New worlds in moving stillness: 'Zabriskie Point' (1970)
The film's suspensions and explosions explore how objects move, inflect, and create new worlds.
Zabriskie Point (1970), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, United States
How does an explosion burst before actually bursting, as the explosions at the end of Zabriskie Point do? More broadly, how does a movement set itself into motion before the actual motion begins? We see Daria (Daria Halprin) move through rooms in a glass and stone house. A wall, beam, door, or window glare cuts across each movement, until she comes to this landing, turns to one direction, waits, and moves off. The image holds its breath and takes on a new quality. It suspends itself, then falls backward into a new dimension. A perspective shift or a low pressure system lifts the air around it. But it exhales at the same time, making lines wub and time and place (the Arizona desert, 1970) fall away. It creates and then gives life to a singularity—Daria held up in a green prism—which seems to move but doesn’t go anywhere.
Eisenstein explored inflection points like this, where a thing moves between two qualities. In ¡Que viva México! a shot in the head throws a revolutionary backwards, but he holds his position for a moment before slumping to the ground. Eisenstein allows for an instant between actions, or, more importantly, an instant before a new action. It seems to hold forever and in holding creates a new field, both instantaneous and infinite. It becomes a freeze-frame in motion, a sort of moving stillness, with new possibilities for becoming. In the revolutionary’s case, he certainly becomes a corpse, but also a lover, a sculpture model, a singer, a Casanova, and a spirit. Eisenstein saw ecstasy here: not the ecstasy of a powerful movement set along its path, as an orgasm, but the ecstasy of infinite movements emanating from a single inflection point before orgasm, where what is becoming challenges where one is going. This point—or, more accurately, pre-point—splits the present and carries it away onto several of what Deleuze and Guattari call “lines of escape.”
It is not an upbeat, but the point between upbeat and downbeat. It is between 0.0 and 0.0̅1, if such a point exists. It is a closed pipe full of water that one suddenly opens, but which water doesn’t flow through yet.
This pre-point holds the immense potential of energy just before it begins to circulate. Daria puts this energy into motion by her own will: she looks back at the house and makes it explode. In her case, anger and sadness demand new movement and a dimensional paradigm shift: something else must not only be possible, but must become possible, so she creates the conditions where this something else can begin to shake itself to life.
At the pre-point, the house can of course become anything. It can take on any new movement, shape, or texture, as well as any new speed or a new nature to its movement through time. In this case, the movement is very particular: the explosion becomes a levitation. Here, the pre-point sets off a moving stillness that then inaugurates a new moving stillness. It accelerates and decelerates instantaneously. Before the pre-point, the house (or bookshelf, TV set, refrigerator, and many other things that explode on this new, blue field) move at a constant velocity of 0. Then the movement inflects, the explosion occurs, and the things move at a new constant velocity we’ll call 1 (though it can be any number). In both times, before and after the inflection point, the velocity is constant: acceleration remains at 0. How does this work? The objects don’t explode, go flying, and then slow down and fall to the ground. Instead, they levitate and scatter evenly across the sky. They go from at once being totally still, not accelerating, to moving totally stilly, still not accelerating. A sudden jump from a velocity of 0 to a velocity of 1.
How does a burst like this accelerate and then immediately decelerate, so to achieve a near constant acceleration of 0? Can we find where acceleration becomes 1 for just the smallest instant to make these objects start levitating? It occurs immediately before inflection, not where the objects move at a velocity that is both 0 and 1, nor equal parts 0 and 1, but something entirely else. I don’t know where it is, this force that causes spontaneous, level movement, but it presents to me this “something else,” a force that can create a new world, with new fields of existence and new physical laws.
How does this new world of Daria’s creation move? We see books become jellyfish and the sky an aquarium. We see objects unfurl from the inside out. We see them move along solid lines alone but scatter and fly away as a group; some seem to come back, but from where? As if the exploding TV set existed not in one place but in several before it burst, sending pieces of wire and glass not out of the frame but into it, one TV re-collecting its pieces but failing to reassemble them. Objects burst into so many similar pieces that together they become mirrors of themselves, the way I used to close myself inside of my mom’s folding wall mirror and dance, seeing “lots of Tylers” radiate around me. One shard of wood cuts across the mirror: in this new world one can still make assertions, divide planes, and challenge images.
In this world things move much more slowly and steadily. There is no rush for things to develop. It is not a primordial space of pre-cohesive abstraction, where new particles begin to collect, form shapes, and then harden into them. Instead, things commingle and disconnect: tomatoes and magazines float together, while bottles ascend past falling bits of glass. They glide, graze one another, and form short-lived shapes. They blur, palpate, and generally just sail around.
They somehow resist the inflection that brought them to this new state: they run away. They resist the moment where a free idea—a radical—becomes a regressive circle, which doesn’t do anything anymore besides subjugate and cause fear. It takes root, builds a nest, and stops moving itself, but continues to connect to other things around it. It becomes a whirlpool or a tumor, but mostly an aneurysm.
See other films from: 1970s | United States
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
Lovely as always :)