Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben

A Z-A of film: Yellow Sky

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN revisits Yellow Sky, 1948, directed by William A. Wellman

Both the triumphant and then jolly music of Yellow Sky[i], with its flippant echo of Oh! Susanna[ii] are a complete contradiction to the overall mood of the film. Whatever your definition of noir, Yellow Sky comes stylistically and psychologically close until the end. Purely noir[iii] Westerns that also have negative endings are very rare. Wellman’s later, colour Western, Track of the Cat (1954) starring that fatalistic ‘Tsar of Noir’, Robert Mitchum[iv], though regularly considered one of the bleakest of Westerns, scrapes some hope at the end – albeit not for Mitchum.

Despite being known as “Wild Bill” for his confrontational personality, womanising and World War 1 exploits as a fighter pilot, Yellow Sky’s director, William A. Wellman[v], is not a household name. A hard-working, cross-genre versatility, valuing story over distinctive personal signature, has limited easy categorisation. Obviously, I didn’t know the man . . . and whenever fashions change, biographical accounts (and lots more besides) habitually shift emphasis to be in tune with them . . . who can you trust?

The frivolous banjo of Oh! Susanna is almost withering on Yellow Sky’s soundtrack as a headline spells out: The West – 1867. When the film was released on Christmas Eve, December 1948, I expect US cinemagoers would have realised the date’s significance. Not having studied American history at school, I needed to hear the characters’ backstories to discover that the American Civil War[vi] is not long over. This setting in time (echoed roughly by the gap between the end of World War 2 and the film’s release) must be intended to partly justify, or at least explain, the wild, egotistical and reckless behaviour likely to occur on the margins of traumatised civilizations.

After the titles conclude, the stock opening music of blaring victory and light-heartedness hits a streak of menace which declines into a thunder-clap over a sunny marshland area. If opening night audiences were looking forward to Christmas, they should postpone such thoughts!

A group of seven weary-looking men, their horses splashing onward in single file, ride slowly across the screen. We are only a minute and 40 seconds into the film – including logos, titles and a fine series[vii] of sketches of ghost towns and mine ruins – and the mood, having swung all over the compass, settles here with the kind of grim certainty one associates with either stoicism or desperation. Yet the landscape looks lushly verdant, flowery and appealing before the youngest of the group spots a skull with an arrow right through it.

“Prospector.” States a man who transmits an air of authority. Since he is portrayed by Gregory Peck, we imagine that if at times he must be brutal, he will usually be fair.

“Skinny little fella. Them bones ain’t hardly as big as my little finger,” opines the portly Walrus (Charles Kemper, who had been a foil to Danny Kaye early in his career and was often to provide an element of comic relief; in Yellow Sky it is faint). Picking the powerful arrow from the two huge holes it has punched in the skull, the youthful Bull Run (Robert Arthur) takes it to the probable leader, who regards its still pristine shaft. With the possibility of vengeful or “crazy Indians” adding to the landscape’s threat, the group survey their immediate surroundings. Dude – played by Richard Widmark, seems to know the area well and starts to lay it out (00:02:48): “up north there are lots of canyons and draws . . . if you know which ones are open.” Intrigued by what a “draw” might be – does it draw you in and then prove to be a fatal dead end? – I discovered a whole chain of words[viii] which construct a hierarchy of depressions and ravines, descending into canyons. Draws are the least significant. Draws drain into arroyos, which drain into coulees, which drain into canyons. As with so many words and word origins this is both fascinating and yet disappointing – disappointing that one imagines additional mysterious meanings. But aren’t such extra implications, to some extent, what poetry and music and the visual arts rely on? How is it that great black and white photography can often suggest more depth, even more colour than colour – can look more real than the reality of colour?

Dude continues to summarise the area’s variety. I’m not sure if such environmental diversity actually exists in such close proximity to Death Valley[ix] – with fertile looking marshes, killing salt flats, canyons, hills, mountains, and a dusty desert town all within a few miles’ radius . . . but if it does, take me there and there I’ll happily live!

Of the salt flats “down south” at 00:03:00, (Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth[x]) Dude chuckles “even a rattlesnake couldn’t get across em”. Is Dude referring to the reptile or to the memorable psychopath, Tommy Udo[xi], who he portrayed so effectively the year before Yellow Sky was releasedin Kiss of Death, (1947), almost stealing the film with his insane intensified chuckle – a chuckle he only slightly revives once (at 00:37:47) in Yellow Sky.

Eventually, in a town saloon, reviving themselves with a drink, the band encounter an extraordinary painting[xii]. A partly naïve, partly delirious, painting. Albert Pinkham Rider[xiii] crossed with Chagall[xiv]. Pale Death on a dark horse![xv]. This large image behind the bar fixates them all.

Lengthy (John Russell) whose awestruck lascivious comment at 00:03:57, harvests lust from the silence and then amusement: “I wonder if she’s got any plans after she gets through ridin’ that horse?” is reprised with more words but less universal staring at 00:05:29 – the camera closer to an image now about 50% larger. The statuesque woman appears to be tied to the rearing horse yet has the posture of someone reclining calmly on a sun lounger. The image is surreal and haunting – and perhaps intended to be subjective? Are the men all seeing it differently? She is not depicted as a victim. Does the horse represent the spirit of the woman? A woman as beyond the pale as Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) in Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Lengthy wouldn’t stand a chance!

“Yes sir, I sure would like to know what she plans to do after she gets
through ridin’ that horse?” 00:05:29

The hold up (00:05:52) shoot up and escape is all over in less than a minute and by 00:07:52, chased by the cavalry out into a rocky wilderness among amazing tooth-shaped rocks towards the salt flats, they have lost their rear lookout rider. The cavalry captain calls a halt to the chase knowing the gang aren’t likely to survive crossing the sink of Death Valley: “Let ‘em go! Save us the trouble of hanging ‘em!”  (00:08:30)

As Stretch divides the loot, the gang appear on the verge of fragmenting, though it’s hard to imagine they were ever a very cohesive unit. Dude, not caring personally about Jed being shot by the cavalry, is superstitiously fearful that the number of gang members no longer adds up to seven (00:09:21): “This desert’s a mighty unlucky place. A man needs all the odds he can get.” Several of them know it’s crazy not to turn back, “It’s a good 70 miles across this sink, maybe more!”, protests Lengthy, yet Stretch (at 00:09:38) asserts “it’s just a place, a place can be crossed.” At a horse walking speed of four miles an hour it would take 17 and a half hours to cover 70 miles. Wouldn’t travelling by night have been a good idea? Do most cinematic cowboys lack common sense? But since there is no shade to be had, maybe it’s better just to get going? In the end, even Dude, who was thinking of pulling back with the dark, follows Stretch and the gang out into the whiteout heat of the sink.

At minus 86 metres below sea level (or minus 282 feet) the Badwater Basin is one of the lowest places on earth as well as one of the hottest. As the band become dots in the whiteness, the scene conveys the idea that Stretch, like Captain Ahab (whose obssession with Moby Dick – the White Whale – Gregory Peck was to portray with festering intensity in 1956) is resolute and tenacious, yet also perhaps, recklessly self-destructive. At 00:12:16 the crazed crust of salt becomes soft and the horses begin to sink and stumble, obliging the men to walk. The film expertly gives an epic sense of this ordeal, of the heat and dessication, of wrong decisions – the folly of Walrus having filled his canteen with whiskey, the mistake of sleeping at night. To cut short a midnight fight between Walrus and Bull Run, when the former tries to drink from the latter’s water canteen, Stretch hurls a large chunk of salt at Walrus’s head (00:13:57). Stretch’s authority is no longer in doubt – as neither is his compassion the following day when he wets his horse’s mouth with valuable water from his canteen (00:15:15). This could be viewed as enlightened self-interest, except that he follows up by doing the same for Walrus’s horse. “Kinda noble, aren’t ya?” sneers Dude (00:15:45) to which Stretch replies “A horse’s a useful animal, no use letting him suffer just because he belongs to a jackass”. The hostility between the two men increases from here on, with Dude less ironically detached from the possibility of taking charge – although at this juncture, he appears to believe they are all doomed. When Lengthy shoots a lizard (00:16:31), basically for looking chipper and able to survive when he probably won’t. Half Pint (Henry Morgan) protests: “he wasn’t doing you no hurt”. The sink however, has no truck with compassion: it is Half Pint’s horse that soon collapses in sand dunes and has to be shot (00:18:19).

After almost ten minutes (a long time, especially in 1940s cinematic terms) at 00:18:47, Stretch, suspecting mirage, spots what appears to be salvation in the form of a distant town. Hope to cracked lips and dried out voices. They struggle on…to find the town of the title: Yellow Sky. A dehydrated ghost town. Dead. Crumpling up all over the steps of a collapsing saloon, the gang don’t have the energy or sense to even get out of the sun, resigned to becoming skeletons. Then there is the faint click of a rifle hammer being cocked. At 21 minutes, Mike (Anne Baxter, hilariously described in IMDb as a “gun toting tomboy”) at last appears:

Yellow Sky at 00:21.08 and the first appearance of ‘Mike’

If I could have it to myself – or better still, share it with Anne Baxter – Yellow Sky is another place I wouldn’t mind living. The rock formations around are superb and the dilapidation aesthetically surpasses Heysham and Morecambe, without people to complicate it![xvi]

In his wonderfully terse, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky[xvii], John Sayles may not overstate Anne Baxter’s impact but does exaggerate what she’s wearing: “tight jeans and a 50s bra that could put your eye out”. The high-contrast noir-etched photography of Baxter is stunning. Without doubt, apart from settings and landscapes, Baxter is the best thing about Yellow Sky, but although frowningly beautiful, its her spirit and character that most impress.

