On Screen

...On Screen MORE PAINTERLY THAN FILMIC BY JOHN SIMON M_ _ ioni s Zabnskie Point is a thorough oversimplification of the American problem, a series of tendentious posters—sometimes very beautiful —that neither embody nor encourage speculation The young activists, whether Black Panthers or white leopards, are aggrieved, victimized and assassmated by a police that treats them at best with cold cynicism, at worst with murderous hatred Now there may be a good deal of truth in this, but in order for it to work artistically, it has to be made at least dramatic, and preferably also believable There is not a decent gesture or word out of any cop here, the least offensive reaction from one of them is the dumb amazement of the highway patrolman who finds Dana seemingly alone in the desert But even this fellow has a glint in his eye and may be revolving m his head, while the camera executes a circular pan around the godforsaken landscape, a quick tumble in the dust with the defenseless girl It is the unhappy gunhappiness of the cops that is their salient feature They shoot a Negro student because, as they shout to justify their act, he has a gun on him, though, quite clearly, he hasn't They shoot Mark without warning because, beleaguered, he tries to ram one of the patrol cars with his landing plane How, by the way, did that much police get to be lying in wait for him, as if by appointment7 How can Mark, m all that pea soup, even find Los Angeles and the little airport7 Why no bullet marks on the plane7 No blood on Mark7 It is as if in this scene, as in several others, only the nastiness mattered, and there was to be no concession to anything as vulgar as verisimilitude These cops are also ignorant and dehumanizing When a fellow they are busting gives his occupation as "associate professor of history," the recording policeman objects that this is too long and puts down "clerk " He would more likely have put down "professor" or "teacher," but that, for Antomom and his scenarists, would be too nice When the same pohceman asks Mark for his name, and is given the nom de guerre "Karl Marx," he first has to ask how "Marx" is spelled and then enters the Christian name as Carl " These oafs, clearly, don't even know the name of what they are fighting But other members of the Establishment—and, in this film, almost everyone who is not a student blends neatly into a dehumanized Establishment—are equally unsavory Thus even the food-shop owner, who says he cannot give the unknown Mark a sandwich on credit, for then he would have to give one to all who ask, takes on a sinister coloration in this context, simply because his statement, though uttered in rational, unhostile tones, makes him less than a saint or character out of Saroyan Although Lee (Rod Taylor) worries about Dana, we are made to feel this could not be concern for a mere human being, or even an employe, but only for a mistress who might prove unavailable to him and turn his impending tnp into all work and no play, thus making him an even duller boy than he already is And that brings us to the elliptical editing that makes Zabnskie Point a duller, less affecting film than anything in the Antomom canon A great deal, for example, is not told us about the heroine of Red Deseit, but at least her sickness is illustrated and explored m enough ways to achieve a certain dramatic validity and so confer on her a measure of interest and dignity In Blow-Up, much is indicated only by the tiniest clues, and even those are not devoid of ambiguity, but at least they are there Here, we do not know how Dana gets her job with Lee, what their exact relationship is, and if it is sexual, how much it means to either participant Accordingly, it becomes impossible to assign any moral value, positive or negative, to the actions of either character toward the other, or to fit their relationship into the moral framework of the whole film In Zabnskie Point, foreshortening becomes, all too often, cnpphng amputation There is a graver problem too Antomom's previous feature films, starting with Cionaca di un amore, indeed even his short subjects, all have considerable social significance, Zabnskie Point is his first film to have political significance Here we are no longer concerned with an alienated bourgeois society, stagnant, dispirited, despintuahzed, and only spuriously alive in the areas of sex and pelf Here we are contemplatmg the Movement, which fancies itself a revolution and may in fact be one—at least so it appears to Antomom But in a revolutionary context we need to know who the adversaries are, where exactly they stand, what they propose to do about each other, and how much humanity they are ultimately capable ot In a merely social context, we can do with less information Thus in L'Avventuia we need not know whether Corrado and Giuha, the eternally sparring couple, will stay together, or whether Sandro and Claudia will ever get married Married or unmarried, these