Tuning in… Yet Another Movie - Pink Floyd in Film, Regent Street Cinema, Part Two USA

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

"A fucking crazy man to work for..."

Nick Mason* 

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?

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.

More Floydian adventures in film: Yet Another Movie continues until 7th June - details on the Regent Street Cinema website. 

PS Once again I failed to spot a young Harrison Ford as an "Arrested Student"... ah well, next time!

*From a Connor McNight interview with Waters and Mason in ZigZag magazine, July 1973

**Saucerful of Secrets, The Pink Floyd Odyssey, Nicholas Schaffner (1991), Sidwick & Jackson

Kathleen Cleaver debates

OK Boomers?

Rod Taylor is in a different movie... Sam Shepard's?

Careful with that camera, Alfio! Or rather, those cameras, there are dozens of different angles of the big finish before in-studio work showing household objects being blown up (and not by Hemmings).

Games for May: Yet Another Movie - Pink Floyd in Film, Regent Street Cinema, Part One: UK

Speed-walking up Regent Street after the Victoria line closed on the hottest day of the year so far, I was overwhelmed by the anxiety of missing the first film as well as the ever-present sense of Floydian past as London’s sunny streets blurred the perception of time around me. Maybe I’ve read too much Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, but psycho-geography is real, as indeed is psychedelic-geography, man. Only last week I’d been in the 100 Club in which the Yardbird's Jeff Beck smashed guitars for Michelangelo Antonioni, whilst Middle Earth still haunts Covent Garden as does UFO Club Tottenham Court Road, music and place pulls you right back, as does film: combine all three and it’s not just Grannie who takes a trip.

 

In terms of the where, the Regent Street Cinema is celebrating the 130^th anniversary of the first film screening in this country from the Lumiere Brothers and it also happens to be the alma mater of former architectural students Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright who all attended when what is now Westminster University was Regents Street Polytechnic. Add Roger’s old Cambridge friend Syd Barrett and then another, David Gilmour (the Floyd were a five piece for a brief moment) and you had a group that was at the forefront of British psychedelia from 1966 onwards.

 

Yet Another Movie is a season of Floydian films assembled by Sophia Satchell-Baeza, a freelance researcher and curator of impeccable taste, who set the scene with details from Nick Mason’s biography. Mason attributes at least his and Roger’s fascination with lighting and staging to their broader education as “Architectural Abdabs” (an early group name) at the Poly and, with Rick and Syd’s more emotional musicality it was understandable that they’d be drawn to film and vice versa. 

  

Speak (1962) and The Committee (1968) with introduction from series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza

 

The Pink Floyd improvised a score for fellow Regent Street alum, John Latham’s 1962 Avant Garde flicker Speak, in 1967 but the version we saw today featured a proto-industrial electronic score from the artist himself which, along with the rapidly changing images on screen, drove a couple of the audience to head for the bar early. It’s remarkable that over 60 years on this work can still startle and disturb (possibly for medical reasons admittedly). Latham didn’t want any “tunes” breaking out accompanying his free-flow and like so many artists of this scene, wanted the watchers to impose their own meaning or, indeed, lack of… we turned on but maybe didn’t all drop out or relax to float downstream.

 

Latham's film and others were used as background projections by the band in ground-breaking ways as what we would recognise as the modern concert experience was created as a mixture of sight and sound. The Floyd’s score can be found on the massive Early Years boxset as can outtakes from their other films including those screened today including the entirity of the next film on Blu-ray.

 

The Committee (1968) I haven’t seen on the big screen or in this restored state and whilst Nick Mason describes their score as a jumble of extended sound affects there are certainly some representative examples of extended instrumentals which sound like either an early version of Keep Smiling People a piece played in their 1968 spring tour and which morphed partly into their proto-post-rock classic Careful with that Axe, Eugene.

