Red Desert (film)

Red Desert
Original Italian film poster
Directed by	Michelangelo Antonioni
Written by	Michelangelo Antonioni Tonino Guerra
Produced by	Antonio Cervi
Starring	Monica Vitti Richard Harris
Cinematography	Carlo Di Palma
Edited by	Eraldo Da Roma
Music by	Giovanni Fusco Vittorio Gelmetti Carlo Savina
Distributed by	Rizzoli (USA)
Release dates	4 September 1964 (premiere at VFF) 8 February 1965
Running time	120 minutes
Country	Italy/France
Language	Italian

Red Desert (Template:Lang-it) is a 1964 Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Monica Vitti with Richard Harris. Written by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, the film is about a woman trying to survive in the modern world of cultural neurosis and existential doubt. "Red Desert," Antonioni's first color film, is renowned for stunningly colored industrial landscapes which express the unease, alienation, and vivid perceptions of the main character. The working title was Celeste e verde (Sky blue and green). Il deserto rosso was awarded the Golden Lion at the 25th Venice Film Festival in 1964. This was the last in a series of four films he made with Vitti between 1959 and 1964, preceded by L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962).

Plot

In Ravenna, Italy, Giuliana (Monica Vitti) 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 purchases a half-eaten sandwich from one of the workers. They are surrounded by strange industrial structures and debris that create grotesque and inhuman images and sounds. Inside the plant, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) is talking with a visiting business associate, Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), who is looking to recruit workers for an industrial operation in Patagonia, Argentina. Ugo and Corrado converse comfortably in the noisy factory. Ugo tells Corrado that his wife, Giuliana, had a recent auto accident, and though she was physically unhurt, she has not been right mentally. That night in their apartment, Giuliana becomes highly agitated and fearful over a dream she had about sinking in quicksand. Ugo is unable to calm her or understand what she's experiencing.

Attracted to Giuliana, Corrado visits her at an empty shop she's planning to open and talks about his life and the restless nature of his existence. She accompanies him to Ferrara 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 woman patient who was advised by her doctors to find someone or something to love—a husband, a son, a job, even a dog. 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 radar installation facility in Medicina, 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 where they meet up with another couple, Max and Linda, and together they drive to a small riverside shack at Porto Corsini where they meet Emilia. They spend time in the shack engaged in trivial small talk filled with jokes, role-playing, and sexual innuendo. Giuliana seems to find temporary solace in these mindless distractions. A mysterious ship docks directly outside their shack, and as she looks out to the open sea, Giuliana confides to Corrado, "I can't look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what's happening on land." During their conversations, Corrado and Giuliana have grown closer, and he shows interest and sympathy for her. Like Giuliana, Corrado is also alienated, but he is better adapted to and accepting of his environment, telling her, "You wonder what to look at; I wonder how to live." When a doctor arrives to board the ship, Giuliana, seeing that the ship is now quarantined due to an infectious disease, rushes off in a state of panic. Her unwillingness to stay, or to return to the shack to retrieve the purse she left behind, underscores her state of alienation from the others.

Sometime later, Ugo leaves on a business trip, and Giuliana spends more time with Corrado, revealing more about her anxieties. One day she discovers that her son has apparently become suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. Fearing he has contracted polio, Giuliana tries to comfort her son 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. Soonafter, Giuliana discovers to her shock that Valerio was only pretending to be paralyzed. Unable to imagine why her son would do such a cruel thing, Guiliana's sense of loneliness and isolation returns.

Desperate to end her inner turmoil, Giuliana goes to Corrado's apartment where he tries to force his affections on her. Initially resisting Corrado's advances, Giuliana eventually accepts his affections, and the two make love in his bed. The intimacy, however, does little to relieve Giuliana's sense of isolation. The next day, a distraught Giuliana leaves Corrado and wanders to a dockside ship where she meets a foreign sailor and 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." At that point, Giuliana seems to be completely alone and at her lowest state.

Sometime later, Giuliana is again walking with her son near her husband'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 poisonous yellow smoke.

Cast

• Monica Vitti as Giuliana
• Richard Harris as Corrado Zeller
• Carlo Chionetti as Ugo
• Xenia Valderi as Linda
• Rita Renoir as Emilia
• Lili Rheims as Telescope operator's wife
• Aldo Grotti as Max
• Valerio Bartoleschi as Giuliana's son
• Emanuela Paola Carboni as Girl in fable
• Giuliano Missirini as Radio telescope operator

Production

Cinematography

File:Monicavitti reddesert.jpg

Vitti and the colour red in Il deserto rosso (1964)

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.

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 called the red hued pipes and railings "the architecture of anxiety: the reds and blues exclaim as much as they explain".

Filming locations

• Incir De Paolis Studios, Rome, Lazio, Italy (studio)
• Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
• Sardinia, Italy

Meaning

Screenshot from the film: "My intention..." said Antonioni, "was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful."

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.

References

Citations

Bibliography

• Arrowsmith, William (1995). Ted Perry (ed.). Antonioni: The Poet of Images. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509270-7.
• Brunette, Peter (1998). The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38992-1.
• Chatman, Seymour (1985). Antonioni: The Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-05341-0.

External links

• Red Desert at IMDb
• Red Desert at Rotten Tomatoes
• Review of DVD of Red Desert
• Fanu, Mark Le. "Red Desert: In This World". Criterion Collection. Retrieved 17 April 2012.