VANISHING POINT
US, 1972, 98 minutes, Colour.
Barry Newman, Dean Jagger.
Directed by Richard L. Sarafian.
Vanishing Point looks like a middle-aged man's Easy Rider, with the car as the vehicle on the American highway instead of the motorbike. The film is memorable in its driving sequences but conveys its message in a contrived way. However, despite this, the film and its points remain in the mind and are worth discussing.
We never really get to know the hero. Perhaps he is typical of the names and personalities that we read about in the newspapers, who flash into our consciousness for a couple of days, whom we think we get to know and then are gone. The hero is a man disillusioned by his time and country and we follow him along the road encountering many facets of the U.S. way of life from the police out to get him to 'Super-Soul', a blind black disc jockey who communes with him and tries to immortalise him as a hero.
As a document of the U.S. in the late 60's there are many limitations in the film. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing and discussing, probably seeming better afterwards than during. Barry Newman does not get much of a chance to be a character (as he did in Sidney J. Furie's The Lawyer). Richard L. Sarafian also directed Run Wild, Run Free and Man in the Wilderness.
1. What did the title mean?
2. Was the structure of the film effective - the major flashback to the immediately preceding events, the flashbacks within this, the captions of place and precise time, the gradual build-up of information about Kowalski? What dramatic effect did it have? How did it arouse audience curiosity and expectation?
3. Was Kowalski portrayed as a hero? How?
4. What kind of man was he - did the audience receive enough information about him as a driver, soldier, policeman, delivery driver? Was he a sympathetic person? Sow 'ordinary' was he?
5. Super- Soul spoke of Kowalski as the last free spirit. What was Kowalski supposed to symbolise? How? Did this come across effectively in the film's techniques?
6. Why did Kowalski drive as he did? What place did despair, frustration, daring, drugs play in this final drive?
7. What was the importance of speed in the film? Was it, in itself, a completely liberating experience or was it meant to be symbolic of liberating factors?
8. What vision of the U.S. of the early 70'e did the film offer - consider the desert, the languid pace of life, people’s curiosity, the role of radio (for soul-communication), the police, phones and telegraph, helicopters, blacks and whites, modern males, Jesus people, drugs, nudity and lack of inhibitions, death and, above all, the role, status and symbolism of the car?
9. What was the significance of the flashbacks - the races, the police interrogation, the beach scene? Did they tell enough about Kowalski and his reason for dropping out?
10. Were the police presented sympathetically at all? Why? Were they presented fairly?
11. What was the significance of the people he met on the road - the different police, the dragster, the girl at the service station, the old man of the desert, the Jesus Revivalists, the homosexual pair, the hippy with the bike, the nude rider, Super-Soul? Were they well integrated into the film or was it all too contrived and done in fashionable cliche-style?
12. What did the music - as well as style - add to the film?
13. Why did Kowalski smile before he killed himself? Why did he kill himself? Why was Super-Soul? silent and disappointed? What did Kowalski's death symbolise - for the U.S.? for humanity?
