Bresson's films or Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad").

In retrospect it seems as if the characters of those particularly precious early 70s films, having lived through a decade of the Vietnam War and the Manson murders, were always fleeing from society into a new environment. In "Two-Lane Blacktop" and "Easy Rider" it's the road, the wide open spaces between people (but not actually among them). Similarly "Apocalypse Now", where the characters live in a collective dystopian insanity and are numb to the degree that not even carnage and bloodshed has any more effect on them, or "Performance", where James Foxx is in search of a "bohemian atmosphere". In "Zabriskie Point" it's the desert of the film's title. A place even further removed from society than the highways in road movies of the era. Antonioni knew that driving a man-made car over man-made streets is not what the disillusioned youth that lived through the 60s really needed. It's the desert as a place of eternity, having existed before they were born, that reveals itself to be the ideal new living ground for Mark and Daria. Antonioni shares with us a vision of utopia for a few minutes, showing us dozens of people passionately embracing and making love in the sands of Death Valley. That fata morgana ends and Daria and Mark are back in reality, with nowhere to go. Just like the nameless protagonists of Monte Hellman's equally mesmerizing "Two-Lane Blacktop", they go on drifting through the world. Mark returns his stolen airplane, though painted in new and provocative colors, while Daria imagines (or catalyzes) an explosion of the bourgeoisie world, similar to the original ending of "Apocalypse Now" (the appropriately apocalyptic explosion of the Kurtz compound).

"Zabriskie Point" is a film of great complexity, something that we should all expect from Antonioni. It is packed with wonders and marvels in every corner of the frame and reveals profound truths about where we were and where we're going to be that resonate much more deeply than anything we may find in "Easy Rider". Don't let the challenging and unconventional style of Antonioni throw you of balance. Just let his vision of man wash over you with its dazzling array of imagery and sound. And then see it again. And think about it.