Watching a lot of films from the late 60s and early 70s it's clear that something is going on, but it's equally clear that the directors don't really know what it is and are struggling desperately to work out what it is. Society is fragmenting, the youth are disaffected, they want something but nobody knows what. Both Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni were experienced directors with distinctive styles by the late 60s, and both attempted to turn their wise older eye on revolting youth.
Even before then, there was a long history of films and other media exporing juvenile delinquency: in literature the thread European Romantics like Goethe and Byron through stories of Russian nihilists in Turgenev and Dostoyevsky to Joyce's tales of disaffected young aesthetes. In the 1950s there were several American movies on similar themes. But Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause and Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life focused on rebellions against parents within the family: the former also described a crisis in American masculinity and the latter behind its melodramatic sheen considered the effect of racial discrimination on identity. Ray was popular with the French new wave, but youthful rebellion in Europe ran from the juvenile delinquents of Trouffaut's 400 Blows and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, to the young crooks and would-be gangsters of Godard's Breathless and Fassbinder's Love is Colder than Death, or by the 1970s the enigmatic anti-hero of Pasolini's Theorem bringing destruction and liberation in a ratio that was hard to calculate.
Throughout his career, Bresson often focused young heroes, from the new priest in Diary of a Country Priest to the existential anti-hero of Pickpocket and Au Hasard Bathazar with its young lovers up against juvenile delinquent on mopeds torturing the ass. His films typically have a simple message in Christian terms, about the redemptive value of suffering and the possibility of rebirth, but they develop richness from the conflict between Christian morality and conventional forms of life, which include secular morality: from the sensuous celebration of criminality in Pickpocket to the dissection of the Arthurian myth in Launcelot Du Lac. Bresson's work has always possessed a certain religious quality, a focus on finding a deeper, transcendental quality to human life, typically expressed through music. His characters may be heroes or villains, and they may find redemption through suffering or simply die.
Antonioni's films were initially attacks on the complacent materialism of upper strata of Italian society - the same people Fellini satirises. Early films like L'Avventura feature glamorous people being self-involved and lacking in any concern for others - or as in L'Avventura lacking an interest in others. Later, in Blow-Up he extended his critique to Swinging London where somebody might be murdered (it seems it might be a nasty, pathetic lover's tiff rather than anything political or symbolic, but it's not clear) and nobody really cares except the photographer-antihero who is too busy making representations of the crime to solve it. By the time of The Passenger, in which Jack Nicholson disappears once or twice in the desert, it seems Antonioni's main enemy is the audience, teased with confusing plots and ambiguous endings.
Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) brought Antonioni and legendary producer Carlo Ponti to the USA, where he collaborated with younger, more counter-cultural figures like playwright Sam Shepard (a co-writer) and for the soundtrack Jerry Garcia and Pink Floyd. As Mark (Mark Frechette) flees from a campus shooting he had no involvement in, the plot takes us from university, a hotbed of radical intellectual debate, into wide empty spaces devoid of human life. As with many of Antonioni's movies, this is not a case of encounter with nature leading people to re-evaluate their lives and become better people, but more like an encounter with nature that reveals the irrelevance of human existence. On the run in the desert, Mark meets Daria (Daria Halprin); they visit the titular landmark, a lunar landscape in the badlands of Death Valley National Park, western California, where they have sex in a hallucinatory scene. They separate and he returns home to a symbolic ending in a flower-painted plane. She expresses something we don't have direct access to by getting wet, and watches or imagines her boss's trendy modern house exploding. For a while it fits in the contemporary series of drug-like or dreamlike road movies like Easy Rider, Vanishing Point and Two Lane Blacktop, despite its lack of interest in travelling. There is no pretence here that you will get anywhere, whereas the characters in Easy Rider at least seem to believe in a kind of utopia even if they can't reach it on America's roads.
Bresson's The Devil, Probably (Le diable probablement, 1977) also focuses on students toying with protest and violence, with the addition of sex and drugs. The central character, Charles (Antoine Monnier) explores politics, religion, psychoanalysis, and drugs, while struggling to choose between two women; the first scenes of the movie reveal that he will commit suicide. In contrast to Zabriskie Point, which soon leaves behind its campus debate, Bresson shows us a world of constant discussion and a desire for assimilation of information. Characters watch footage of environmental damage (oil spills, sea clubbing) and visit a logging site. There are meetings in which people are interrogated about politics and religion; Charles is interrogated by police and a psychoanalyst; in one outstanding central theme, people on a bus debate the source of the evil around them, blaming not the youth of today but the devil. All the other scenes of debate seem more interested in presenting the image of debating than propounding real ideas, it's not certain this explanation is meant to be serious. But religion is not far away: another scene shows Charles briefly finding tranquility in a church, record player at his side.
In this sort of film the leads are always glamorous, and that's true both for Antonioni, who has a long history of glamorous actors, and Bresson, whose films often show a wide range of interesting faces but who likes to have good-looking leads. Bresson employed a special acting style, whether working with amateurs or professionals, which avoids emotion and makes all characters look blank, shallow, parrotting lines written by the screenwriter, and in The Devil, Probably his beautiful, stylish cast give the impression of bored models speaking words they have no connection to. This is accentuated by the faded palate of the film, the often glamorous interiors, and pastoral interludes such as a bathing trip to a cadmium-polluted river comically interrupted by policemen. Antonioni gives his lead characters the same name as the actors; this also gives the sense that we are watching something less than a performance.
Ultimately in both films, what lasts is the mood. Zabriskie Point, if you can get past the longueurs, is a bleak fatalistic world where destruction is the only thing that means anything. The Devil, Probably is equally depressing, also ending with the death of a lead character, while it offers glimpses of hope, indicated as so often in Bresson through classical music. Another comparison can be made with Lindsay Anderson's If...: more youth in revolt (schoolchildren this time), more guns (lots more guns). Again, youth rebellion is largely aestheticised, as in the early scene where boys returning from holiday post up pictures of black African soldiers. No film has any idea of what people are rebelling against. All three suggest it might have something to do with sex (Charles' romantic triangle; Antonioni's scenes of desert copulation; Anderson's excursion to a diner where his hero meets a young waitress). Bresson suggests it might have something to do with the Devil, but that is even less credible. Doubtless this aestheticisation reflects the approach of its heroes, but it shuts off the prospect of real solutions, just as it does for the characters.
What matters, when you are young and miserable, is lying around and feeling morose. The blank-faced casts add to this: the film doesn't show us emotion through their performance, it immerses us in experience. These filmmakers know the power of music, the telling image and even a little wry humour to communicate information without long speeches of "What I Feel". Zabriskie Point is about the cutting off of physical escape, while The Devil, Probably cuts off any intellectual get-outs: the comically inept psychoanalyst who Charles visits has a drawer full of money, assumes Charles is talking about fees nothing deeper, and even suggests how to successfully commit suicide. Both films end with a bang. The achievement of the best portrayals of juvenile delinquency is not the positing of social causes, or still less the offering of solution; it is the description of how it feels to be hopeless, to look at the world clear-sightedly and see only death, destruction, the devil.
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