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MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI’S ZABRISKIE POINT is often cited as one of the greatest follies made by a great filmmaker, but have any of those writers watched it lately? While its 1960s youth-culture-on-the-run-story, with echoes of Kent State (credited to Antonioni, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra and Claire Peploe) is often blunt and the acting wooden, it’s one of the most striking uses of light and space in a filmography built upon such concerns. Take the last scene alone, an explosive 10-minute fantasia of the end of consumerism. Sometimes I think it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, just for how it looks and sounds, and not even for any of its many meanings. You know Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry have seen it; there’s a shared understanding with Antonioni of objects and space, the concreteness of objects within not-fully occupied spaces. A character imagines a modernist house on a hill, and all its furnishings, exploding in extreme slow motion, detonating again and again. It maybe be one of the greatest fuck-you endings ever, but who’s the “fuck you” to? The audience in 1970? James Aubrey’s craven administration of MGM? The youth movement? Acquisitiveness itself? Narrative? Me when I saw it 22? You? Me watching it today? You seeing it this week? Someone who recalls their own flipbook of recollection of first exposure to images of fluttering destruction on 9/11? You can watch the closing scene here as well as the original trailer, “where a boy… and a girl…. meet… and touch… and blow their minds… Zabriskie Point… How you get there depends on where you’re at,” the amusingly dated promo goes. A folly, to be sure, but its photography, boldly colored and concrete, also borders on abstraction, a dislocated gaze upon practical and temporary things. Explosive. Cue the Floyd. [Ray Pride.] (Zabriskie Point shows at Siskel in Chicago June 29 at 6pm and July 1 at 3pm.)