Robert Langdon Lloyd and Paul Jones discuss meaning

The Committee was written by an economist and social scientist, Max Steuer, then as now a lecturer at the LSE and a founding member of the Centre for Philosophy and Social Science. It was his only film but it is not surprisingly a reflection of his concerns about the way society is managed. It’s not clear whether the committee(s) in question make decisions or whether they are large-scale focus groups to help the powers that be command and control through informed opinion testing, but there’s a sinister management elite behind them alright… maybe.

 

Director Peter Sykes had approached Syd for a score but when he came up with an improvisation in early ’68 and suggested that it be played backwards, he turned to the other four for a more disciplined outcome and its this we hear, from the opening electronica to the Hammond organ driven main theme and that early Eugene, hinting at menace and possible violence – I wonder if Michelangelo Antonioni was watching and listening? More on that later…

 

Some versions of the film start with a quote from Joseph Shumpeter which lays out the agenda... our likes and dislikes do not amount to a programme of independent action: are we really more concerned with the strategies of games than living a clear-headed existence? But this is perhaps more help than the audience needs.

 

Arthur Brown sets the party alight

The story opens with a car driving through country lanes, the driver (Tom Kempinski) incessantly chewing wine gums as he blathers on to a seemingly hapless hitch-hiker – the Central Figure (Paul Jones) – about the inconsequentialities of his life. They stop in a glade so that the driver can check his engine and he carries on his prattle as he does so. The Central Figure is impassive, smoking a cigarette and wandering around the clearing – seemingly relaxed.

 

Then, almost out of nowhere, we feel unease as the driver sticks his head under the sharp edge of his car bonnet… the Central Figure looks intent for a brief second and then slams down the bonnet completely severing the man’s head. In the silence that follows he remains calm, continuing his smoke and his even-paced stroll. Finally, he drags the body into the car and, bizarrely, sews the head back on. His wrong-headed acquaintance continues on his journey, bewildered.

 

Later he is called to a special Committee… is this heaven, a higher force or an advanced form of market research? It’s an interesting film as you try to make sense of it and Paul Jones is very good at being distant and disaffected. There are some choice moments as the Committee members enjoy a party with music from Arthur Brown along with his Crazy World, in front of an audience that includes a few familiar faces such as John "Hoppy" Hopkins who set up the London Free School, co-founded International Times (IT) and, with producer and early Floyd manager, Joe Boyd, the UFO Club at which the group were the house band. I think we also saw Barry Miles with his distinctive chunky glasses and blonde hair, he co-owned the Indica Gallery and also helped start IT.

Like so much of today's efforts, this film came out of the general philosophical and political underground centred with thus relatively small London in-crowd. British psychedelia is often considered less radical than its US counterpart but there is no doubt of the commitment to experimentation and alternative views of how society should be organised.

 

Iggy... aka Evelyn Joyce

Iggy the Eskimo Girl (2002) + Tonite, Let's All Make Love in London (1967), Introduction by Sophia Satchell-Baeza and Dr Alissa Clarke, De Montfort University, co-curator of the Cinema and Television History Institute's Peter Whitehead Archive

 

Iggy the Eskimo Girl (2002) featured film shot in the late sixties of Syd Barrett’s sometime girlfriend – also known as Evelyn Joyce (no relation) and who is featured on the cover of his first solo album, The Madcap Laughs, adorning the newly painted floors of his flat in Egerton Court which he shared with the artist Dougie Fields. Directed and filmed by Anthony Stern, partly for a film originally called The Wheel, he repurposed the materials to create this tribute to Syd’s latter-day muse which was set to the blistering 170-odd seconds of See Emily Play, Syd’s Floyd’s finest moments in pop. Stern’s distinctive stop-start technique – he worked with Peter Whitehead, see below – still leaves the audience discombobulated and, unlike “Emily” it’s pretty clear that Iggy did “understand”. 

