Zabriskie Point

The flowering of radical will across America in the late ’60s seized the imaginations of many directors in this series, Michelangelo Antonioni in particular. The protests he witnessed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago proved catalytic, and the episode would eventually precipitate one of his most divisive films, Zabriskie Point. A student radical finds himself on the run after a violent clash with the police, escaping to Death Valley in a stolen plane. There he meets a young woman and in one of the movie’s most iconic sequences takes part in a dusty, surreal mass orgy. The real action here, however, is in the spectacular wide shots. “A country of such vastness,” the director reflected, “with such distances and such horizons, could not help but be molded in its dreams, illusions, tensions, its solitude, faith, innocence, optimism and desperation, its patriotism and revolt, its dimensions.”