I’ve long had a thing about Anne Baxter, especially in earlier films such as Swamp Water[xviii] (1941) before fashion styled her hair in that increasingly fixed, bouffant power-perm manner which I can no longer bear to see because it unfailingly reminds me of the night and daymare that was Margaret Thatcher![xix] You can see this style creeping in by the time of another of my old screen favourites: 1958’s Chase a Crooked Shadow – although realistically, even in much earlier films, the secure Forties hairstyles aren’t so very different. Perhaps it is her wilder character in both Swamp Water and Yellow Sky that is so appealing?

Where matte[xx] shots are interposed into genuine landscape is often hard to tell when watching films in a relaxed way, but the solid ghost town of Yellow Sky, “fastest growing town in the territory” – its appearance and atmosphere – are entirely convincing. Apparently, the filmmakers reused and partly rebuilt or wrecked an old set known as “Last Outpost” in the Alabama Hills[xxi] just to the west of Lone Pine[xxii]. A hundred miles east, the salt flats and desert scenes were shot mostly in the Death Valley National Park[xxiii] with actors and crew staying at the evocatively named Furnace Creek.

Before the Thatcher-esque look of later years – a colorized, glammed-up publicity shot for Yellow Sky

At 00:21:54 Mike tells the exhausted gang where to find the spring “up behind those big rocks, at the head of the street”, suspiciously tracking them, rifle in hand. Later, at 00:23:47 she appears dominantly on a boulder above them, regretting their arrival, poised as they gulp and wallow in the pool.

It has often been repeated that Yellow Sky is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest,[xxiv] and you can see certain obvious parallels: desert = sea, Stretch/Peck = Ferdinand, Grandpa = Prospero and Mike/Anne Baxter = Miranda . . . but if so, it’s a still looser adaptation than Forbidden Planet (1956), and Mike clearly has no wonderstruck admiration for Stretch:  Miranda in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest: “I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble”.

If I had money for every film ‘loosely based’ on Shakespeare (the seventh art tirelessly in quest of respectability?) I would not be poor! In any case, the true value of Shakespeare, is the poetry, not the plots – most of which The Bard lifted from earlier sources. Once the description ‘loosely based’ is applied, most films would begin to resemble one (or several) of the seven – 36 basic plots[xxv] available. One might just as well say that Yellow Sky is ‘loosely based’ on the shipwreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda in 1609[xxvi]!

No, Mike is not enraptured by this new humanity and if she were less defensive when the now hydrated Stretch first visits her house (00:24:25), could she have falsely conveyed that she was hiding nothing other than herself? With water, food and rest, the gang are bound to remember that weird painting in the saloon and revive their other animal instincts.

At 00:25:05, Mike tells Stretch that “it ‘aint far to Alkali, you could make it easy, if you try”. Alkali is a real place[xxvii] albeit a ghost town now[xxviii] in the inappropriately named Esmerelda County. Or perhaps the name only seems inappropriate because owing to one of those carelessly poetic lateral slips, it makes me think of emerald green grass . . . rather than sand, salt and emeralds[xxix]?

Nevada ghost town – Alkali Springs

I don’t want to venture into the political incorrectness of Stretch and his gang’s attitude towards the Apache[xxx] (though not only was Mike raised “with Apaches”, Grandpa praises them (00:26:11) as “fine people, if you can understand them”) or their lust or chivalry (the latter particularly in Bull Run’s case) regarding Mike/Constance Mae, or the necessity for a 1948 production to reinforce gender stereotypes for its mainstream coda (more on that later). Some of these attitudes are obviously toxic, some just amusingly or irritatingly of their time. Yes, it was inevitable that Mike and Stretch would ‘fall in love’ and probably both of them subconsciously feel this from the first moment they see each other – or so runs the timeless loathing-to-loving story convention, as well as the popular romantic notion. Mike tries to resist, whereas Stretch violently relaxes (!) into it, ceasing to sufficiently lead or control his gang and breaking his own rule to “stay away from those people!” (00:29:03). Eventually, stung by Mike telling him he smells bad (00:33:19), he even washes and shaves.

Mike with a smoothed-out Stretch!

Stretch looks much less appealing once shaved . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself and far ahead of the plot since it is Dude who dolls himself up first, just before Mike first comes to the spring for water (00:27:47). I hope she is going to boil that water before use after the mob has all slurped and wallowed in it! Or maybe, it’s just that I feel like washing after the battery of sexist comments and leering – all of which Mike takes in her stride. Of this and more violent scenes, no less than the BFI seems to have become over-compliantly politically correct[xxxi] proposing to demote a film made in 1948 for not having the worthwhile but somewhat idealised values of 2026. However enlightened we think we are 78 years later, such situations have not gone away. In watered-down fashion they happen in Heysham and Morecambe every day and my 16-year-old daughter prefers not to walk on the prom alone.

With dozens of wrecked buildings to choose from, why do the gang all “bunk down” in the saloon (00:29:50) – I’d chose a building as far away from the others as possible. The characters that “amount to nuthin’ nohow” (to quote Lengthy) seem able to sleep through Walrus snoring like a “wounded buffalo”, but Lengthy is driven outside – to find Stretch contemplating on the veranda of the ruined saloon. After needling Stretch about the whereabouts of Dude he goes back inside.

Is Stretch really looking for Dude, as he claims, when having moved towards the tenebrous homestead Mike emerges from the shadows to challenge him at 00:31:58? Tackling her by surprise, they fight, she head butts him, he does it back harder and forces a kiss on her, before desisting. This is where she tells him twice that he smells, and then taking careful aim, shoots him across the scalp (00:33:39). In another excellent post from 2008[xxxii], the writer highlights the scene which follows with Mike trying to explain to Grandpa why she shot Stretch:

“He made me feel . . . I don’t know.” But she does know. Stretch has made her feel like a woman for the first time in her life. Wellman then cuts to Mike’s room, in which      a picture of an elegantly dressed lady is pinned onto her wall. Seeing it fills her with disgust and causes Mike to angrily tear it into pieces. It’s a great moment of self-loathing – she hates herself for feeling something that she’s been trying so hard to suppress. Although having such a picture on her wall in the first-place clues us into the fact that Mike longs to be as pretty as any other woman out there. In that one short scene, we sense Mike’s vulnerability for the first time.”

More specific than the tragic/Romantic pop songs that are a chart constant, the romances of old films still need last only half an hour or so of screen time – this is why they can be so haunting. Novels and tedious soaps and serials often do them to death. The best romance stories are about potential and hope, not dull, chronological reality. Being fundamentally frustrating, the human condition (in its customary form) cannot fulfil our yearnings for long – yet almost everyone who refuses to let the human state get them down, clings to hopes we project from imagination. Hence good love stories (and happy endings) have a general appeal even if many who have experienced the long-term reality of romantic love, try to reject such unreliable optimism. Romantic love may linger as familiarity and companionship, even flourish and create a sense of safety for decades, but are its deepest feelings of connection and joint projection, always liable to return to being about the other or the elsewhere? To a degree, this could be why I have abstracted my own deepest feelings into landscapes, atmospheres and the most searching art – which doesn’t mean that I can resist a wistful attraction to actresses[xxxiii] usually long dead. In great films none of the characters or landscapes are ever dead!

Bathing his scalp at the spring, Stretch encounters Dude. Could they have once been friends? Could they become friends? Not in Yellow Sky – this, distinctively, is one of its noir aspects. Stretch’s romantic inclinations have prevented him from deducing what Dude has had a hunch about all along – the presence of gold! Dude is greedy for gold and has no interest in romance. He tells Stretch his history and it’s the thought of his betraying ex-woman being made to suffer, that briefly revives Widmark’s insane chuckle from 1947’s Kiss of Death (00:37:47)[xxxiv]: “she lit out with a fella who ended up beating her”.

Above the ghost town the spring looks idyllic – as if the gang are enjoying a picnic. 00:26:57

Shattered the showershields, roofs ruined,

age under-ate them.

                                            And the wielders & wrights?

Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone,

fast in gravesgrasp while fifty fathers

and sons have passed.[xxxv]

From first encountering the Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin, as a teenager,the idea of the ghost town, or of ghost areas – such as the ex-lead-mining moors of Northumberland upon which we lived for seven years – may be even more fascinating than the allure of actresses who, while society survives, will never die. Ghost towns represent the flip side to potential, and up to a point, their history becomes fixed in time. Tyneham[xxxvi] in Dorset was one such place explored when we lived in the southwest of England. Appropriated as a training ground for D-Day in 1943, it was never returned to its inhabitants. Mardale in Cumbria[xxxvii] was another valley we knew well, though we never knew its villages, Mardale Green and Measand, only the reservoir which gradually drowned them from the late 1930s. By contrast, the ghost towns of the desert states of Nevada and California largely record a failure to survive at the periphery. Spelling out tales of greed, aspiration or over-ambition, they are gradually destroyed by extreme temperatures and the wind.

Shattered stable in a court of rocks. 00:41:09

Stretch makes no attempt to understand or appease Dude (00:38:16). The increased antagonism between them begins the central section, though at first, Stretch is more interested in smartening himself up. The gang meet to decide on a course of action having voted Dude as new leader (00:41:53). Stretch has no regard for democracy, but before a direct showdown, Mike takes the initiative from the boulders above – with her rifle. The existence of gold can no longer be doubted.

White flag or not, Mike has Stretch in the barrel of her gun – 00:45.09

This was probably not the first time such an idea was used in a film. Since the helical grooving[xxxviii] is clearly shown, was it actually shot through a larger diameter gun barrel or was this a special effect added in post-production?

If you have read this far without knowing Yellow Sky at all, I will leave all the nuances and twists of fate of the film’s second half to your imagination and jump to the perhaps unjustly despised coda which opens at 01:34:37. For long sections of its often nocturnal second half, Yellow Sky looks like a noir, but both the romantic elements and the reformation of Stretch to “James Dawson”, run counter to this. Stretch starts his biography by telling Mike and Grandpa (01:04:42) that “I come from good people. When I give my word, I mean it”.

