Red Desert (film)
| Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) |
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 Original Italian film poster |
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| Directed by | Michelangelo Antonioni |
| Produced by | Antonio Cervi |
| Written by | Michelangelo Antonioni Tonino Guerra |
| Starring | Monica Vitti Richard Harris |
| Music by | Giovanni Fusco Vittorio Gelmetti Carlo Savina |
| Cinematography | Carlo Di Palma |
| Editing by | Eraldo Da Roma |
| Distributed by | Rizzoli (USA) |
| Release date(s) |  4 September 1964 (premiere at VFF) 8 February, 1965 |
| Running time | 120 min |
| Country | Italy/France |
| Language | Italian |
Red Desert (Italian: Il deserto rosso) is a 1964 Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, written by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra and starring Monica Vitti with Richard Harris. This was Antonioni's first color film. The working title was Celeste e verde (Sky blue and green).[1] Il deserto rosso was awarded the Golden Lion at the 25th Venice Film Festival in 1964. It is also sometimes noted as the last in a series of four films he made with Vitti over five years beginning in 1959 and ending in 1964, the three before being L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962).
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[edit] Plot
As the film opens, Giuliana (Vitti) has been released from the hospital after having attempted suicide. She lives with her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), director of a nationalized plant which is going through a strike, along with their young son. Giuliana feels estranged from her family and disconnected from the world. Ugo's friend Zeller (Richard Harris) comes to Ravenna to make a business deal and is drawn to her. Zeller may understand her troubles more than Ugo does, but this is not enough to sway Giuliana from her worries.
[edit] Cinematography
The film is set in the industrial area of 1960s Ravenna 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 blends a foley of industrial and urban sounds with ghostly ship horns and an electronic music score. This was Antonioni's first colour film, which the director said he wanted to shoot like a painting on a canvas:
| “ | I want to paint the film as one paints the canvas; I want to invent the colour relationships, and not limit myself to photographing only natural colours.[2] | ” |
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.[2] Andrew Sarris called the red hued pipes and railings "the architecture of anxiety: the reds and blues exclaim as much as they explain".[2]
[edit] Meaning
Although on one level Red Desert might be taken as a story about a harsh modern industrial culture to which only the neurotic Giuliana has awakened, Antonioni later said he wanted to show that industrial technology has a beauty of its own and that he had filmed a story about human adaptability, in that Giuliana
| “ | ...must confront her social environment. It's too simplistic to say - as many people have done - that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable... The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date.[2] | ” |
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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