 

Tonite, Let's All Make Love in London – a Pop Concerto for Film – was presented in a recent remastered format and looked very fresh. It starts with Peter Whitehead’s rapid cutting as he synchronises dancers in swinging London’s clubs to a trippier version of Interstellar Overdrive than we’re used to, which still allows for some remarkable alignments as Syd’s lighter flies up and down his fretboard, Nick’s cleverly propulsive light touch, Roger’s angry bass (it’s still furious 60 years later…) and Rick’s elegant anticipation. Wright was the only classically trained musician having attended the Royal College of Music for a while before changing course and knowing how to hold an improvisation together in the manner of his jazz heroes. Whitehead filmed the band recording both this and an improvisation called Nick’s Boogie, and it’s a great document of the band in their psychedelic pomp with Syd leading on guitar and that cigarette lighter.

It’s split into sections addressing: Loss of the British Empire, Dolly Girls, Protest, Pop Music, Movie Stars, Painting and the US scene. There are some of the talking heads you would hope all of whom have to contend with Whitehead’s curt interview technique which certainly leaves Julie Christie slightly defensive but then she also comes across as open and genuine, relishing strength of relationships and her week on holiday away from everyone after finishing Dr Zhivago. In comparison Andrew Loog Oldham comes across as about as genuine as Malcolm Maclaren or Simon Cowell, being too busy planning for tomorrow rather than worrying about today and deliberately over-tutoring one of his new charges in the studio. That said, Vashti Bunyan is allowed to get on with it… ALO was a master of marketing and probably still is!

Julie Christie

 

His most famous success, The Rolling Stones were filmed previously by Whitehead for Charlie is My Darling (1966) and they’re here too in revelatory film as fans throw themselves at the stage and each member – Charlie apart – before being thrown back into the crowd like so many fish. Jagger is interviewed and almost ties himself up by fretting about the future we now enjoy in which machines mean we only work four hours a day. Oh. Hang on…

 

Michael Caine frets about the end of empire and its influence on the shortness of skirts whilst there’s more sexism to come much to Lee Marvin’s delight. In the section on the opening of the Playboy club in London, we see Dolly Reid who, fact fans, was later to feature in Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert’s Hollywood exploitation pic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1969). It’s as the chap representing Hugh Heffner says, in London there was a relatively small scene and you could expect to find “faces” in most of the key haunts. Indeed, we see Terrence Stamp, Jim Brown and Sharon Tate arriving at the premiere of her husband, Roman Polanski's film Cul-de-sac (1966).

 

The same was true of Cambridge creatives with Sophia Satchell-Baeza reading out excerpts from Jenny Spires’ diary about how, this ex-girlfriend of Syd’s in Cambridge, met Whitehead and suggested his film needed not juts current pop music but something from the underground. She was thinking Astronomy Domine but her went with the entirely instrumental Interstellar Overdrive… she was living with Syd and his new girlfriend in Soho and offered to introduce the director to Barrett, no problem, he had known him since their Cambridge days… Like minds, a few streets apart in swinging Soho, and on the same artistic plane. What are the odds?

 

More overlap and co-incidence were to come and I’ll tell you all in the next post… Meanwhile, tickets are still available for next Saturday's continuation of the season with some rarely-screened Floydian curios. Details on the Regent Street Cinema website!

 

Jenny Spires and Syd

Quicksilver… More (1969)

 

A fool there was and he made his prayer…
(Even as you or I?)
To a rag and bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool called her his lady fair…
(Even as you or I?)*

There’s a point in More when the main protagonist drunkenly refers to his Germanic tendency to believe that there is a price to be paid for everything and that there is no pleasure without pain.

Many have seen More as a blueprint for endless summer drop-outs and indulgence in search of the unspecific but as Barbet Schroeder says, it is “not so much a tale of our times but a timeless tragedy: a vamp in a new t-shirt…” Hard to compare Mimsy Farmer with Theda Bara but maybe there’s not too much difference between More and A Fool There Was?