Long prefaced by Grandpa’s compassion (01:08:02): “Guess the wars upset a lot of those boys and set them off on the wrong foot,” the coda is not just happy but quite comic and begins with the chagrined, contrite surviving bandits returning the stolen money to the bank. As if all crime could be so simply undone!

At 01:37:00 as the three survivors gallop across a beautiful flower-filled water-meadow for a rendezvous with Grandpa and Mike, the film reverts to its framing triumphalism and lightness. However, rather than the exploratory, adventurousness of the opening, the ending quickly becomes jubilant.

Do I want to be a woman some of the time? Can I do this? . . . 01:37:53 

At 01:37:30 Stretch presents Mike with the hat bought from the head of an only temporarily affronted lady at the bank. This might all be “sappy” and “unbelievable”[xxxix], but personally, I enjoy it. Even if it was a studio imposition, it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, not worth getting wound up about[xl]. I don’t believe Mike will change because of it.

. . . Yes! At least for a while   01.38.00

Mike dares herself and accepts the hat. Love is in the air, let’s end quickly before the wedding!

© Lawrence Freiesleben, 2026

Notes

[i] Available on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=XoSVGw_Ex-Q

[ii]  See songofamerica.net/song/oh-susanna/

[iii] In this outstanding piece by Stark Holborn, starkholborn.com/2020/01/23/review-yellow-sky-           1948/ he claims Yellow Sky as a precursor to the “Acid Western” sub-genre: “Acids, if you haven’t come across them before, are known, and named, for their counterculture tendencies; the desire to kick the western away from the glowy sunset of manifest destiny and into the dark corners of the soul.” 

[iv]  This article by Imogen Sara Smith brightlightsfilm.com/past-sunset-noir-in-the-west/ is so good on Bob Mitchum and others and on Pursued (1947), that I might abandon all future hopes of writing about that particular film!

[v] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Wellman

[vi] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

[vii] Actually, there are only four different sketches; the dissolves between title changes create      the impression of more.

[viii] youtube.com/watch?v=noxTiJNgmxk  landscape features explained by Randy Newberg

[ix] A location coincidentally carried over from Z’s film in this Z-A: Zabriskie Point (1970). See A Z-A of films: Zabriskie Point – The Brazen Head

[x] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_on_Earth

[xi] crimereads.com/tommy-udo-film-noirs-greatest-homme-fatal/

[xii] I cannot find out who painted this. Presumably an artist employed by the film studio? If Sherlock Holmes were alive now, we need a monograph on bizarre portraits and paintings of old Hollywood A and B pictures – though I’m not sure it would be much help in the field of crime solving. When I’d almost reached the end of this essay, I encountered yet another wonderful post about Yellow Sky jeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ which highlighted the similarities between the scene with the strange painting behind the bar and the opening of Wellman’s earlier film, The Ox-bow Incident (1943). The painting in Ox-Bow is not nearly so strange, but Henry Fonda’s comment “that guy’s awful slow getting’ there” sets off an interesting dialogue exchange.

[xiii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pinkham_Ryder

[xiv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall

[xv]  clevelandart.org/art/1928.8  The Racetrack or Death on a Pale Horse  c. 1896–1908

[xvi] Or perhaps not! According to jeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ “In         temperatures topping 120°, with Gila monsters and scorpions everywhere, it wasn’t a comfortable set for the actors.”

[xvii] See: youtube.com/watch?v=SrbtgJTe6ok  00:01:14

[xviii] The first of Jean Renoir’s five films made in Hollywood during the Second World War was produced by 20th Century Fox. Categorised by the Nazis as “Cinematic Public Enemy Number One” Renoir’s left-wing anti-fascist and anti-war stance gave him no choice but to flee.

[xix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher  Whom I reference in the hope that time can be reversed and she and her dire legacy can be exorcised from history!

[xx]            thepropgallery.com/painting-in-pictures-the-lost-art-of-the-matte-shot

[xxi]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_Hills – an area famous for its rock shapes and widescreen vistas of the Sierra Nevada  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Nevada

[xxii]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Pine,_California See also:  lonepinechamber.org/sightseeing-in-the-lone-pine-area/movies-filming-in-the-lone-pine-area  In the centre of the movie map at the end of this page you can see ‘Yellow Sky’ (Gregory Peck)

[xxiii]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_National_Park

[xxiv] Alex Good goes into this more carefully in another outstanding post on Yellow Sky:    alexonfilm.com/2022/01/25/yellow-sky-1948/

[xxv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots ; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations

[xxvi]  https://www.rsc.org.uk/news/archive/the-ship-that-inspired-shakespeare

[xxvii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkali,_Nevada

[xxviii] Or is it? nvtami.com/2021/05/17/alkali-spring-nevada/

[xxix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esmeralda_County,_Nevada  “Esmeralda is the Spanish and Portuguese word for “emerald”. An early California miner from San Jose, James Manning Cory, named the Esmeralda Mining District after Esmeralda the Romani dancer from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”

[xxx]  Ibid, from Alex Good’s post: “At one point I was hoping for the return of the Apache at the end in the role of the cavalry, saving Stretch and Mike and Grandpa from Dude and the gang. That, however, would have been a turn of the screw too far in 1948.”

[xxxi]  bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films see also, reference xxxv below. It is notable that after Yellow Sky, Anne Baxter’s very next film, You’re My Everything (1949), a slight, cringy and often irritating musical drama, insidiously reinforces sexist attitudes as well as racism – Dan Dailey even blacking up for one film-within-the-film. Rightly unacceptable now, this was standard at the time. Unlike the constant threat of the lustful men (a gang of criminal roaming men would be no different nowadays) towards Mike in Yellow Sky, this casual racism is not intrinsic to the contrast, tension or plot. An amusing aspect of You’re My Everything however, are the silent film take-offs – one entitled Flaming Flappers – acted out in believable, satirical fashion by Baxter, whose character is supposedly “patterned” on Clara Bow. She is certainly utterly different to Mike!

[xxxii] theroadshowversion.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/to-save-and-be-saved-yellow-sky-1948/ 

[xxxiii]  It would never have occurred to me to think of an actress as being in any way inferior to an actor. See: theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/sep/25/readers-editor-actor-or-actress

[xxxiv]         Ibid: crimereads.com/tommy-udo-film-noirs-greatest-homme-fatal/

[xxxv]  The Ruin, lines 8-13, translation by Michael Alexander, from The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics, first published in 1966, is thought likely to be about Aquae Sulis (Bath).

[xxxvi]         virtual-swanage.co.uk/things-to-do/towns-and-villages/tyneham

[xxxvii]         lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/haweswater-and-the-lost-kingdom-of-mardale/

[xxxviii]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling The wonderful post about Yellow Sky, encountered when I’d    almost reached the end of this essay, jeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ said exactly what I was going to suggest: that it “must have inspired the people who did the credits for the James Bond movies.”

[xxxix]  In his splendidly terse, to-the-point, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky, John Sayles hates its possibly studio-required end: youtube.com/watch?v=SrbtgJTe6ok saying at 00:01:36 “If I ruled the world, I’d cut the sappy, unbelievable coda off the movie!” But I often like abrupt happy endings, unless they are so bad they make you nauseous. They can be less tiring. I always feel tempted to rewrite bad endings. Every time I watch Out of the Past (1947), for example, I always want Bob Mitchum to survive even though that would defy one    of the rules I consider essential to true noir – a tragic conclusion.

In William A. Wellman: 10 essential films www.bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films the BFI also finds fault with the cheerful ending (and other things): “Were it not for some alarmingly dodgy sexual politics – from Gregory Peck’s assault on Anne Baxter to her final acquiescence (via a bonnet) to his idea of feminine norms – Yellow Sky might rank among Wellman’s best.” I fail to see why depicting things how they simply would have been, counts as “alarmingly dodgy sexual politics”. That is to apply modern attitudes to a film made 78 years ago. The hat incident may or may not have been a studio imposition, but it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, neurotic to be wound up about, and absurd that it should affect how we rank the film. We can deplore aspects of the past, but we can’t expect the past to fit in with our current fashions. Personally, I don’t believe Mike/Constance Mae will change all that much because of a silly hat and both Stretch and I would be disappointed if she did. But that’s why films end when they do. In ‘real life’ we are often likely to be disappointed. One of the major problems with long-form TV is that it never ends but merely staggers on into the desert.

Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben

Devonshire

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has been an artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town

Devonshire

Staggering amidst a floodtide                                           Heavitree

of happiness embalmed in memory                              sudden frost children

Impression . . . kaleidoscope . . . slowed                        Chapleton, Umberleigh

of veiled suburb or deep country

part lament, part symphony                                          hands enfolded

To cope or not to cope                                                    bright face, rosy cheeks

Is not the question . . .

Summer bluebells, autumn leaf, the red streets missed    (brickwork and gardens)

the grass-glowing banks of peace turned white

back or forwards                                                       your singing eyes

it all returns                                                                                   Sidmouth, Ottery

to find areas unnoticed or skimmed

certain times become legend                                                           Honiton.

Hail the slowing train for the clatter up Taw’s wooded, meandering river (1981

or else this confession                                                                 under the sun

will get out of hand

match-light flaring in and out                               Hembury, Belstone, Great Mis Tor

of places and times centring by weight                                                       let go

upon Bideford or Exeter . . .

These blind summits can be cold

give me time to intensify or pass . . .

Floating through empty streets where all life has ceased                    

I wonder how to wake or whether

this is the truth                                                   returned to the ether

the shadows rich, the ruins better

than a world we have sold for a molehill of groats

squandered ourselves and scrapped the future

between lonely screens and the social surf                                

all thought swallowed in a fly-tip of chatter

the maya of progress                                                                                        

a ceaseless march . . . Return to the past:

its light and feel, a sandstone red                                    

background of caverns ringing the head

the matches flare, nocturnal semaphore,

signalling Exeter and Dawlish Warren.

