Michelangelo Antonioni: Zabriskie Point (Take I)

With a little Pink Floyd mixed in, far out is what it is: Michelangelo Antonioni's full color English language film Zabriskie Point (1970). It's fueled by ghosts in the machine, the late 1960s Zeitgeist, Time-Ghost, spirit of the time. Pictured here: Kathleen Cleaver, now a professor at Yale. How cool is that?

The main actors, Daria Halprin (as Daria -- Dennis Hopper was a spouse in "real life") and Mark Frechette (as Mark) are a joke as far as delivering lines (hello, Earth? Is anybody out there?), but Zabriskie Point works anyway.  Antonioni knows exactly how much Americans obssess about guns -- there's a sequence in a gunshop that could have been filmed in 2013, in fact -- and about planes (Mark steals one, for little apparent reason other than that he's a certifiable nut).

Let's not forget explosions -- and Wonder Bread debris flying through the air to the tune of Pink Floyd's "Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up" (a reworking of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene"). Far out, indeed.

Today's Rune: Fertility.