Mimsy Farmer

Barbet Schroeder’s first film had more than a hint of autobiography not just in his choice of location: the family home in Ibiza a lime-painted white villa on top of a stunning cliff overlooking the Balearic Sea… He had an affair with a heroin addict who had managed to kick her habit but still attempted to get him to sample the experience: he declined later saying that had they been on Ibiza it may have been more difficult to resist but luckily he was in sober Paris…

Still the Franco-Swiss Schroeder was an adventurer who firmly believed that he had to experience life before making his first movie. Naturally, his male lead in More, Stefan Brückner (Klaus Grünberg), is a recently-graduated German student, who sets out for Paris in search of some life.

Michel Chanderli and Klaus Grünberg wonder who's that girl?

He meets a character called Charlie (Michel Chanderli) who leads him into a life of petty crime so they can get funds. Through Charlie, Stefan also ends up at a party where he meets a beautifully intriguing American girl Estelle Miller (Mimsy Farmer) and, as he says in the intermittent spoken commentary (his diary?), he falls instantly in love (something that also happened to Barbet).

There is some quality in Estelle that compels Stefan to follow but, like quicksilver, she's difficult to pin down... this very quality making her irresistible. So, when she announces that she’s off to Ibiza he agrees to join her…

But by the time Stefan gets to the island – via a superb sweeping panorama of the port – Estelle has seemingly disappeared. He seeks out the German businessman she was supposed to be staying with, “Ernesto” Wolf (Heinz Engelmann) to find him playing darts with Nazi army knives. Herr Wolf doesn’t like to linger on the “old times” but it’s obvious what he did in the war… But now, he runs a hotel and entertains groups of traveling Germans who like to sing the old songs… (the Schroeder family had a somewhat suspicious group of middle-aged Germans who owned a nearby villa).

Wolf claims not to know Estelle’s whereabouts and so Klaus wanders the islands picking up a new friend, Henry (Henry Wolf) who offers him some purple hearts, more evidence of the period's carefree attitude to pharmaceuticals...

By the time Estelle is found, it’s clear that something is wrong. She is pleased and yet not pleased to see Stefan and he becomes possessive: jealous that her relationship with Wolf goes beyond business. He can't resist her indifference... her inconsistency pulls him in.

But Estelle does have feelings for Stefan - maybe she genuinely thinks he can help her break free from the strange grip Wolf has on her, at least for a while. They escape to a remote house (the Schroeder family home) where they begin to experiment with a freer lifestyle and with the drugs Estelle has stolen from her employer. For a while it’s idyllic and then after a visit from Estelle’s girl-friend Cathy (Louise Wink), Stefan learns of their link to “horse”…

Tilting at windmills...

Initially she tells Stefan that she has the habit under control – and she probably has – but when he agrees to try them he becomes quickly hooked. Estelle gets caught on a trip to town and the two end up having to work for Wolf in order to pay him back. For a while things go well and the two even manage a brief LSD-aided period of cold turkey.

But, things unravel as Estelle’s true relationship with Wolf is revealed and Stefan slips further into despair… he sinks lower and lower and ends up making a fatal error in his self-medication…

An age-old tragedy of a good man laid low by the love of a not-so-good woman there are indeed parallels with *Kipling’s The Vampire, the inspiration for Miss Bara’s aforementioned film. But More is a little hipper than that, it takes two to tango after all.

That it’s set against the sunny purity of the island makes events all the more shocking: junkies belong in drab inner cities don’t they? The luscious camerawork (from Néstor Almendros) and the director’s own familiarity bring out the Mediterranean beauty even if there’s always death in paradise.

Then there’s a soundtrack from The Pink Floyd, hipster princes from the age of psychedelia on the lookout for some more serious work and a new direction… Their quickly-compiled song-track is used to create the perfect backdrop to serious summer ’69.

I watched the BFI Dual Disk Blu-ray and DVD set which can be purchased direct from the BFI and many other places besides.