A girl I knew when we were both ten,

moved here and was never seen again, a new start or an old ending?

like post-war Sidwell Street’s arcades of idealism               Exeter again

abandoned, due to be demolished

or awaiting restoration                                                        I hope

The train gallops on metals not traversed for 30 years

four old homes passed already . . .

I want to say I love you                                                    Bonehill Down

but just now, you are not here

(and as) the tunnel approaches, the blind end trough

in the mind’s ear, I can still hear beyond the years

past this washed-out, effortless tube,

the blast of Ajax and Achilles                                           Indomitable

even in the 80s there was still an air of splendour

diesels with concentrated power

worthy descendants of the dragons of steam                Seaton Junction

Surging brakes slow the water meadows passing west of Axminster

unchanged it seems since we last alighted:

1989, and a pushchair wheel detached itself to cross the platform and roll slowly off its edge

We watched this filmic omen of tragedy in horror

but as the wheel settled on the sleepers, began to laugh.

All those places where we came and went          Harpford, Ottery, Hembury Fort

recur again in the travelling carriage glass

with different children under different skies       or yet alone

swerving on, fast again, they will not rest,

a devastating parade                 immediacy struck by infinite distance

their atmosphere is porous                                  haze, beauty,

as if a spell could so easily                                  slim slate graves

contradict the years                                            reverse

All these thoughts I would have to avoid (at the lodge)

dismiss every fantasy and whatever remains

every background yearning excuse    (Devon is Hevon, says the mural/graffiti)

accept yet reject getting tired and the gathering gall of a disregarded life

in the sliding anaconda of this declining world

reject the dwindling thread between us    the habit of misunderstanding

Companionship (it seems) is not enough for self-surmounting tunnellers or their aerial quest

impatient with the human form

without extravagant love (and probably with it too) – unreasonable, crushing,

these mimes and twists of frustration

only bring closer the hour of the wolf,

glimmering in uncompromising starkness

in purity or despair

clutch hands, see far behind the yes, feel the warm rounded limbs regardless

such halfway states

between body and soul, not relegated to the past

the idea of completion, of that internal ghost . . .

comes and goes as the train sweeps through and on   Chard Junction

to the sirens of alarms

the striped angry barriers

the crushing ache of life

gone

lift off is here, at last . . .

Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben

A Z-A of films: Zabriskie Point

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN revisits Zabriskie Point, 1970, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

[Caution: plot is of minor concern, either to the filmmakers or the thoughts which follow]

Travelling backwards from the end of the alphabet, three other Z films initially clamoured their alternative directions: the Hammer-esque Dracula adaptation from Pakistan directed by Khwaja Sarfraz, Zinda Lash, 1967[i]; Jake Gyllenhaal in David Fincher’s Zodiac, 2007; and Z, directed by Costa-Gavras in 1969. As if glimpsed on signs or billboards during Zabriskie Point’s early flashing road-journey sequence (00:10:00 – 00:11:56), with its distorted rear-view mirror alternatives, the presence of these other films insisted, reminded, recurred and haunted . . . but eventually fell behind.

“Zabriskie Point lives on as Antonioni’s moody meditation about freedom curdling into emptiness” ends one concise and informative appreciation of the film online[ii], a reasonable, if skin-deep conclusion to an expert precis – for it has reached its principal concern: an article about fashion and style.

White Lund Industrial Estate, Morecambe, April 2022

How common is the assumption that all lead characters in films exist as centre points to be either identified with or rejected? Can such a generally reasonable idea apply to Zabriskie Point? Even if Antonioni and his collaborators had sought so conventional an objective, their sounds and images would have escaped. There are far more enlivening things to be found here.

Zabriskie Point at 00:11:01

Back to that first road-journey sequence scored to cacophonous noises and experimental music[iii]: all through the LA suburbs of exhilarating colours and forms amongst dusty wires, lampposts and warehouses, eventually to the stroboscopic verticals of Mexican fan palms towering above the vying traffic, Zabriskie Point’s vibrant overwhelm of colours and shapes here make a symphony from the tangible presence of a vanished world. This is common to films and television of the period: it’s there in John Boorman’s outstanding Point Blank (1967), Peter Bogdanovich’s notable debut, Targets (1968) and the rickety Raquel Welch vehicle, Flareup[iv] (1969). It’s there through much of the superior Rockford Files TV series of 1974-1980. It might seem incidental, but it’s rarely accidental. Filmmakers look for such backgrounds tirelessly. The difference is that Antonioni often made foregrounds of the background. Setting becomes as vital as character – and while this is also true of films such as, for example, Edward Scissorhands (1990), I Start Counting (1970) or Rear Window (1954), Antonioni did not limit himself to one or two distinctive places, he tried to use the whole wider landscape and ambience – occasionally allowing its significance to equal or exceed that of the human foreground. This was not a failure to fully realise the characters, nor was it carried out with only the intention of satirising the world depicted – even if that might be as far as some viewers care to look.

White Lund Industrial Estate, Morecambe, April 2022

To me, Antonioni’s viewpoint is metaphysical. In films such as L’Avventura (1960) this can feel remote. Watched from a “normal” human angle his films are often regarded as alienating. Yet whatever Antonioni’s personal views on faith or doubt, presence or absence, the films are almost bound to feel alienating if one struggles too hard to identify (positively or negatively) with the characters – which of course is precisely what, as spectators of TV and film, we are expected to do.

Zabriskie Point at 00:11:37

Heartbreakingly beautiful in retrospect, as with the London of Blow-Up[v](1966), the Los Angeles of Zabriskie Point may be sadly or safely gone, depending on your viewpoint. Delusional rationalisation – both economic and psychological – combined with the reckless notion of constant progress, have created a force towards a future which cannot curb either the blandness or destruction inherent in it. The inadvertent society marches on[vi].

White Lund Industrial Estate, Morecambe, April 2022

Vanished suburban and industrial backgrounds are like treasure and many artists in different media have richly enshrined and celebrated such visual and auditory fairground rides, but in Zabriskie Point’s first of many journeys – lasting less than two minutes of screen time – as well as throughout the film as a whole, this is more than a time machine visit by an acutely observant[vii] foreigner, it is a sociological and historical document, not just – in passing – for its period, but also for America’s distorted idea of itself . . . yet more relevant today under a dangerously unhinged president[viii]. How dismayed the radical students in the assembly for action at the beginning of Zabriskie Point (00:00:07 – 00:08.46) would be to discover, just how “pell-mell into fascism” (00:04:46) their country has fallen under Trump.

Amongst the joy and sadness, the hurtling traffic and bustle of vanished lives, in search of the overlaps when certain films or experiences strike some kind of well or mineshaft . . .

Aiming for the visionary / Instead, a lead mine has been drilled down inside my neck / to flooded levels I can’t keep clear. / Grid confined, primal force without bearings, craving the sky / Far from meadows or moors / Is there no choice but downward?[ix]…

Then, everything – all the fleeting side-thoughts and impressions triggered by Zabriskie Point, went calm as I remembered Leighton Buzzard sand quarries . . .

Leighton Buzzard Sand Quarries. Stock image: M O’Brien Group

Several illicit Sunday trips to Leighton Buzzard sand quarries in hot summers of the mid and late 70s, deposited vivid geological strata in my mind, a dream of deserts – or even distant planets which remains undimmed. This was both the surface and the inside of the land itself. Climbing over fences and sneaking down into cuttings and pits, following rusting rails alongside the severe blues of ponds and lakes, pushing the small mineral wagons along tracks we chose to believe abandoned, collecting sandstone rocks which were like red-ochre asteroid landscapes in miniature . . . This was one of those moments when a truer sense of priority emerges – to disregard time and the usual human goals. These moments are part of what Antonioni is trying to embody in Zabriskie Point.

Despite later, tamer visits with my children to the narrow-gauge railway (first opened in 1919) that had become a noticeable tourist attraction by the 1990s[x], the archetype was not dislodged. An unearthly place vastly expanded from its dimension in reality. Just how many landscape experiences, direct or second-hand, this archetype has helped intensify is impossible to calculate. Antonioni’s misunderstood Zabriskie Point (1970) is one of them, even though the titular Death Valley desert viewpoint, in yellows browns and whites has little in common with the vibrant reds and oranges of Leighton Buzzard. The temperate Bedfordshire location became a long-running family joke. Scenes in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ice Cold in Alex and Sea of Sand (both 1958)would all be met with “Look! Leighton Buzzard sand quarries!”  Zabriskie Point (1970) however, was not a family film and what Peter Bradshaw positively describes in The Guardian[xi] as a meeting between a radical student on the run and a “hippy chick” which leads to a “sexual epiphany, psychodramatised as an orgy” would not have gone down well, if indeed it was ever shown on T.V. before my sister and I left home.

In Antonioni’s last full-length feature film, Beyond the Clouds[xii], (1995) John Malkovich as ‘The Director’ serves – largely in voiceover – as the alter ego of Antonioni. Some of his thoughts are rhetorical, others enigmatically intriguing, if whimsically vague[xiii]. Near the beginning of the film comes this self-deprecating statement: “Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a philosopher. On the contrary, I’m someone who is profoundly attached to images.” [Does this rule out the philosophical impulse?]  “I only discovered reality when I began photographing it. Photographing and enlarging the surface of things that were around me. I tried to discover what was behind them. I’ve done nothing else in my career.” While it’s hardly true that Antonioni did “nothing else”, this element of exploration is undoubtably true of Zabriskie Point.

If alienation – intended to trigger observation and thought rather than emotional empathy – appears key to almost all mid-career Antonioni’s films, it follows that his characters often dispense with excessive . . . character. Many of them remain partially or severely blank – inscrutable to the point of being elsewhere. This is taken to a constructed extreme within the partial road movie, partial romance, partial thriller of The Passenger, (1975). As Locke, Jack Nicholson – one of the least camouflageable stars that ever grinned! – takes Antonioni’s concept and distancing literally: attempting to lose himself by exchanging identities with an acquaintance who dies unexpectedly in their shared shabby hotel on the edge of the Sahara in Chad.

