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TRIBUTE TO ANTONIONI

ZABRISKIE POINT
September 14, 17 / 7:00, 9:15
USA 1970 // Director: Michelangelo Antonioni // 110 min // 35mm

As a tribute to the late Michelangelo Antonioni, we are pleased to screen his controversially beautiful Zabriskie Point, a sensation that holds up better than many of Antonioni’s more respected European works.

At the heart of Antonioni’s political modernism is an impulse to express reality in terms that are not completely realistic; in Zabriskie Point especially, jettisoning plot, character and dialogue allowed him to see objects, colours and people as elements in a broader canvas. The Sixties generation excited and energized the Italian modernist, who made the film as a radical attempt to take it to The Man.

With gorgeous widescreen cinematography—that shimmers in a new print, made for the film’s screening at the VIFF in 2003—Zabriskie Point remains an epic work of ambition symbolizing the period’s utopian revolutionary spirit, and, for fleeting moments, catching it. Never has Antonioni’s vision been clearer than in a devastating freak-out that stakes a strong claim as the most impressive finale in all of cinema.

"His beautiful handling of 'Scope compositions and moods has many lingering aftereffects, and the grand and beautiful apocalyptic finale is downright spectacular." — Jonathan Rosenbaun, Chicago Reader

Photos at: http://www.vifc.org/fileshare/login.php

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