people merely have the choice, not even of different circles in hell, only of this or that bolgia within the same circle In a political context, however, m a revolution, we must know with how much feeling a given combatant is endowed, for it is ultimately on the degree of his humanity that we must judge him, whatever other criteria history may choose to invoke Antomom seems to take the superiority of the young over their elders for granted The guilt of the adults is meant to be self-evident from their surroundings chrome-and-glass offices crammed lull of computers closed-circuit television, telephones, dictaphones, control panels, gadgets—circumstantial evidence, perhaps, but not quite enough tor the judicious viewer to pass judgment Antomom the pamphleteer, the poster-maker, the agitprop filmmaker wins out over Antomom the artist There is, tor instance, a magnificent shot of Lee enthroned behind his desk m a glass office that Antomom had specially built on top of a skyscraper The shot is from the floor, diagonally up the tycoon's legs, past the control panel under the top of his dolmen of a desk, up along, still diagonally, the complacently backward-leaning figure, then out through the plate-glass window, where an American flag battens on the breeze, and beyond that to a swarthy, neo-Moonsh office tower There was mtense blue light on the actor (its heat, I am told, almost unbearable), to create the same steely blue within as without The angle and the palette are those of El Greco, and the whole thing looms chill, gaunt and gigantic in the camera's slightly astigmatic eye s \J uch an image, for all its artistry, is dishonest because it tries to tell through a single picture what can be shown honestly only through a series of dramatic images and words In short, through an action There are times when one picture's speaking louder than a thousand words functions to the artist's detriment A political argument must persuade through its cogency, not through its loudness What is more persuasive about the film is the skill and obsessiveness with which it records the various forms of advertising that dominate the scene, from billboards to tv commercials, from colossal papier-mache figures to slogans on the backs of taxicabs Here the repetitions and juxtapositions begin to m?ke a case, except that the concept of California (or America) as one vast gallery hung with stationary and mobile advertisements had become a bit of a commonplace even before Antomom When it comes to making his young people eminently lovable, Antomom is rather at a loss for adequate images We wonder why Dana, the free spirit, the happy-go-lucky flower child, should so quickly and easily become the mistress of a tycoon who must stand for everything she abhors All Antomom can do is simply not show us how it happened To depict Mark and Dana's immediate mutual attraction, the best he can manage is to have the kids meet cute—mdeed, supercute Their antics m the desert are no more convincing than their air-to-ground courtship, and their dialogue, poorly post-synched, sounds stilted and is delivered without conviction The histrionic ^sufficiency of both youngsters (Dana Halpnn and Mark Frechette), the sloppy plottmg and wntmg, the overuse of zoom and telephoto lenses, the obtrusion of film clips from the San Francisco State demonstrations in the middle of staged sequences m Los Angeles—such things make it hard for us to care about Dana's conversion from flower-childishness to supposititious activism, yet that, if anything, is what the film is about Nobody, however, changes noticeably in this film, even if some shadows come to gesticulate a little differently Mark may pick up a gun, and Dana may blow up a house or a whole society in her mind, but if these paper cut-outs flutter m slightly different directions does that mean development of character7 Antomom loves these young ones, presumably for pnvate, sentimental reasons to which he is entitled, but that he should expect us to fall for them, to share his undramatized predilection, is an act of pure hubris What Antomom has made here?whether deliberately or unconsciously, I cannot say—is a Godard film Just as m Godard, we get billboards and slogans, zeroing in on bits of lettenng, visual puns, characters hurtling from one gratuitous act to the next, the camera zooming off somewhere for no particular reason (say, onto an escarpment at the far end of Death Valley), storytelling and editing so elliptical that characterization is jettisoned, omission of key details (did Mark shoot that policeman or didn't he'), coincidences and lllogic rampant, reveling in revolution and destruction Pauline Kael has rightly likened the relish in those final explosions (the house, I have been informed by better mathematicians than myself, blows up 13 times and is shot by 17 cameras) to Vittono Mussolini's notorious comparison ot Italian bombs dropping on Ethiopia, as seen from the air, to roses unfurling