Although they were not professionals and, in some ways, exist in the film on an attitudinal surface, Mark (Mark Frechette – virtually playing himself it would seem[xiv]) and Daria (Daria Halprin) remain increasingly memorable. Towards the end of the film, Mark is predictably martyred by the aggressive trigger-happy cops lurking at the airfield, cops too overcharged or dim to wait until he stops and gets out of the plane. Meanwhile, Daria becomes the projected soul or alternative hope of the film . . . at least in her final, satisfying, explosive daydream. This is a moment we are encouraged to identify with – and carries us with it even when it digresses from repeatedly destroying the building to a series of more abstract, increasingly impossible detonations – sky-blue backdropped[xv] interior spaces conjured from the ether, to blithely destroy consumerism’s unlimited contents, comforts and gadgets.

Blithe destruction at 01:48:02

The clash in so many ways (ideological, physical, temperamental) between Daria and her middle-aged boss, Lee, (good old Rod Taylor) is harsher than either of them seem to realise. Fiercely ambitious and materialistic, Lee seems to be a deliberately jarring, no-nonsense advocate from an older generation, a patient bull who has left Bodega Bay and The Birds (1963)[xvi] far behind. He seems stranded – as if at some point he set his Time Machine[xvii] for 1969, and abandoning it, has swapped his clothes in some trendy boutique for the uniform of a square!  

Sometimes, I have the feeling that the best films, indeed the best art, only appears to have faults. Eventually we realise that it’s the imperfections and the sections we can never explain or understand which create “perfection”. Experienced often enough, faults can become serendipities[xviii]. If this doesn’t happen, then it’s the underlying limitations which are revealed: those films which complete themselves in the watching and die; those too well-constructed novels or poems; the over-skilful or over-stylish paintings. Years ago – as well as wishing that Zabriskie Point had used all 23 minutes of The Grateful Dead’s, Dark Star[xix]  – I was unhappy with the main cast, now they seem ideal . . . just as Kim Novak’s woodenness in Vertigo (1958) has been widely reappraised[xx].

Having not seen it since 2017, would Zabriskie Point amount to less than the sum of its parts? Another problem with getting older is realising how not only individuals, but more-importantly, the human race, so often dismally fails to achieve what it could[xxi] – our cleverness progressively drained of wisdom, while the summits of art become rarer or more piffling. Also, fewer of the past’s claimed summits look as valid as they once did. The best of everything becomes increasingly elusive, hidden beyond the surface of reality or inside yourself. It is not wholly present in the art (if it ever was) but depends on what the individual’s experience enables them to apply – as Leighton Buzzard’s sand quarries helped me. It’s the interaction that counts, rather than any end product. As our cultural ability to appreciate any form of art declines – dulled or made intolerant in the film world by an over-indulgence of blockbuster or franchise trash (as mobile screen overuse is dimming the capability to concentrate on anything much longer than a moment) – so its past value becomes veiled or lost.

Hopefully, it’s not just on a personal level that Zabriskie Point contradicts this general decline. Although I must’ve seen the film six or seven times, almost everything is better than I remember – the characters more present in their ambiguity, the atmosphere vividly real. Instances of droll humour – such as the policeman writing Carl Marx when Mark states his name upon being arrested (00:16:43) occur quite often. The unforced satire of advertising and billboards showing family, is as clear as crystal, yet the irony is, at this point, forgiving. The same goes for the entire sequence (00:18:18 – 00:19:38) cross-cutting between the Sunny Dunes, Board of Directors, smoking or contemplating, and their absurd promotional film presenting desert development as an innocently offered chance for wealthy customers to receive what they’ve always wanted: “Why be caught up in the rat race of city life when you can enjoy life the Sunny Dunes way?” Emerald green tennis lawns beckon beneath red rocks[xxii]. “Drink fresh mountain water from oaken buckets” (00:18:36), “Breathe the unpolluted air of the high desert”. A grinning boy mannequin (00:18:43) who resembles, minus the glasses, that idealistic nerd, Joe 90[xxiii], armed with six-shooters and dreaming of outdrawing a quail or a mountain lion!

Even this fictional real-estate advertisement mocking the ersatz nature of modern consumerism – always more lavish and go-ahead in the US of A – seems forbearing. Perhaps Antonioni was trying hard not to believe that society as a whole could so pathetically fall into such sterile traps? Or that the ludicrous twisting of the idea of freedom fuelling this commercialisation, the corralling of the free spirit of the desert, would be obvious to all intelligent people? “Forge a life of your own, like the pioneers who molded [sic] the West” (00:18:54). Like some gross escalation of Metro-land’s[xxiv] fading echo of the Edwardian period (which from 1919 until the early 1930s, sold a pastoral dream situated in the fields and wooded hills north-west of London) the Sunny Dunes Corporation aims to conquer the desert itself.

At 00:19:39 an impressionistic travelling sequence interrupted by a rear-view mirror’s abstract oblong in space, comes into focus on Lee (Rod Taylor). A radio report records that the total number of US servicemen killed in Vietnam is nearing 50,000. Oblivious, Lee’s almost identical colleague (same clothes, same profile, same haircuts) reads a newspaper article noting that California now has seven “centimillionaires”.  An overlapping radio item moves to Mark’s house and his decision to go to the campus “to see for himself” (00:20:47). As he leaves in his battered truck, Lee and identikit colleague arrive at the Sunny Dunes office tower block. Meanwhile, Daria is escaping the city.

Daria drives into the desert at 00:23:13.

In the late 60s and into the 70s, Hollywood films briefly overlapped with searching art cinema[xxv]. Like other films of the period, Zabriskie Point is so complex and remarkably edited that subsequent mainstream cinema often tastes vacuous.

Fleeing the campus shootings of protester and police officer (00:29:24 – 39) Mark takes a bus to the “end of the line” – the suburb the driver announces, sounds like “Rockway and Kirby,” although no such place or intersection appears to exist. Attempting to cadge a sandwich “if I trusted you, I’d have to trust everybody in the whole world”, he later sits by an Official SMOG Inspection Station. Wandering towards a used car lot, a light aircraft drones over, leaving a billboard of family behind . . . Flags, more planes, a remembered airfield, the chance of escape . . .

Mark at 00:32:47

The flight from Los Angeles, leaving its traffic-spiraling cloverleaves and dreary grids behind to an excerpt of The Grateful Dead’s Dark Star (00:36.15 – 00:37:14) lowers the stress and melds into a helicopter sweep over Daria’s borrowed and well-weathered 1952 Buick to Pink Floyd’s Crumbling Land (00:37:25).

 Daria at 00:38:27

A brief story from toddler to youthful soldier is told as the camera begins a short pan across colourful knick-knacks (00:38:24) before Daria’s bar phone connects to Lee’s grey office paraphernalia. The bar from which she rings could be seen as pre-Lynchian, albeit in Wes Anderson palette, but remains distinctly real. The pending ghost town settlement outside is a wasteland outpost with little more than a gas station, short railway platform, a grain silo (or obese ICBM hiding in plain sight?) the remains of an outdoor dance deck[xxvi] and a gaggle of “emotionally sick” children – all boys – who later, unconvincingly set upon her. Slightly reminiscent of the killer dolls sequence in Barbarella[xxvii], she escapes easily enough, never meeting her friend “Jimmy”[xxviii].

Although Mark’s aerial escape was based on a real-life incident[xxix], the whole section of his unlikely meeting with Daria, raises questionable aspects of their backgrounds. As a revolutionary student says at the beginning (00:04:18): “That’s why black people are, like you say, in another bag.” For Daria and Mark, (although not for Mark Frechette in real life[xxx]) their antiestablishment stance is, comparatively, a lifestyle choice, even a “bourgeois individualism” (00:08:39). If only we could all choose “to get off the ground” (00:54:05) when we needed to. If only it were ecologically justifiable.

 Zabriskie Point at 00:56:17

To Daria the desert is peaceful, to Mark it’s dead (01:02:06). Daria’s idea about planting only good thoughts in people’s head (01:03:45 – 01:04:02) is a clear precursor to Gretchen’s IMG (Infant Memory Generators[xxxi]) in Donnie Darko (2001)[xxxii] but Mark is as sceptical about such an idea as Donnie and Gretchen’s science teacher is in Donnie Darko. Only good thoughts are important to Daria: 

              Daria: “That’s the point, nothing’s terrible!”

              Mark (ironically): “Far out.”

As for the “sexual epiphany, psychodramatised as an orgy[xxxiii]” Peter Bradshaw could be enjoying his exaggeration? I see this long scene (01:06:46 – 01:14:48) as archetypal or symbolic. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you never see Mark or Daria with anyone else, only cross-cut with other wigged and dressed-alike couples. To me it has an idealised people-through-time suggestion. Despite chiming with the counterculture and free-love attitudes of its day, it is more about kissing, choreography and sand play. It ends before the multiple couplings, sunburn and sex gets too serious. The kaleidoscopic crowd disappears leaving Mark and Daria alone and the idyll begins to dissolve when Mark reveals that he is thinking more about the desert than love (01:14:59). It’s finally shattered at 01:15:14 by the crass image of consumer tourism at its worst. A truck roamer-home with boat attached and a satirical family from some suburban hell or perhaps from Billy Bob’s Diner, Preston[xxxiv] take a stroll around the car park: “They should build a drive-in up here. They’d make a mint”. The screech of a plane timed with a left-panning zoom, (01:15:58 – 0 1:16:09) briefly implies that the despoilation of the world by unrestricted jet travel is already well underway.

