The man can’t bust our movies: buying and selling the counterculture with Zabriskie Point (1970)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This article examines the link between the advertising images represented within Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (MGM, 1970) and the strategies employed for the film’s own marketing and promotion. I argue that Zabriskie Point’s critical and commercial failure is partly due to Antonioni’s misunderstanding of the function of studio publicity and promotion and to his studio’s misperceptions of late Sixties countercultural youth, who are both the subject of the film and its target audience. In order to stimulate new and productive ways of thinking about Zabriskie Point in relation to American media and marketing culture, I have structured this article around some particularly resonant advertising images displayed within and used to market the film – images that alternately conceal and confront the film’s own position within the American consumerist system that the foreign-born Antonioni intended to critique.