Michelangelo Antonioni’s poetic chronicle of late ‘60’s American counter culture finds the hippy dream goes sour in this surreal desert odyssey about a man attempting to take leave from society.

Mark (Mark Frechette), an armed student radical who can't relate to people, groups, political factions or corporate interests, is on the run from the police. Stealing a small plane, he lights out for the stark beauty of Death Valley, where he meets Daria (Daria Halprin), a hippie chick with whom he has a sexual epiphany. However Daria is having an affair with Lee (Rod Taylor), a corporate real-estate exec, whose company, she belatedly grasps, is despoiling the desert with its bourgeois development. Beginning as a faux-documentary, this head-trip of a film mutates into a neo-western and embraces Euro-erotica along the way before climaxing as a sort of strident, slow-motion video-art blitzkrieg on consumer culture.

Accompanied by an iconic score by The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and Pink Floyd, Antonioni’s film perfectly captured a certain place and moment in history, and its central idea of not wanting a specially selected elite to be the mouthpiece of a nation remains brutally prescient even today. Don’t miss this restored cult classic of counter culture, otherwise like Captain America in Easy Rider, you really will have blown it man.

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