Zabriskie Point could often be paused as a painting: sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract. The red toilets at 01:16:35, are an instance where Antonioni, with the instincts of both painter and storyteller, switches abruptly from a strong abstract visual primary to figurative human tension with the arrival of the cop. Many will remember the menacing cop who quizzes Marion in Psycho (1960) – hilariously echoed, (along with Kiss Me Deadly, 1956), by Alex Cox in Repo Man[xxxv] 1984. Yet this cop is not so bad after all (01:18:08) and with the influence of Daria – a fairly practical and sensible “hippy chick” – you wonder if things can be made right?

Jumping on to 01:28:18, as Mark nears the airfield where the police cars lie in wait, I have that feeling common towards films watched and admired before, of hoping the ending will be different[xxxvi]. If Mark had not phoned his friend at 00:31:25, would he have stayed in Los Angeles? If the sandwich man had trusted him (00:31:58) would his intuition about human nature have shifted? At 01:32:49, Daria hears the news of his death – effectively an execution without trial – on her car radio. She hesitates, but drives on.

Zabriskie Point at 01.35.00

The road junction at 01:35:00 is worthy of a Graham Sutherland[xxxvii] composition. But for the grace of climate, so the bucolic hay fields of West Wales pictured below, might become the desiccated, be-cactused view shown in Zabriskie Point – in which the treacherous wilderness which encircles earlier Westerns such as Yellow Sky (1948), are now laughably ‘controlled’ by roads. Such threads of tarmac are there and yet not there. Sutherland frequently employed lanes in a similar manner, perhaps unconsciously, as more than a structural device, in an attempt to control the primeval, erupting from the past?

Carn Llidi, north of St. David’s, Pembrokeshire, 24 July 2025

The highly skilled but constricting etching techniques of Sutherland’s early years, were shattered, almost it seems against his will, by his discovery of Pembrokeshire in 1934. What exploded upon him in West Wales, rather than echoing the softer bucolic reality Romantically idealised by Samuel Palmer[xxxviii] – an antecedent he revered – could often be as unsettlingly prehistoric as the desert locations in Zabriskie Point[xxxix]:

Welsh Landscape with Roads by Graham Sutherland (1936)

But while the Sunny Dunes Corporation wishes to suppress the desert, Sutherland knew he could not contain the time fracture which perhaps derailed his nature in Wales[xl]. What is the suggestion of the human figure in Welsh Landscape with Roads (1936) fleeing from or to? Is it a kind of messenger? A Hermes running from history, trying to reach the present? As Daria drives through the desert landscape, there is often a sense of time fracture, as if she crosses both a distant primordial landscape, the near past of the black and white Western, and the approaching future of the colonial crescents and closes projected by the Sunny Dales Corporation – which will only ever float upon the surface of the land. I suspect it was such a fracturing (or dismissal) of time which first struck me as a child at Leighton Buzzard sand quarries.

Back in Arizona, Daria crosses the junction and continues to the heat-struck modernist mansion, visually and psychologically cooled by artificial waterfall and swimming pool and nestled into a collection of huge boulders, as a desert overlook. Despite the human forcing required to live in such places, the landscapes themselves remain beautiful.

The Boulder Reign residence[xli] at Carefree, Arizona, was the pioneer for a real-life Sunny Dunes[xlii]. Here, relaxing by a pool (01:36:14), are housewives slightly more real than the dummies featured in the promotional film. Having parked her car aslant two spaces, as if she knows she will not be staying or as mute protest, Daria passes behind the women without being noticed, as if she is invisible, or taken for one of the servants[xliii] – who appear to be women of Native American descent . . . this Sunny Dunes acquisition being one of the final nails in the coffin of their dispossession. Inside the shadow of the red rocks[xliv], Daria pauses, then painfully reflects (01:37:02), embracing water and rock, almost taking sustenance from them, before finding the will to continue, half-wet, through the boulder corridor.

Zabriskie Point at 01:37:44

As often in Antonioni, ellipses can be long and without warning. At one moment Daria, near the film’s start, is a temporary secretary at the Sunny Dunes Corporation tower block, asking permission from an authoritarian receptionist to retrieve a book, from “the roof” (00:09:01). When we next meet her, she has gone AWOL on a road trip through the desert to Phoenix and is presumably Lee’s casual mistress? Although she finally meets Lee (Rod Taylor) at the boulder house, she never answers his questions there, and in fact, throughout the film, is only ever heard talking to him twice: at their first meeting as strangers in the Sunny Dunes office foyer scene above, and then on the phone from the bar on her desert digression. On this second occasion, concerned that if she gives away her location, he’ll send a helicopter to fetch her, she hangs up. Now, at the boulder house, she remains mute. After Lee amusedly directs her to her room, she resentfully heads downstairs. Out of his sight, half-sharing a smile with one of the servants (01:41:52), she reflects again on the situation before hurrying from the house and driving away (01:42:10). 

Although perhaps the film’s conscience resides in Daria, does she remain representative of a generational, middle-class American future? It seems unlikely she’ll object to the status quo for long, she is too sensible – and even if she rejects the exploitational upward mobility of Rod Taylor’s Lee, she will be back one day, to take her place in some Sunny Dunes or other, not so different from the women in The Stepford Wives (1975). Or am I being unduly cynical?

Boulders Resort & Spa, Scottsdale: The real Sunny Dales 50 years later.

Essence of the free spirit![xlv]

For the ending sequence [xlvi] a prop replica of the Boulder mansion was built on the back lot at Southwestern Studios in Carefree, Arizona for $100,000. The explosions (01:44:40 to 01:49:52 with a premonition at 01:43:49) are the film’s political, social and spiritual climax. Repeated over and over from different angles and distances, the explosion, simultaneously captured by 17 cameras, is reminiscent of those grim films of nuclear detonations and the effects of blast on mock-up towns and structures in the Nevada desert[xlvii] – mostly carried out approximately 70 miles to the east[xlviii] of Zabriskie Point. With explosion, blast damage and the sound of flames fading into Pink Floyd’s Come in Number 51, You’re Time is Up[xlix] this sequence remains gravely, majestically powerful. Deriding the aspirational society, at moments it can appear amusing – when you feel like raging or crying about the state of the world what else can you do but laugh? – and yet it continues to project a wish-fulfilment retribution. Embodying Mark’s rage as well as Daria’s, with the segue into music haunting and ethereal to begin with, sound and image together suggest some kind of everything. The slow-motion shots of things blown apart are reminiscent of protozoa yet often resemble late Kandinsky paintings[l] such as Sky Blue (1940)[li] and Tempered Elan (1944) . . . 

              through this collision of worlds

              and pavement chalk urges us to Be Happy XXXX

              how staunchly we must embrace hope

              to sustain the mirage of progress[lii].

The later explosions mark a sleight of hand into the abstract, into pale blue. The victims: clothes, furniture, objects of conspicuous consumption as well as food, have lost connection with their natural environments. While remaining a wish-fantasy attack on consumerism, it is more than that. It is an attack on the inadvertent society[liii] itself. The colours have changed it. It is both more humorous – the lobster, the slowly revolving chicken and Wonder bread, the books at 01:49:14 – and yet more profound. A whole library follows. We are nothing but a waste of space to the Earth. 

Music and vengeance are abruptly cut off at 01:49:52 as the scene reverts to a sunset desert silence without time or place.

We look at Daria’s face, glad, wistful, satisfied? Then, realistic, she turns away.

“Who really cares to catch the thoughts of another person’s existence, to feel their inner life? To catch the thought of them, or there, or then, instead of the habitual self-interest. To feel what they felt, you need to become possessed. After which feverish infatuation, may come a deeper empathy or identification – perhaps reviving what you once had yourself, your own lost space, your own inner time travel?…How little of what remains enigmatically important inside every individual, means to anyone else.”[liv]  

At the end[lv], is the Roy Orbison song intended to reassure or mock departing cinema audiences? Either through the existence of an alternative version of Zabriskie Point without this gratuitous element; poor memory; or having willfully wiped it from said memory, this song was unfamiliar. It mars the finality of the explosion sequence and the unearthly yet beautiful desert sunset; the sense of a peace thankful to be rid of human influence.

              Anyplace for those who care, Zabriskie Point is anywhere. . .  

I wasted a certain amount of time brooding upon why this song was here. Was its echo of the 50s deliberate? Was it an early instance of the crosscurrent texturing of irony, nostalgia and unease that both Dennis Potter and David Lynch later utilized so effectively[lvi]? Then, I discovered, apparently[lvii], that it was added by MGM during post-production. Unravelling possible influences is often conjectural, yet it is interesting to wonder whether MGM’s clumsy use of Orbison’s song over Antonioni’s sublime atmosphere, might inadvertently have influenced either Potter or Lynch . . . which thereby, thirty or fifty years later, has come to make the added ending song more acceptable to viewers? It might have been appropriate for the song to play (ironically) after a gap, over the closing titles on black, to the bang of folding seats and the muted murmur of conversation as the cinema emptied. Time runs out so fast on love too good to last . . .

But no. The song’s presence panders to the swamping mainstream tradition of embellishing or entombing everything in music. Love is space in life / A place in time a state of mind too late I find . . .

No.

Silence would be preferable.

