Naked in the desert sand.

1970 Michelangelo Antonioni tried with "Zabriskie Point", the revolutionary spirit of the times to capture on film - and reaped the worst trashing his career. Rightly so? The new edition of the DVD offers an opportunity to revise history.

 

For most big films of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni master is the Cineastenwelt today agreed: "The Night" (1961) "? Setting standards." The Red Desert "(1964)? Beguiling." Blow up "(1966)? Unsurpassed .

Well, and then there's "Zabriskie Point" of 1970. Critics legend and Antonioni fan Roger Ebert summed it as follows: "What a silly and stupid movie!"

The majority of other critics, particularly in the U.S., saw it was similar. Antonioni, the project, a film about the student movement and its revolutionary motives to turn confused with anti-American views and konsumkritischem directly against the wall, says the tenor. Wanted to see the whole thing will not, thus the tradition of MGM studio-financed film also has a wicked Kassenflop.

Today enjoys "Zabriskie Point" at least among hardcore Antinionisten a status as a cult film and misunderstood classic. That could make it to the orgy scene is legendary, in which dozens of sudden and unexpected love couples more or less naked through the desert sand roll. Or at the spectacular, apocalyptic finale, in which only a luxury villa on several occasions and from multiple perspectives in the air will be chased, and then all kinds of modern consumer goods from TVs to a fridge to an explosion in slow market.

An excellent cast and a brilliant plot, it is rather not. With Mark and Daria Halprin Freshette Antonioni undertook two laymen from the protest scene, which, apart from good looks, acting talent any abging. And the script, except in the Antonioni still four other people herumgedoktert have presented rather vague ideas of a revolutionary phase as a serious portrait of the times, the plot is lost in the Nowhere: A young student (Freshette) moves in with a protest event a weapon, which he might kill a policeman. He steals a small plane and escapes into the Californian desert, where he was a random passing Secretary (Halprin) know who shares his ideals, and he then broadly about his half-baked ideas can be revolutionary. A critical attitude to the film seem both to the culture of protest as well as the consumption of terror preserve what comes out, but it is indefinable mishmash-ideologies.

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The dialogues are wooden in their simplicity, sometimes at the limit of endurance. Nevertheless, of course, no way of cinema lovers in "Zabriskie Point" over. Because what Michelangelo Antonioni in this absurd rocks in Death Valley for images created, which today nobody dares more. Between Fieberwahn-hippie fantasy and romance, he illustrated a sick world is on the brink of collapse, every motive and more intense than all the simple dialogues together. Plus a psychedelic soundtrack to the perfect noise, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones. At best it makes it so comfortable as possible, and can easily fall into this experience, perhaps more of a cinematic trip is from an ordinary film.

Over the past year, "Zabriskie Point" in a one-cable movie ever edition on DVD, the TV format, with truncated image edges, which is nothing other than a brutal crime against the arts. The new edition offers a deserved 16:9-format, so that the images of its entire splendor can flourish.

And if it does not do otherwise: just the sound off.

"Zabriskie Point" (Warner), now on DVD.