The cinematography is truly stunning and the Blu-Ray transfer does it full justice: any number of freeze-framed shots would do as a poster and you can see why so many have always wanted to be submerged in the blood-warm air of Ibiza. But, as some Germans say, every pleasure does have a price…

More on the soundtrack…

It’s interesting that Schroeder uses his soundtrack almost as “found sound” in exactly the way that the Floyd use such snippets in their own music from a wasp on Grantchester Meadows to a helicopter on the  The Happiest Days of Our Lives, I believe.... He wanted to use their compositions to flavour the narrative and not to descend from on high to add artificial definition. He feels that this was especially effective when the couple play with mercury (Quicksilver) and when Stefan is lying in a stoned daze burning his shirt as his cigarette falls (the mini-epic Cirrus Minor).

On a trip to Cirrus Minor...

Overall there is more music heard than in their next collaboration (on La Vallee) and what there is seems to be largely a different mix. Long ago…as a Floyd completest I used to swap cassette tapes (see Wiki youngsters!) of obscure material and More was one of the most treasured for this reason: there’s even a completely un-released song, Seabirds, featured extensively in the party sequence when Stefan meets Estelle.

As with the later soundtrack, the time constraints seemed to have freed up the band’s creativity and they produce a varied, fresh-sounding set of songs, a number of which remained in their live set for years…initially as part of their proto-type long-form pieces, The Man and The Journey and later as extended pieces on their own: Cymbeline (which featured a lengthy mid-section with quadraphonically focused feet walking around the concert halls…) and Green is the Colour which flowed into Careful With That Axe, Eugene…

Fascination

The band were reaching out to find a new course after their leader, Syd Barrett had left and 1969 was, in my opinion, one of their most active and creative years as a result producing the soundtrack for Zabriskie Point as well as More and a sprawling double LP, Ummagumma, the live half of which remains one of their high-points and which reflected their endless touring and live experimentation.

Schroeder certainly benefited and no doubt the soundtrack has generated more interest in his film as the years have passed. As he says in the “making of” interview on the BFI DVD, the local tours mention the film but then they also mention the band. The lads didn’t visit the island during the shooting though and instead worked off a 35mm rough cut when recording in London.

The irony is perhaps that the majority of the Floyd were more drinkers than drug-takers especially after Syd Barrett crashed out, the victim of drug-induced psychosis…arguably. This didn’t stop their music being the soundtrack for many a trip before and since and it is in this social context that More uses their songs so well.

The re-mastered soundtrack is available from the usual online retailers, one of their most under-rated efforts and well worth a listen on its own perhaps over a cup of tea?

Antonioni swings… Blow Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970)

I didn’t start out wanting to write about Blow Up. It’s a long time favourite and a film I’ve not wanted to over-analyse for fear of breaking the delicate strands of nostalgia that hold it up as one of my “favourites”.

That’s favourite as in really like… in an unquestioning and unconditional way. It’s not an overtly rational Sight and Sound poll sort of decision but one based on layers of imposed meaning at various stages of my life. I’d liked it for its hip credentials, its crystal clear view of the world I missed growing up in and its inherent cleverness… it was too smart to demolish even when I saw it as a jaundiced twenty-something.

But… I’d just watched Zabriskie Point and I wanted something to compare it with… to understand how Antonioni could go from the focus and intensity of Red Desert to the almost empty Zabriskie... 

This the very stuff of Antonioni. All film is a search for meaning and that meaning can only really be defined through sharing it with others. So… in the same way that David Hemming’s photographer wanted to show the dead body only he had seen, to someone else… I would like to share my discovery with you.

Alright, straight into pseuds’ corner with this but I’ll give it a go.

Zabriskie Point was Antonioni’s first American film and he spent almost four years on the project searching for the right story, locations, music and cast. It begins promisingly enough with what looks like a genuinely heated discussion amongst actual students about revolution and race. Over an impressively formless percussive music track from Pink Floyd, the youths argue whether white people can truly become revolutionary and whether they are willing to die for the cause (whatever it is…).