© Lawrence Freiesleben, Heysham, May 2026

NOTES

[i]  Often referred to as The Living Corpse

[ii]  bamfstyle.com/2026/02/05/zabriskie-point-mark/

[iii] I was forcefully reminded here, of an abstract interlude in the middle of Night Mail, 1936 (from 00:12:17 to 00:12:05) imdb.com/title/tt0028030/ which despite being in black and white and possessing a strident documentary voiceover, is visually and audibly arresting in a very similar manner – its shattered sounds including a work siren or hooter, echoed by Zabriskie Point 34 years later

[iv] My review from July 2021: “After too much dancing in the first half of Flareup, everything falls apart in the second, leaving only the dramatic immolation of psycho, Alan, to galvanise it. Suffering understandable trauma throughout the film, Raquel recovers remarkably rapidly from incinerating Alan – literally burning him alive. Surely that is not why the film is called Flareup? The finale becomes dreary when, yearning for home and kids, nice-guy Joe Brodnek puts his foot down: It’s me or Mexico. Restless Raquel revs away before U-turning into a happy-ever-after. Please spare us! The best aspects of Flareup are the 60s locales, the signs and neon nightscapes – plus the bar in LA, so aptly named The Losers”

[v]  For Blow-Up, see: stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2025/12/five-films.html and internationaltimes.it/blow-up-a-london-walk-of-august-2020-and-its-consequences/

[vi] I was interested to read recently, Henry K Miller’s Shoot to Thrill, interview with Kathryn Bigelow in Sight and Sound, December 2025, Volume 35. It struck me that perhaps there was some overlap between the “inadvertent society” (an endlessly revisited old phrase of mine) and Foucault’s image/idea of the panopticon, which he defined in “Schizo-Culture” (in 1975) as a machine “in which everyone is caught, those who exercise the power as well as those who are subjected to it… Power becomes a machinery controlled by no one”

[vii] With input from other writers: Sam Shepard, Franco Rossetti, Clare Peploe and Tonino Guerra

[viii] Donald Trump – referenced in the hope that before long he will be a disgrace lost in history

[ix] Paraphrasing of stanza 15 of No Error, (2022, L W Freiesleben, unpublished)

[xi] theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/23/zabriskie-point-review-michelangelo-antonioni

[x] buzzrail.uk/about-us/ It continues to grow in popularity: livingmags.info/great-start-to-season-for-leighton-buzzard-railway/

[xii] Unlike Zabriskie Point, as a whole, Beyond the Clouds feels redundant. Perhaps this is understandable given that it was made with help from Wim Wenders after Antonioni, disabled by a stroke, was unable to speak. A blend of lesser Antonioni and lesser Wenders, the script and voiceovers, sometimes taken from Antonioni’s writings (see sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/antonioni/  last paragraph) try to say important things and occasionally succeed, but despite its many beautiful images, locations, atmospheres, and actors, the film is undermined by its glib, lightweight style and perhaps by too many celebrity cameos? It’s as if everyone is kindly gathering around Antonioni for an uncensored, off-season Miss Marple adventure.

[xiii] “I believe that one moves forward driven by that vital impulse which is manifest in all things, that which originated in life, created the past and will create the future . . . while we will always remain in the present and keep on deceiving ourselves that we too change along with the world . . . whereas, I fear that we remain irreparably ourselves, as we were when we began to live.”  

[xiv] bamfstyle.com/2026/02/05/zabriskie-point-mark/  

[xv] Only the poolside furniture is recognizably connected to the house and able to have happened during the repeated detonations of the house. The open wardrobe, the surreal TV with a vase of flowers on top and attendant armchair, the outdoor fridge and food – lobster and chicken etc – the clothes, the Wonder bread, books and library shelves, all blown up against a Graham Sutherland 1950s blue sky of crucifixion: “blue skies are more powerfully horrifying.” See: etsy.com/uk/listing/1669704274/preparatory-sketch-for-christ-carrying or many of the Thorn Cross paintings and earlier studies for the Northampton Crucifixion: stmatthewsnorthampton.org.uk/art-and-history-the_crucifixion.php

[xvi] Is Hitchcock showing his age by The Birds (1963) – which feels a less modern film than Vertigo (1958)?

[xvii]  The Time Machine (1960), perhaps the film which along with The Birds, Taylor is most associated?

[xviii] I’m thinking particularly of the wobble in Yehudi Menuhin’s 1969 performance of the Violin Concerto by William Walton, with the composer himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. At first, I could not believe my ears: the slight but distinct wobble off-key for a second at the highest romantic climax, would surely have scotched it? I wondered if it was written into the piece or deliberate on Yehudi’s part, but could not hear it on other recordings and realised how much I missed it. It heightened the emotion – as if the violinist himself were overcome. Mind you, perhaps I should have checked it wasn’t a scratch on my L.P.! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Walton)

[xix] youtube.com/watch?v=-Xic-CHInek

[xx] rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-vertigo-1958

[xxi] Obverse to this, at times it seems miraculous that community exists at all – that we can, for example, organize the orderly collection of rubbish . . .

[xxii] Come in under the shadow of this red rock – line 26 of T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland is most directly invoked by the moment towards the end of the film, 01:36:47, when Daria in the wasteland of the Boulder house, does literally that

[xxiii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_90

[xxiv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land

[xxv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood

[xxvi] This fascinating piece is about Anna Halprin’s dance deck. Anna Halprin was Daria’s real-life mother. She died at the age of 100 in May 2021. https://flash—art.com/2020/05/anna-   halprins-dance-deck/

[xxvii] youtube.com/watch?v=AzZr_GRz6kQ

[xxviii] Daria’s friend, James Patterson, is considered to be based on Mel Lyman of the Fort Hill Community near Boston

[xxix]  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066601/trivia/?item=tr0772643

[xxx]  See this tragic piece: madinamerica.com/2025/09/fifty-years-of-grief/

[xxxi] maninbetweenthemoon.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/donnie-darko-and-gretchens-influence/

[xxxii] internationaltimes.it/donnie-darko-a-digression-on-universality-and-inevitable-nostalgia/

[xxxiii] Ibid: theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/23/zabriskie-point-review-michelangelo-antonioni

[xxxiv] billybobsparlour.com/diner/ 

[xxxv] youtube.com/watch?v=HZjZbJuhPAo

[xxxvi] See the Billy Liar (1963) reference and note: internationaltimes.it/things-behind-the-sun-a-digression-on-memory-trauma-and-mystery/

[xxxvii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Sutherland

[xxxviii] theartnewspaper.com/2016/01/08/an-unconventional-pastoralist-on-samuel-palmer

[xxxix]  How you see Sutherland’s reimagining of West Wales (or Antonioni’s films), is perhaps down to your own temperament – “with delight or with horror, as with the taste of bittersweet fruit” – a phrase the artist once used about reactions to his work in a TV documentary

[xl] Some commentators view Sutherland’s early Welsh landscapes as by far his best work – when in a sense he was carried away by the genius loci or spirit of the place

[xli] Designed by Hiram Hudson Benedict for Carl Hovgaard and situated 34 miles north of Phoenix

[xlii]  To quote an excellent article, sadly not found until I’d virtually finished: “The desert around Phoenix today is filled with one suburb after another, but what Rod Taylor glimpses from the terrace of Boulder Reign is merely a mirage, a memory of the future. Today, a brief virtual tour on Google Earth around these coordinates confirms that this location has turned into just what the Sunny Dunes company had dreamed of.”  See zabriskie+point%3a+the+metaphysical+pop+of+michelangelo+antonioni+dr.+joël+mestre-froissard

[xliii]  At 01:38:18-19 her reflection briefly merges with the older Native American woman

[xliv] Ibid – see note xxi above

[xlv] hilton.com/en/hotels/phxrsqq-boulders-resort-and-spa-scottsdale/

[xlvi] youtube.com/watch?v=bJsW6ta4X8o

[xlvii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site

[xlviii]  The Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site) “is located very close to Death Valley National Park, with the southern boundary of the test site situated less than 50 miles from the park”

[xlix]  A rerecording of Careful With That Axe, Eugene youtube.com/watch?v=tMpGdG27K9o

[l] internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-8/

[li] wassilykandinsky.net/work-55.php

[lii]   End of A Detour to Avoid Tragedy (2025, L W Freiesleben, unpublished)

[liii] Ibid – see note vi above

[liv] A paraphrasing from pages 41-2 of Maze End (2013, L W Freiesleben, unpublished)

[lv] According to IMDb imdb.com/title/tt0066601/trivia/?item=tr0772643 “Antonini’s original ending was a shot of an airplane sky-writing the phrase “Fuck You, America,” which was cut by MGM president Louis F. Polk.” This seems out of character, unless Antonioni did it as an (expensive) joke?

[lvi] In works such as Pennies from Heaven (TV Mini Series 1978-79) and Blue Velvet (1986)

[lvii]  With the internet, so much information is not to be trusted that I hesitate to expand on this. It appears that MGM commissioned Roy Orbison (with Mike Curb and Roger Christian) to write the song for the end credits rather than it being Antonioni’s choice. Since Orbison was under contract to MGM from 1965 to 1973, this would not presumably have been difficult. It was not included on the official soundtrack album

Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben · 1 Comment

Blackheath

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN takes a psychogeographic trip through south London

Nobody wanted proper light they want to be in the dark, they liked it, they liked

the little cupboards.  To live a story written in invisible ink, painted in

abstract arcs, but atmospheric, poignant, calm, devastating . . .  Perhaps this

could never happen except in some strange half-apprehension inside?

Hurtling the elevated course[i]

viaducts arching forwards

headlong,

cable-ducting streaming a frantic pulse

while gantries blink at signals vanishing 

gaps before speech

no time to question

twelve tracks in unison, dividing, merging,

aimed reckless

– a geometric exaltation –

at the sharp radius, weed-ragged triangle

of Borough Market Junction

(slow thunder amongst the attics),

braking will have its moment, but now is not it,

now is acceleration,

exploding through the jumbled visual inundation

of miraculous panoramas vaunting the compass

to praise and shun

from slum to gentrification’s skyward balconies

skewed bridges over stalled clutter

horns accusing each other  

St. James’ Bermondsey[ii] – foregrounded – is granted time,

Tower Bridge Road is not.

Scaling steel and dazzle of glass, mirror and kaleidoscope

the solid eras from which they took insolent flight,

splintering visions into the grey-green river’s tidal swell.

Cannon Street or Charing cross . . . default to London Bridge:

this sublime chaos has been overripe for a century,

between the essence of specific words

changing with the hour

the light, the region of Europa, the confident stairways.

Did the bombing try to neaten things or only add another density?

