Red Desert (film)
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''Red Desert'' () is a 1964
psychological drama Psychological drama, or psychodrama, is a Genre, subgenre of Drama (film and television), drama and psychological fiction literatures that generally focuses upon the emotional, mental, and psychological development of the protagonists and other c ...
film directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni Michelangelo Antonioni ( ; ; 29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and editor. He is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents", ''L'Avventura'' (1960), ''La Notte'' (1961), and '' ...
and starring
Monica Vitti Maria Luisa Ceciarelli (3 November 1931 – 2 February 2022), known professionally as Monica Vitti, was an Italian actress who starred in several award-winning films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni during the 1960s. She appeared with Marcel ...
and
Richard Harris Richard St John Francis Harris (1 October 1930 – 25 October 2002) was an Irish actor and singer. Having studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he rose to prominence as an icon of the British New Wave. He received numerous a ...
. Written by Antonioni and
Tonino Guerra Antonio "Tonino" Guerra (16 March 1920 – 21 March 2012) was an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos, and Fede ...
, it was Antonioni's first
color film Color (or colour in Commonwealth English; see spelling differences) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object's light absorp ...
. Set in
Northern Italy Northern Italy (, , ) is a geographical and cultural region in the northern part of Italy. The Italian National Institute of Statistics defines the region as encompassing the four Northwest Italy, northwestern Regions of Italy, regions of Piedmo ...
, the story follows a troubled woman who is unable to adapt to her environment after an automobile accident. ''Red Desert'' was awarded the
Golden Lion The Golden Lion () is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is regarded as one of the film industry's most prestigious and distinguished prizes. In 1970, a ...
at the 25th Venice International Film Festival in 1964. It has received acclaim from critics. This was the last in a series of four films he made with Vitti between 1959 and 1964, preceded by ''
L'Avventura ''L'Avventura'' () is a 1960 drama film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Developed from a story by Antonioni with co-writers Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra, the film is about the disappearance of a young woman ( Lea Massari) during a boat ...
'' (1960), '' La Notte'' (1961), and ''
L'Eclisse ''L'Eclisse'' () is a 1962 romantic drama film co-written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, with Francisco Rabal, Lilla Brignone, and Louis Seigner. Filmed on location in Rome and Verona, the story ...
'' (1962).


