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With the final scene of Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni made film history. The main character Daria drives away from the villa into the desert. Fantasy is overheating. Daria stops, gets out, and looks back angrily at this stronghold of consumerism and commerce, now engulfed in a ball of fire. Then the villa reappears and the spectacle repeats itself over and over again. The embellishments of modern prosperity go up in the burning mushroom cloud. The detonation of the outside world is the explosion of the imaginary. Antonioni shows himself to be a resourceful "blaster," staging a slow-motion aesthetic of destruction. Freezer and television, clothes and whole interiors disintegrate in one surreal movement. Through Daria's eyes, the audience experiences the transformation of functional objects into useless fragments, which rearrange themselves in bright spaces into wonderful images with instinctive precision. The explosive effect is sublimated into an immaculate execution of colors and forms. Several minutes later, the time-suspended apocalypse reverts back to the desert landscape. Daria glances at the smoking ruins, turns, starts the motor, and drives away into a red sunset.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230611900_7

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