One participant, Mark (Mark Frechette) gets up and says that he’s prepared to die but not from boredom… he means it, man. We move through a series of fragmentary scenes culminating in student arrests after which Mark refers to himself as Karl Marx whilst being processed by the police. We’re not given any defined set of beliefs for Mark though, he might be a communist or he might just like the idea of revolt.

A policeman is shot during a student occupation. Mark was about to pull his trigger but someone struck first. He runs and ends up stealing a plane…

At the same time we’re introduced to a young student Daria (Daria Halprin) who is working part-time with a property company to help fund her studies. She takes to the road in a magnificent old Buick off to meet up with her bread-head boss (Rod Taylor).

Daria and Mark meet up after he spies her from above. They end up at Zabriskie Point, a quiet and exceptionally beautiful area of the Californian desert which, almost, provides the film’s visual highpoint. They make love amongst the prehistoric river beds seemingly accompanied by dozens of others… yet as the dust settles, they remain alone.

Mark explains his backstory and resolves to return the plane and, possibly, to prove his innocence in his diffident way. Yet on his return he is killed by the over-zealous police. Knowing his fate, Daria reaches her boss’s amazing desert retreat. Sickened by the opulence she leaves looking over her shoulder to imagine the house and all capitalist trappings blown to smithereens.

This is the most famous sequence in the film and rightly so. Against the menacing backdrop of a re-worked Careful with that Axe, Eugene (an immensely influential track and probably the main reason Antonioni wanted Floyd for the soundtrack), the house explodes over and over again along with its contents. It’s a powerful moment and one that gives sense to the film. But it’s also an unambiguous statement and this is problematic, anchoring the film in the anti-capitalist political rallying of the time.

Is this a warning, a revenger’s dream or is it just a really good looking pop video?

By comparison Blow Up is far more universal in its politics and philosophy – in spite of being as much bound to its time and its reputation as quintessential swinging cinema. In fact it has far more in common with Antonioni’s early 60s films in terms of its critique of social mores and the nature of identity.

Zabriskie Point is more obviously and directly political but has less impact than Blow Up, which in its own unresolved way, asks bigger questions and demands more than patience from its audience. Zabriskie may question the commitment of alternative America to a substantial agenda and it may even be a call to more direct action but it doesn’t intrigue or engage in the same way.

 Even in the unreality of a London caught up in its own myth, Blow Up hits harder. This is partly down to the considerable strength of its actors. Both Frechette and Halprin were certainly committed (the former tithed his earnings to his then commune and ended up in prison for armed robbery after a failed attempt to redistribute wealth to another) but were largely untrained. Whilst this brings a certain neutrality it’s no substitute for skill and neither moves their story forward by very much. Frechette in particular leaves us a clueless at the end as at the start.

In contrast David Hemmings, Sarah Miles and Vanessa Redgrave were highly adept players and are able to obscure as well as reveal. Sarah Miles gets through more genuinely moving human expression in five minutes than Frechette manages in almost two hours…  In Zabriskie there were blank faces against the desert backdrop whilst in Blow Up there are complex emotions on display against the ever-changing London scenery.

Hemmings plays a photographer in the David Bailey mould who is self-servingly documenting the visual life of swinging London. He goes under cover to photograph a doss house and then switches into Svengali mode to bully various models in his fashion shoots. He is planning a book on “real” London including the shots of the down and outs in the doss house; he is not committed to social improvement just self aggrandisement.

He is constantly on the move driving through the London Streets onto his next meeting. Antonioni spent a fair amount of time in London and he deserves credit for his selection of locations. He doesn’t go for the obvious hot spots of Notting Hill, Camden and Carnaby Street and shows us Clapham, London Wall, London Bridge, Charlton and Camberwell in a fascinating tour of a city still in mid-regeneration… establishing the more self-directed society which carries on to this day.