in full bloom There is a nasti-ness here, a glee in destruction, unearned by what the film has been able to demonstrate, though this does not quite reach Godardian proportions, it is nevertheless similar in kmd Now it is perfectly all right for an outsider like Antomom to make a film about America, but he is then unwise to ignore the advantage m telling the story from the privileged position of an observant foreigner To try to tell it from inside out, as Antomom does, is courting disaster, most promptly perceptible in such verbal infelicities as Dana's remark to Lee about not digging work, only digging it when she needs bread Or take Mark's flatfooted comment after the sexual act, "I always knew it would be like this " In itself, that would be merely banal, following upon Dana's vision of scores of copulating couples, the line elicited giggles from audiences and had to be cut well after the film was released So it goes when a movie has two Italian scenarists, Antomom and his fidus Achates, Tonino Guerra, an English one, Clare Peplo, An-tonioni's girl friend, and two very different American ones, Fred Gardner and Sam Shepard Gardner is a former Ramparts journalist, an expert on campus activism and the Movement, Sam Shepard is a leading avant-garde playwright whose vision is extremely idiosyncratic Zabnskie Point represents the uncoordinated thrashings of this disparate quintet Yet the problem goes beyond that of too many cooks It is a case of cinematic language and spoken language not meshing, indeed contradicting each other Antomoru's filmic style is complex and overpowering, whereas the dialogue tries hard to be swinging, loose, cool Thus for Mark to explain the purloined plane with an offhand "I just needed to get off the ground" is to undercut the sophistication of the filmmaking, and to undercut it to no meaningful, artistically expressive purpose The dialogue is even worse, though, when it tries to be poetic, as when Dana exclaims, " 'So anyway' ought to be one word—the name of some place or river, Soanyway River " I doubt that m Italian Antomom would have let that pass T m here remains, on the credit side, Antomoni's way with his camera, although Alfio Contmi, his new cinematographer, strikes me as less gifted than some of his predecessors (I say this on the further evidence of The Libertine, also shot by Contini ) There are some overwhelming images here—as well as others that are overdone or lust ordinary Let us examine three beautiful ones Having just heard the radio announcement of Mark's death, Dana stands with her back to the camera in front of some giant cactuses There is a wind, and in it all kinds of lesser vegetation jiggles and writhes around those colossi, they, however, tower immobile like a living Stonehenge, a green monument to imperturbability and survival Or take a mere shot of a trash can at the airfield a yellow can inscribed with "NO OIL PLEASE" m large red letters, while the background of hangars and sky is all gray or grayish blue The colors and composition here are worthy of a painting by Morandi, and as quietly instinct with atmosphere Atmosphere of a different kind is achieved m the scene in the bar of the little desert town where Dana looks for her elusive guru The faces, conversations and silences, the rhythm of the small incidents and smaller talk—funny, peevish, disquieting—in fluid juxtaposition, all this supremely evokes some typical corner of America, some ultimate cranny of loneliness The imagery and mood here are strongly suggestive of Edward Hopper, particularly at the conclusion of the scene, when Dana's car spurts out of the frame and the camera passes through a window to linger for the last time on an old-timer seated at the bar, craggily staring beyond his glass of beer into a future that does not exist Although this failure ot Zabnskie Point is dispiriting, it is hardly an excuse for the yelping and growling horde of currish reviews that have been sinking their teeth into Antomoni's ankles It is as if the artistic failure of the film were compounded by a foreigner's presuming to sit in judgment over us, which, heaven knows, is his right as much as anyone else's The fact that this judgment is made m cliches is probably more apparent to us than to him, and to non-American viewers it may seem much more pertinent and revealing than we would surmise This does not make Zabi is-kie Point a valid work of art, or a valid view of the United States, but studying it may shed some light at least on why Americans look so deceptively like ugly Americans even at home What is probably most disconcerting about the film is the absence of the Antomom look, so unmistakable since his Trilogy A young German critic suggests that the desert sequences look like an Italian western, some of the L A shots remind me uncomfortably of Demy's The Model Shop, and much, as I said, is Godaid And a Godard film we do not even need from Godard, let alone from a master like Antomom...