Followed by two or three decades of hopefulness[iii]

(in retrospect overstated, deluded),

soon came the point where things went subtly

yet more incurably wrong. 

More than anything, landscape had always given him freedom. Uninsistent.

It had no care for the human world.

All that dialogue, phrasing, signature, soundwave, all that need and frustration:

it made no impression. It missed almost everything.

Censor the didactic rant to puzzle on the outpourings of runic graffiti

ipton’s Tea, the finest the world produces

disrupting or expanding Deptford Broadway

bloated Arabian Nights or a portal to secret cults

conspiracy conflations overrunning all others

horror sunflowers with erotic intent

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik[iv] is not the genre

nor boombox cars racing their decibels

no wardrobes or courtyards conceal the past

for the hangars of wire are all a-rattle with nothing 

nothing visible

and the indulgence expanding from self-control,

intensifying experience to give a purpose,

rings artificial,

yet undoubtably the ancient and the medieval

exhale through every area of wood or raven black

and transitory 21st century towers alike suggest demise and the diagonal

upon which the air itself will carry their dust

their stone tapes[v] into the clouds and colours

as though history is more than dead structures and the fabrications of books

is rather the ether itself (as some claim love is truth and truth is love)

behind and above all terminal, worn out, buzzing industry

this daily to and fro of mindlessness

the impatient global death-wish.

Take Courage at the Amersham Arms by the double red lines:

I did and I didn’t – no alcohol passed my lips

chalk on the wet wood around the shadow of alphabets

all of these corrections

and all of these failings[vi]

echo from the mesh fence over New Cross station

expectant platforms freed from rush hour below

looking south to Hastings (theoretically),

taste the wash of the tide and the rush of shingle

briefly fade the queue of danger lights shining on bin bags

the pierce of brakes . . .

what first impressions from a precarious pushchair!

boys will be . . . what we teach them to be[vii],

as this mental brass rubbing, struggles corridors into distances

angles waking from the dormant

tries staves to support a cloven harmony.

Obviously, it wasn’t good to have all this contempt. It wasn’t kind.

Even to wish for a magic wand to wave up another life . . .

the lodge house on a disused drive . . .

Only he would ever open the gates between the trees. High ornate gates that would

symbolically exclude or welcome –

if occasionally he felt expansive towards the outside world.

Roadworks now upon the winding hill

funnel the yellow box junction overlooked

by that endless fight of George and Dragon

good versus evil or more complex alchemy?[viii]

From a smile to the left, other soundscapes flow

reducing plastic vehicles to a whispering haze

mind-manacled time zones intersect and cancel

hint forms, images, prospects

even narrative

from tilted rooms fumed with exhaust

from fenced corridors under bamboo screen and radar dish,

stunted palms and arrowslit windows

from country villas stranded in their rowdy future

dilapidated, behind railing and creeper

preceding 40s flats . . . perhaps? (they have a rectilinear austerity).

The projection may be drab 

but climbing Blackheath Hill toward the grass, drought-widening common 

its balconies are not stale,

filled with town and country,

their musics drift above the heavy traffic

the stop and start of hybrid buses

the slant of dreams and aspirations in many languages . . .

“If you can’t satisfy yourself, how can you satisfy anyone else?” runs the wise phrase,

the target of self-knowledge, bow and arrow, individualist parade.

The only trouble being: who but the ignorant, the arrogant or the lucky, can ever

satisfy themselves?

Higher, as the plateau begins to break,

wooded commons buffer zones of peace

where red shuttered bays remember green wartime garages,

until a siren sounds from 80 years past

loud enough to wake Wat Tyler[ix] from his abysmal mooring

reduced to a road sign,

loud enough to date other more recent subjectivities

garnered from artists, writers and characters who preferred art to living,

half-dead or lost, fascinated perhaps 

and wishing to stay that way –

forgetting that at its most vivid, art is life multiplied

or aware that such a level or spiritual leap[x], is too great a risk or challenge

and prudence often worse than a toxin.

Gestures and beauty gone –

You had your chance

and mine is nearly done

there is never finally any way to turn

but take port duty free on the link span[xi].

Is history the attempt of spirit to conquer matter[xii]

or no more than an accretion of grime?

something we should try to learn from but forget,

the circles through which we overlap or not . . .

our one-way flow with no option but to follow

– or a topological map with infinite directions and choice?

Here, the country church[xiii]

invisible tock upon the bookshelves . . .

red bus through the trees and fences that reach backwards and block

all diagonal pursuit

no sleep ever seems just

only a pause between enigmas

unless you switch off to it all and dream of Wales, or a remote coast

or a vineyard in Chile  

as if the dream were all.

That dream could be the dream of the lodge, off the map, disused, forgotten,

but self-sufficient – as in the end we must all become, unless (or even if) we can

rekindle love. Our own fracture is enough, only the landscape or the lover can heal,

not the peer group or the distant friend.

Once it becomes impossible to tolerate life as it is, there is only the light inside. 

The gates opened into woodland sun and shade.

All human drivel died between the avenues

all ambition drowned on the unspoilt riverbanks which followed.

And through the lines, words, shapes, the movement arose,

becoming tastes and notes and colours.

At New Cross station, Sutherland[xiv] asked “Do you think I’ll ever be an artist?”

This was the late 1920s – before the primeval incursion of Pembrokeshire

shattered his mould,

“Or shall I get my father to find me some other kind of work?”

Do such assumptions, signifying class structure, still remain?

Should I have been a meter reader[xv], musing on life’s paradox as I walked my round . . .

never troubling to scrawl any of it down,

never disturb the peace

for anything beyond style or template originality may be too cruel.

Was post-war optimism also when culture began to slither more generally trivial,

relaxed too far?

or can such impressions be blamed on the inevitable drought,

the scrap to maintain one’s personality in the face of the world? . . .

However –

since the developed temperament and will

can banish or dialectically justify all negative reality,

or dissolve material into metaphysical

today’s dull light is more than enough to make us content

avoiding the fairground and the ever-flashing blue lights

of ambulance and fuzz

as we walk, expecting rain, flippant but uplifted,

crossing the parched August space of

Blackheath.

NOTES

[i]    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_%E2%80%93_Greenwich_Railway_Viaduct

[ii]    Neo-classical. This image seems to exaggerate both the height of the viaducts and the closeness of St. James’ Church to the railway: blackcablondon.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/near-bermondsey-church.jpg

[iii]   From 1945 – 1975: arguably the maximum period of post-war hope – during which (for one example) ecological concerns were fully realised but insufficiently acted upon. During which, global corporations became too powerful and greed became a virtue.

[iv]  Both the music and specifically (in the line above this one), Dorothea Tanning’s painting of 1943: https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/64/

[v] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069316/  1972 British television horror drama film written by Nigel Kneale.

[vi] https://genius.com/Songs-ohia-travels-in-constants-lyrics  (paraphrased) lyrics written and performed by Jason Molina: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcNpD1YyoI&list=RDbTcNpD1YyoI&start_radio=1  at 12.46 – 13.39

[vii] Slogan on a screen or billboard?  [visible but small in the top right of the roadworks photo –21st August 2025]

[viii] From https://brill.com/view/journals/rt/13/2/article-p195_4.xml  :

“It is the purpose of this paper to interpret the legend of St. George and the Dragon in terms of alchemical symbolism. While the victory of the Christian hero over the Dragon is traditionally interpreted as symbolic of the triumph of good over evil, it is argued that both combatants represent the four alchemical elements: air, water, earth and fire. Instead of a duel of opposites their combat transmutes the coiled-up energy of the dragon into solar light, which manifests as the beautiful princess of the myth. The conclusion is drawn that there is a dialectical movement of force in the battle between St. George and the dragon. The hero releases the antithetical power of the dense, dark matter symbolised by the dragon so that the elements of a polarity do not remain contrasted but are resolved creatively.”

[ix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Tyler

[x] Søren Kierkegaard et al

[xi] Link Span, BTF film of 1956, directed by Michael Clarke. See: www.imdb.com/title/tt1754135/  “This documentary from British Transport Films, follows 24 hours in the life of three British Railways Channel ferry services.”

[xii]  Colin Wilson paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee in Religion and the Rebel (1957) reprinted by Aristeia Press in 2017, page 130.

[xiii] Charlton village is the one here of many.

[xiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Sutherland  While Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire landscapes may not be “realistic”, personally, I wouldn’t think of them generally as “surreal” – which word to me indicates an element of attitude, even a degree of literary willing, more evident in (for example), Paul Nash’s gently surrealist, Landscape from a Dream, or in Dorothea Tanning’s, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tanning-eine-kleine-nachtmusik-t07346

Sutherland’s best Pembrokeshire work celebrates the mystery and reveals the hidden power and primeval qualities of the landscape. However, I can see how, given that his landscapes are often ‘more real than reality’, this can easily be associated with surrealism, and at times he does utilize a more surreal approach. In fact, it could be argued that the most relevant aspect of surrealism, is not the exaggerated drama of melting watches and so on, but simply an ability or a moment in which one sees and notices things more vividly. Walking through a suburb of Heysham yesterday, gradually moving into a heightened sense of seeing, I was reminded how ‘surreal’ so many houses and gardens can look in bright daylight, the layout of shrubs and pots, the window surrounds and porches etc – all those aspects of daily life it is so easy to take for granted or disregard. Down on the prom, I was reminded of Paul Nash’s short essay Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism published in The Architectural Review (Volume LXXIX, April 1936, pp. 161-4). Nash himself distinguished between the work of artists belonging to a Surrealist group, distinguishing their work by a capital ‘S’, and “artworks, situations, objects or locations that have a dreamlike character or incongruous settings that evoke disquiet or the uncanny. These, he describes, as surreal with a small ‘s’.” See: www.paulnashdorset.co.uk/timeline/1936#

[xv] https://internationaltimes.it/?s=meter-reader  Obituary for my father, 2024.