Wandering into a park he is attracted by a young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and an older man who appear to be lovers. He follows and photographs them until the woman chases over and demands the photographs back. He refuses throwing up the kinds of justification modern paparazzi make for their activity. The girl runs back up the hill and away from him.

Later she visits his studio and the two almost make love before being interrupted. He gives her another roll of film but keeps the ones she wants. He develops the film and here begins the mystery. Blowing up the pictures he gradually pieces together the story of what he shot but not what he saw. The images get larger and grainier but in the end he is convinced he’s photographed a murder.

I’m not sure how much Antonioni “liked” the Hemmings character, but he begins to behave in a slightly more humane way, possibly humbled by his inability to control or resolve this situation.

There’s still time to take advantage of two young girls hoping for a modelling break though… one of the two is Jane Birkin and she looks like she’s giving Hemmings as good as she got in this scene. Don’t mess with “Mrs” Gainsbourg!

Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills

He goes to the park and finds the body his shots revealed and then goes off to find his publisher: somebody needs to share in this for it to become “real”. On the way he sees, or thinks he sees, the girl from the park. He gives chase and ends up walking into a gig where the Yardbirds are playing. The crowd remains pointedly silent and still – a comment by Antonioni on the shallow nature of London pop culture?  Jeff Beck breaks up his guitar and throws the neck into the audience and they suddenly go wild: everyone wants the souvenir. Hemmings wins it and runs outside, discarding it once he is clear… it was only important when everyone else wanted it and has no value on its own.

This kind of point is made so effectively and in a far more coherent and less obvious way than Zabriskie Point’s political trajectory will allow.

Hemming’s character arrives at his publisher’s house and experiences a soulless orgy of drink and drug taking… in the morning he races to his destiny at the park. The body is gone and as the film reverses itself to a finish he encounters the mimes who play a game of silent tennis that amuses and finally draws him in to their shared reality… It’s non-specific enough to allow you to place your own meaning.

One of the characters is an abstract painter and the brief scenes the cameraman has with him reveal a lot of Antonioni’s intent. The painter says that when he has finished with a painting he loses touch with them and clings on to what detail he can to understand the work. The same is true for the director and for the watcher who, like Hemming’s character, tries to find understanding in looking as hard as possible at the detail.

But maybe the answer is in not looking too hard but accepting what you can. In Blow Up’s case, that means enjoying the richness of the images, the city and the acting without having to commit to definitive meaning.  You don’t have to pin it down to “get it” and that ensures longevity for both movie and message.

None of this makes Zabriskie Point a bad film, it’s just not as good as the director’s best work. The cinematography is superb and the scenery is beautiful. But the film is remembered more for the closing scenes of destruction than for its analysis of contemporary politics.

Blow Up is available on DVD from Amazon and the version I watched had a well-informed commentary from film scholar and Antonioni specialist, Peter Brunette. Zabriskie Point is not so well served but was recently released on a basic DVD -  a decent quality print and very worth watching if you like Antonioni but it won't haunt you like his very best work...

Blow Up came through with flying colours. It’s still got more than enough to maintain my interest and grows in stature if anything. I should trust my “favourites” a little more.

Childhood's end? La Vallée - Obscured by Clouds (1972)

Amidst our on-going fascination with the 1960’s remains the fact that, in many key cultural respects, the “period” never stopped and is with us now.

The 60’s was the first time when the chance to “do as thou wilt” was available to a relatively mass market and this cultural Pandora’s Box has never been closed, just monetised. The freedoms and social mobility of the time are still present but are commoditised, stripped of their pioneering spirit and political context in an age when self expression is taken as a right.

This much is clear when watching La Vallée (Obscured by Clouds), a seemingly quintessential “hippie” movie made by Barbet Schroeder in 1972, sometime after the scene had soured in the US and UK – the French were always less transiently trendy… Yet all is not as it appears.

