Here I finally present It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point, a feature-length essay film that began as an editing mashup, a bit o’ fun with found footage, and ended as a pop meditation on American iconography and mythologies, a cine-exegesis of the American desert through the prism of both culture and counterculture, and a very…
I started my new essay film, It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point, with an attractive if patently absurd proposition. I was convinced that one could seamlessly edit together Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point with Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Imagine situating Daria Halprin, Mark Frechette, and their “dirty hippie” friends in California…
I’m going to start by setting a scene. The head of the Moving Image Section at the Library of Congress, Mike Mashon, takes the stage at the Castro Theater to introduce a screening of Erich Von Stroheim’s ambitious debut Blind Husbands (1919) at the 25th San Francisco Silent Film Festival. It’s a full house and…