FILM

FILM

WOODSTOCK — Directed by Michael Wadleigh; Warner Bros.

ZABRISKIE POINT — Directed by "Michelangelo Antonioni; MGM

After all those sordid years when one had to rely on Roger Corman exploitation epics to catch a glimpse of what was going on around him, the youth culture finally has begun to spawn films of some depth of perception and, surprisingly, reality.

Both Woodstock and Zabriskie Point pretend to be about us, our lifestyle, our times; dissimilar in all too many respects, one is still successful as a key to where we’re at, the other fails. In the end, Woodstock won’t stand up to the genius of .Zabriskie Point because Woodstock and Wadleigh force us to become spectators to the reality which Antonioni forces at us.

Zabriskie’s Mark may well possess enough naivete to become a James Rector; Daria, jriay well be simplistic enough to be pointlessly slaughtered in Kent. True enough, Zabriskie was outdated by the time it hit the screen.

On the other hand, peace and music were all through in 1967. And, as much "as Woodstock tries to pull off that so-called Aquarian image, its real force is as a film of rock and revolution. When that force is robbed from it, the film falters and descends into a blithering .pop-star epic,-a sacchrine substitute for the real events of last August.

So in 'Zabriskie Point we face a situation where unknowns confront things impossibly bigger than themselves and quickly lose (but don’t surrender); in Woodstock, we face our own culture heroes, larger and smaller than themselves at the same time, and in the end, we win. In real life, if not the film.

Woodstock as a documentary is more fantasy than the barely fictionalized events of Zabriskie Point. The films define us in terms of the central problem of our time; Woodstock opts for passivity, Antonioni for action. Which is to call no character in either film ^revolutionary;;' all the revolutionaries have been deliberately cut out of Woodstock, including the most renowned single event at the Festival, that of the Who’s Peter Townshend kicking Abbie Hoffman offstage. And Mark and Daria, despite their posturings and fantasizing, are not revolutionary personages in .any light. Nor, I suspect, are those who’ve seen and written about the film, though some of them would like to think they are.

That, I think,is why Jonas Mekas is one of the few to give Zabriskie Point the credit it deserves; Mekas, whatever he considers himself, is an uncompromising cinematic revolutionary. And the self-styled pseudo-radicals, who need their realities reinforced, by a kind of pablumjzed rhetoric, are not only offended, they are slapped in the face and 'kicked in the balls by' the .righteousness of Antonioni. With an outsider’s perspective, he understands Amerika and especially Amerika’s youth far too well for anyone’s comfort. Pressuring us todefine ourselves in terms of ourselves, just as his camera defines itself in terms of his camera, pressures too many of us too far. So we’ll take the easy way out, watch but not see and in the end come away bemoaning the lack of humanity, the lack of perceptive dialogue.

But as Frank Bardacke told me, (and I think he’s right) “After awhile I stopped caring what I said, because I knew he didn’t care-... It’s probably the best silent film ever made.” Zabriskie Point is, like it or not, about our lives from Los Angeles to Kent. And 1 if the absurdities in the film bother you, their reality should too.

Where Antonioni involves us with the totality of our lives, Micheal Wadleigh molds us into an audience spoonfed three days of peace and music-,'muck and mire, fronted by a gaggle of pop stars. It’s uhfortunate that his own film makes him a liar.

The gutsiest, most vital acts in , Woodstock are not the Crosby Stills and Nash peace and music acts, they’re the rock and revolution acts of the Who and Hendrix. The Who are easily the most incredible performers in the film, despite the Hoffman incident, or perhaps because of its omission. I waited for Abbie to be thrown off-stage, with a little anger and a little glee. After all, sometimes even people as heavy as Abbie deserve a little come-uppance.

The most unfortunate thing about Woodstock is that it reduces the mass of 500,000 to pawns for a couple of dozen pop-stars. All the shots of people are reduced to filler between the rock acts; half the people I know who were at" Woodstock didn’t even remember hearing more than one or two groups. It’s like shooting a movie of life in Nero’s palace and telling people that that’s what life was like in Rome.

And, if all the other insults weren’t enough, if the embarassment of seeing Joan Baez walk out of 1965 to be confronted by 1970 isn’t bad enough, the final horror is Jimi Hendrix black and virile and revolutionary being replaced by the epitome of peace and music —, limpid, ball-less, lily-white, non-funky Crosby Stills and Nash.

Woodstock is an encouragement to a kind of robotized, LSD-concentration' camp consciousness; that’s the, reaction the' pop-festival inspired in me and the movie reinforces it. Pop festivals are a threat, in so many ways; and that someone like Ellen Sander can write in the Free Press, after the Festival, that if that’s what a concentration camp’s ’ gonna be like then bring on the concentration camps, points up the essential absurdity of the film and the festival.

Which is not to say that Woodstock is jnot a good film; it’s just naive and in the end rapes itself by its fear of rock and revolution. Woodstock didn’t end with CSN peace and music and you can never really let yourself forget it.

See Woodstock, for sure; but you’ve gotta live Zabriskie Point.

Dave Marsh