David D''Arcy on an award-winning short.

One of the discoveries at the San Francisco International Film Festival was an essay on an icon who barely had the 15 minutes of fame to be a shadow on the media record of his moment in history. Death Valley Superstar takes us back to Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni''s epic 1970 meditation on the American landscape and American culture at the height of the war in Vietnam, which is never mentioned in the film.

The male lead of the movie, inspired in part by a young man who stole an airplane for a joy ride in the desert and was gunned down by the police on his return, was Mark Frechette, who was "discovered" when he was spotted in a fight at a Boston bus stop. Death Valley Superstar is a 27-minute elegy to Frechette by Michael Yaroshevsky, a Russian living in Montreal. (Before showing at San Francisco, Death Valley Superstar premiered at the International Festival of Film on Art [FIFA] in Montreal.).

Posted by: dwhudson    Source

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