The film is about a group of young “drop-out” travellers who have come to find a lost valley in New Guinea, funded by the inheritance of their leader, Gaetan (Jean-Pierre Kalfon). This part of the island is unexplored and literally obscured by permanent cloud cover.

The group is well meaning and at pains to make this journey a voyage of spiritual discovery as much as an eco-vacational novelty. The other man in the group, Oliver (Michael Gothard) is more wary and, as things unfold, we see his worldliness and disappointment rise to the fore. They are accompanied by two women and a child…a mini commune sharing each other and “free love”.

Into this group comes a French diplomat’s wife, Viviane (Bulle Ogier), who is on vacation and looking to pick up cultural trinkets for re-sale back home. She meets Oliver in a trader’s shop and becomes fascinated with a rare feather he has.

Her quest for such exotica leads her to join the group as they head onto their destination. Never intending to go the whole way, Viviane is sucked into the group mentality initially through greed, hallucinatory sex and her own curiosity.

The party meets with one of the local tribes in a sequence that feels more than half-documentary. This section with the Mapuga tribe is fascinating, with the tribe preparing themselves and some of the actors for a feast. Amazing costumes, elaborate, richly-coloured face painting and singing accompanies this. They kill pigs in ritual, inhumane ways and the considerable gap in cultural outlook is revealed – I couldn’t watch the slaughter.

Viviane and Gaetan embrace this but Oliver has seen nothing but his own fall from grace reflected back: “Once you have tasted Adam’s apple there is no way back….you cannot recover the lost innocence…” Michael Gothard is a supremely unsettled presence as per usual, he manages to convey a deep insecurity whilst at the same time being confident and facing up to things. Brave I suppose.

His Oliver cannot make the final step of the spiritual journey but continues with the group even though, as he says to Gaetan, “…we're not going to get out of this”. Does this mean physically or figuratively?

The group press on, with Viviane and Gaetan convinced that they are ready to find themselves in the lost valley…

Compared with Gothard, Bulle Ogier is a closed book. She is less expressive and carries a lot of emotion within her acting and slides from self-centred to wide-eyed acceptance over the course of the film. I’m not sure how judgemental Schroeder was being but she carries blame for abandoning herself to being the tourist. Does she ever really open up?

I should also mention the soundtrack… having previously worked with them on More back in 1969, Schroeder chose Pink Floyd to accompany his film. Aside from the opening theme and the closing moments their music is heard only in snatches, mostly on the travellers’ cassette player.
Schroeder felt the travellers where the kind of people who listened to Le Pink Floyd. Never-the-less, the group were always outside the hippy mainstream and, as some of the lyrics and song titles suggest, were cynical enough not to believe in the nirvana of primitivism. Which is just what the director was looking for.

I had their soundtrack LP as a teen and it always stood out as one of their more immediate works having been knocked off very quickly during their mammoth “Dark Side…” sessions and, benefiting from this. They were still functioning as a collaborative band at this stage and there are some decent tunes on show, not least the main theme which showcases Rick Wright’s brand new synth to splendid effect.

This is not a great film but it is a very interesting one. It’d be lazy to say “of its time” (it always is) especially in an age when the young have broadened their range of travelling in “gap” years and when there are “tour companies” offering the more adventurous “first contact” holidays in which to meet the few isolated tribes that remain in New Guinea, South America and elsewhere. (If you don’t believe me, check out this frankly shocking BBC documentary on YouTube.)

Our need to explore remains and the moral justification for doing so remain conflicted, just like the characters in the film. Schroeder knew enough to be cynical even if his choice of location was driven by the same adventurous spirit as his characters.

In an interview given at the time, he talked about the impact of western civilisation on these people who would have no real time to adjust and whose cultures would dilute and dissipate following contact.

If you look at Papua New Guinea on Google Earth there are still plenty of valleys obscured by clouds and maybe that’s the way they should stay.

The BFI have done this film proud and released it on dual format with an extensive booklet on the film actors and the music. It’s available from their shop and all of the usual places.