If he wants to be a revolutionary he has to learn to work with other people...
Unnamed student in Zabriskie Point's debate about collective radical action.
Back to the differences between the British and American scenes
and the question of whether they were more radical and politically aggressive
across the pond. Certainly, there was more violence in the US, the stakes were higher
with the Vietnam War and, well, guns, as the Kent State massacre demonstrated
in 1970, but there was still the same something in the air. So here are two
films in which a British and Italian director attempt to portray the American counterculture
using the musical assistance of the men from Regent Street Poly and Cambridge…
San Francisco (1968) + Zabriskie Point
(1970) + Introduction by series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza
San Francisco is something of a twin with Tonight…,
with that film’s assistant director, another Cambridge multi-talent, Anthony
Stern – who exhibited his art alongside Syd – heading to California to film the
scene over there and, once again there were naked women – a coincidence? He
used a demo version of Interstellar Overdrive, quicker and with a more
aggressive live feel, to the version Whitehead had recorded in the studio, and
cut his film to match the music. The effect is startling and the stop-start nature
of the rapid cutting acts as the perfect nervous breakdown for Syd’s Floyd’s
overdriven riffing. San Francisco is militaristic, protesting and having a fine
time with sexy mock rituals… meanwhile the terror was unfolding in South-East
Asia.
Sometimes the style of the film is what makes these
relatively ordinary streets appear heightened and in the moment, whilst elsewhere
the naked woman and the “ritual” appears to be trying too hard to be
transgressive, the male gaze is present – sorry Anthony! But it was a time when
the limits of the new expression were still being established and not every “new
freedom” had equal merit but who would know how things would be viewed 60 years
later? San Francisco still feels fresh and experimental and, whilst there are
debates to be had over just how ground-breaking Floyd’s music actually was, with
Syd as guitarist and Rick Wright on keyboards, they were more adventurous than
most and proto punk in approach. Syd heard AMM and other improvisational groups
of the time and the band were reaching out and striving for the “next projected
sounds” that their EMI publicity promised.
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| San Francisco through the lens |
Zabriskie Point (1970) was Michelangelo
Antonioni’s big break in America following on from his era-capturing success
with Blow Up (1968) but what made the London mystery work was its
focused locations and strength of performance across the board. MGM gave him a
substantial budget for Zabriskie but the results are mixed in
fascinating ways, with some incredible cinematography, the mind-blowing violent
sequence at the end but with a plot that is vague and does not have the depth
of his Italian work. Here the silences appear coy rather than purposeful and
the actors, are a mix of professionals such as Rod Taylor and newcomers in the
main role, Daria Halprin and the ill-fated Mark Frechette. They are not David
Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave but there’s chemistry and Halprin is the
more assured of the two.
They’re not helped by a script, based on a treatment by
Sam Shepherd, which is just a little too free-wheeling and reliant on both
co-incidence and the audience filling in gaps. And yet… the lengthy sequence at the
beginning with the students seemingly involved in a genuinely heated debate
about the course of resistance to follow works very well, and it’s not the only
one. This section features noted Black Panther member Kathleen Cleaver to add
that touch of realism and, her experience as one of the leading academics of
the movement is also placed against the violence of the state’s response with
the Panthers being the first to be attacked by the Police’s new SWAT team in Los
Angeles. Dangerous times and whilst there’s a picture of her holding a rifle in
a 1968 issue of The Black Panther, the shooting at the protest in this
film was a sad foreshadowing of the events at Kent State University just two months
after Zabriskie’s eventual release.
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| Mark Frechette |
Perhaps Antonioni had immersed himself too much in
America or at least the process of trying to understand the country. He spent
many months driving around in search of stories and his film reflected this as
it starts off with this discussion of how to challenge authority and ends with
an explosion of violence which may or may not even be real, let alone an
answer. In between the story is focused on an itinerant fork truck driver, Mark
(Mark Frechette) who flees from the shooting of a policeman at the demonstration
and a young woman temping for a property development company Daria (Daria
Halprin), who meets with Mark on her journey out to a big meeting in the spectacular
desert home of her boss (Rod Taylor).
