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).

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.