ZABRISKIE POINT AFI Fest All-Night Movie Marathon: Left Wing Versus Right Wing

Zabriskie Point is screened as a tribute to this year’s AFI Fest guest of honor, master
director Michelangelo Antonioni. This most emblematic L.A. movie is a bemused
European intellectual’s hallucinatory vision of America in the sixties: billboards, freeways,
riots, .guns and endless Western landscapes. It begins with Kathleen Cleaver leading a
campus meeting and ends with a famously drawn-out scene of private property being
symbolically blown to bits in slow motion. The intervening plot (such as it is) involves a
chance, radicalizing erotic encounter between a student on the run from a murder he
didn’t commit and a young woman driving to Arizona.