Plot

In
Ravenna Ravenna ( ; , also ; ) is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. It was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century until its Fall of Rome, collapse in 476, after which ...
, Italy, Giuliana is walking with her young son, Valerio, towards the petrochemical plant managed by her husband, Ugo. Passing workers who are on strike, Giuliana nervously and impulsively buys a half-eaten sandwich from one of the workers. They are surrounded by strange industrial structures and debris that create inhuman images and sounds. Inside the plant, Ugo is speaking with a visiting business associate, Corrado Zeller, who is looking to recruit workers for an industrial operation in
Patagonia Patagonia () is a geographical region that includes parts of Argentina and Chile at the southern end of South America. The region includes the southern section of the Andes mountain chain with lakes, fjords, temperate rainforests, and glaciers ...
, Argentina. Ugo and Corrado converse comfortably in the noisy factory when Giuliana arrives. Ugo introduces Corrado to Giuliana who departs to wait in Ugo's office. Ugo later tells Corrado that his wife had a recent auto accident, and though she was physically unharmed, she has been mentally unwell. That night in their apartment, Giuliana becomes highly agitated and fearful over a dream she had about sinking into quicksand. Ugo is unable to calm her or understand what she is experiencing. Corrado visits Giuliana at an empty shop she is planning to open and discusses his life and the restless nature of his existence. She accompanies him to
Ferrara Ferrara (; ; ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) in Emilia-Romagna, Northern Italy, capital of the province of Ferrara. it had 132,009 inhabitants. It is situated northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main ...
on one of his worker recruitment drives, and she indirectly reveals details about her mental state. She tells him that when she was in the hospital, she met a young female patient who was advised by her doctors to find someone or something to love. She speaks of the young woman feeling like there was "no ground beneath her, like she was sliding down a slope, sinking, always on the verge of drowning." They travel to a radio observatory in
Medicina Medicina ( Bolognese: ; Eastern Bolognese: ) is an Italian ''comune'' with c. 16,000 inhabitants in the Metropolitan City of Bologna, part of the region of Emilia-Romagna. Name The origins of its name (which in Italian means "medicine") are quit ...
, where Corrado hopes to recruit a top worker. Surrounded by cold industrial architecture, Giuliana seems lost in her loneliness and isolation. The following weekend, Giuliana, Ugo, and Corrado are walking beside a polluted estuary when they meet with another couple, Max and Linda, and together they drive to a small riverside shack at Porto Corsini where they meet Emilia. There, they engage in trivial small talk filled with jokes, role-playing, and sexual innuendo. Giuliana seems to find temporary solace in these mindless distractions. In a dense fog, a mysterious ship docks directly outside their shack. During their conversations, Corrado and Giuliana have grown closer, and he shows interest and sympathy for her. When a doctor arrives to board the ship, Giuliana, seeing that the ship is now quarantined because of an infectious disease, rushes off in a state of panic, nearly driving off the pier. Some time later, Ugo leaves on a business trip, and Giuliana spends more time with Corrado, revealing more about her anxieties. One day, Valerio becomes suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. Fearing he has contracted polio, Giuliana tries to comfort him with a story about a young girl who lives on an island and swims off a beach at an isolated cove. The girl is at home with her surroundings, but after a mysterious sailing ship approaches offshore, all the rocks of the cove seem to come alive and sing to her in one voice. Soon afterwards, Giuliana discovers that Valerio was only pretending to be paralyzed. Unable to imagine why her son would do such a cruel thing, Giuliana's sense of loneliness and isolation returns. Desperate to end her inner turmoil, Giuliana goes to Corrado's room. Giuliana is distraught and begins to disrobe. Initially she resists Corrado's advances, but they eventually have sex. The intimacy, however, does little to relieve Giuliana's sense of isolation. Corrado drives Giuliana to her empty shop, where she remarks that there is something "terrible" about reality. Later, Giuliana wanders to a dockside ship where she meets a Turkish sailor and asks if the ship takes passengers. She tries to communicate her feelings to him, but he cannot understand her words. Acknowledging the reality of her isolation, she says, "We are all separate." Later in the daytime, Giuliana is walking with her son near Ugo's plant. Valerio notices a nearby smokestack emitting poisonous yellow smoke and wonders if birds are being killed by the toxic emissions. Giuliana tells him that the birds have learned not to fly near the smoke. The two then walk away.


Cast

*
Monica Vitti Maria Luisa Ceciarelli (3 November 1931 – 2 February 2022), known professionally as Monica Vitti, was an Italian actress who starred in several award-winning films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni during the 1960s. She appeared with Marcel ...
as Giuliana *
Richard Harris Richard St John Francis Harris (1 October 1930 – 25 October 2002) was an Irish actor and singer. Having studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he rose to prominence as an icon of the British New Wave. He received numerous a ...
as Corrado Zeller * Carlo Chionetti as Ugo * Xenia Valderi as Linda * Rita Renoir as Emilia * Lili Rheims as Mario's wife * Aldo Grotti as Max * Valerio Bartoleschi as Giuliana's son * Emanuela Paola Carboni as girl in fable * Giuliano Missirini as Mario


Themes

Antonioni dismissed simple interpretations of the film as a condemnation of industrialism, saying:


Production


Background

The working title of the film was ''Celeste e verde'' (''Sky blue and green''). The film is set in the industrial area of 1960s
Ravenna Ravenna ( ; , also ; ) is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. It was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century until its Fall of Rome, collapse in 476, after which ...
with sprawling new post World War Two factories, industrial machinery and a much polluted river valley. The cinematography is highlighted by pastel colors with flowing white smoke and fog. The
sound design Sound design is the art and practice of creating auditory elements of media. It involves specifying, acquiring and creating audio using production techniques and equipment or software. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including filmmaking ...
blends a foley of industrial and urban sounds with ghostly ship horns and an abstract
electronic music Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music ...
score by Gelmetti. This was Antonioni's first colour film, which the director said he wanted to shoot like a painting on a canvas: As he would do in later film productions, Antonioni went to great lengths in reaching this goal, such as having trees and grass painted white or grey to fit his take on an urban landscape.
Andrew Sarris Andrew Sarris (October 31, 1928 – June 20, 2012) was an American film critic. He was a leading proponent of the auteur theory of film criticism. Early life Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Kat ...
called the red hued pipes and railings "the architecture of anxiety: the reds and blues exclaim as much as they explain". Another of ''Red Desert'' innovations is extensive use of the telephoto and zoom lenses, even in shots where the actor stands relatively close to the camera. Antonioni wrote, "I worked a lot in ''Il deserto rosso'' with the zoom lens to try and get two dimensional effect, to diminish the distance between people and objects, make them seem flattened against each other. Such flattening contributes to the sense of psychological oppression: Giuliana in several shots seems pinned against the wall and the bars between couples seem part of their body."


Filming locations

Shooting took place in Incir De Paolis Studios, Rome, Lazio, Italy (studio);
Ravenna Ravenna ( ; , also ; ) is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. It was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century until its Fall of Rome, collapse in 476, after which ...
, Emilia-Romagna, Italy;
Sardinia Sardinia ( ; ; ) is the Mediterranean islands#By area, second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, and one of the Regions of Italy, twenty regions of Italy. It is located west of the Italian Peninsula, north of Tunisia an ...
, Italy; and Budelli, in northern Sardinia, Italy.


Critical reception

In 1965, a reviewer for ''
Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
'' lauded ''Red Desert'' as "at once the most beautiful, the most simple and the most daring film yet made by" Antonioni, and stated that the director "shows a painterly approach to each frame". In 1990,
Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum (born February 27, 1943) is an American film critic and author. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for '' The Chicago Reader'' from 1987 to 2008. He has published and edited numerous books about cinema and has contributed to ...
praised the director's "eerie, memorable work with the industrial shapes and colors that surround iuliana she walks through a science fiction landscape dotted with structures that are both disorienting and full of possibilities." In ''
The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...
'' in 2012,
Robbie Collin Robbie Collin is a British film critic. Collin studied aesthetics and the philosophy of film at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He edited the university's student newspaper, '' The Saint''. Collin has been the chief film critic at ''The ...
wrote that Antonioni's "bold, modernist angles and thrillingly innovative use of colour (he painted trees and grass to tone with the industrial landscape) make every frame a work of art". Richard Brody of ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'' viewed the approach to color as "greatly responsible for the film's emotional and intellectual power" and argued, "The characters in his movies seem thin because their environment is developed so thickly; yet that environment, he suggests, is, though exterior to them, an inextricable part of them." The Japanese filmmaker
Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker who List of works by Akira Kurosawa, directed 30 feature films in a career spanning six decades. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the History of film, history of cinema ...
cited ''Red Desert'' as one of his favorite films.


References


Bibliography

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External links

* *
''Red Desert: In This World''
– an essay by Mark Le Fanu at
The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home video, home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of art film, arth ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Red Desert 1964 films 1964 drama films 1960s French films 1960s Italian films 1960s Italian-language films 1960s psychological drama films Films about adultery in Italy Films about depression Films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni Films produced by Angelo Rizzoli Films scored by Giovanni Fusco Films set in Emilia-Romagna Films shot in Emilia-Romagna Films shot in Rome Films shot in Sardinia Films with screenplays by Tonino Guerra French psychological drama films Golden Lion winners Italian psychological drama films Italian-language drama films Italian-language French films