Throughout Antonioni smuggles meaning in his usual ways,
leaving the gaps for us to fill as passengers in the film journey. This is his
most scenic film since L’Avventura with huge shots of the desert roads, big
skies and enormous silences. Cinematographer Alfio Contini earns his crust with
excellent overhead shots of the lonesome roads along which Mark flies and Daria
drives, and there’s even an audacious shot of a man at a bar in which the
camera pulls in and appears to go through the window into the bar – a precursor
to the outstanding single take ending of the director’s next film, The
Passenger (1975), Antonioni’s final film of his contracted three with MGM.
Zabriskie Point itself is a strange world of yellow and brown
striped hills shaped by a long dead river and when viewed from Homestead
Overlook, appears like another planet. The “Love Scene” between the couple and
dozens of other real or imagined couples dancing in the dust, played by members Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater troupe with whom Sam Sheperd was associated, is a mystery. The Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia provides the score here with his country-inflected improvisations having been preferred to
the Floyd’s best efforts with which Antonioni would almost always find the things
he didn’t like in his daily meetings with Roger Waters as the band worked overnight in the studio.
“We could have finished the whole thing in about five days, but Antonioni would listen and go ‘eets very beautiful, but eet’s too sad’, or ‘eet’s too stroong’. It was always something that stopped it from being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy. It was hell, sheer hell.”
Roger Waters*
Antonioni is another of those mentioned in these screenings who was at the launch of International Times at the Roundhouse, which is where he first encountered The Pink Floyd**. The group wrote a lot of music for the film but only the
sparse beats of Heartbeat, Pig Meat, the country-styled Crumbling
Land – which Gilmour said any number of US bands could come up with – and
the explosive magnificence of a reworked Eugene in the form of Come
in Number 51, Your Time is Up. This was probably what the director wanted
from them anyway but with the outtakes now available we can now hear Rick
Wright’s beautiful progressions for The Violent Sequence that were to
become Us and Them on Darkside of the Moon. Elsewhere there were
songs and blues improvisations that wouldn’t re-appear but the group were
honing their craft and writing quickly with this their third album in 1969
after the More score and Ummagumma.
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| Daria Halprin |
I obviously like this group but I also like Antonioni and
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this film on the big screen, just as not every
album is Dark Side or Piper at the Gates, not every film is L'Avventura,
La Notte or Red Desert. If you haven’t seen it, well, it is certainly
an intrigue and it has to be seen and heard on the big screen.
There’s some fascinating background to the casting of Daria
Halprin and Mark Frechette, according to the former in a 2022 interview she
said Antonioni had seen her dancing and decided that she could be his lead. She
spent two years working with him on the film and felt much closer to him than
her co-star who, in their awkward interview with Dick Cavett, said he’d clashed
with the director and was disappointed in large parts of the film. In some ways
she felt it was a wonderful process but she also felt the end product didn’t
quite reflect their workings. Frechette is the edgier on the show with Mel
Brooks thankfully chipping in to fill the dead air his moodiness brings – this
really was a moment in American counter-cultural history and where are we now?
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| Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in the sand of Zabriskie Point |
Sadly, Mark was to die in prison after being sent down following an armed bank raid with other members of Mel Lyman's Fort Hill commune. Daria Halprin was briefly a resident too during her relationship with Frechette but followed a differnt path, now MA, REAT, RSMT and clearly a sincere deep thinker who has led a very interesting life, including marriage to Dennis Hopper but especially as an artist in her own right. A dancer, director, writer and teacher she now runs the Tamapala Institute she established with her mother, also a dancer. Seeing her now she seems completely at peace and thought-through, a far cry from the anger and uncertainty of her film character - a fulfilled artist in her own right.
This was quite some day and there’s more to films come from this most cinematic Floyd. It’s easy to understand how filmmakers and
music makers were drawn to each other for these collaborations and, of course,
given the amount of experimentation there would be interesting mistakes as well
as moments that stay with you a long time, deep resonance almost haunting the
hallowed space of the Regent Street Cinema as Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas
Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière ask their ghostly co-habitants to maybe just
turn the sound down a little.
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| Kathleen Cleaver debates |
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| OK Boomers? |
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| Rod Taylor is in a different movie... Sam Shepard's? |
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