The Red Desert (Film Group Essay)

　

In 1960, Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’Avventura stunned critics and inaugurated revived international interest in Italian cinema. L’Avventura premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita from that same year signaled a renaissance in art films from Italy. For a decade, Antonioni was regarded as one of the world’s most important, and challenging film makers. His pictures characterize that period in the sixties when critics as diverse as Andrew Sarris, Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Susan Sontag recall that "there was a new masterpiece each week," a era of vibrant innovation and the golden age of "arthouse" cinema.

L’Avventura, a film that is genuinely eerie, beautiful and haunting, was unlike anything audiences and critics had seen before. At Cannes, the first showing of the picture was met by much booing and catcalls. But, after subsequent screenings, viewers came to acknowledge the film as a masterpiece and it won the Cannes jury prize with Kon Ichikawa’s sex comedy Kagi. (Fellini’s movie was awarded the "Palm d’Or.") Antonioni was hailed as a significant director whose films were major cinematic events. On the strength of this reputation, Antonioni was given a free hand to direct his next three films. Those pictures are La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962), and The Red Desert (Il Deserto rosso) (1964). The first two of these features, taken together with L’Avventura, are said to comprise a trilogy, exploring similar themes and employing an austere architectural mise-en-scene that virtually eliminated dramatic conflict and event from the narratives of these movies. The Red Desert is notable for being Antonioni’s first film made in color – many critics regard it as closely related to the preceding trilogy in style and content, to the extent that the 1964 picture is frequently regarded as a sort of addendum or appendix to the black and white films.

As early as 1940, writing for the Fascist film magazine Cinema, Antonioni predicted that technicolor films would supplant black and white pictures. In his 1940 essay, Antonioni imagines a young film-maker meeting with Samuel Goldwyn at MGM. The young man says that he wants to make a picture exploring color and the effect of colors on human emotions and action. In Antonioni’s fantasy,Samuel Goldwyn is not impressed and has the young man ejected from his office. The young director says: "Today’s audiences are tired of black-and-white. In the future only color will be acceptable and black and white pictures will be viewed as unendurable."

After the international success of The Red Desert, Antonioni was, in fact, offered work in Hollywood and, indeed, contracted with MGM, his old betes noire to make three pictures. These were Blowup (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Passenger (starring Jack Nicholson) released in 1975.

Antonioni suffered a stroke after making his last important film Identification of a Woman in 1982. (He had worked with Monica Vitti on his previous film The Mystery of Oberwald, an early example of a film shot entirely on high-definition video in 1980 and 1981). He continued to work on short films but was partially paralyzed and could not speak – fortunately for him, he had a young wife, 34 years junior to him, and she was able to assist him. With Wim Wenders as co-director, he completed In the Clouds in the late eighties. (Wenders is an example of a director intensely influenced by Antonioni – but, apparently, the collaboration between the two men was not a happy one; Wenders noted that he had been retained to "co-direct" the picture with Antonioni, but that the old man was very much in command of his faculties, capable of directing even though he was literally speechless, and, ultimately, cut almost all of the footage that Wenders’ shot.) In 1995, Jack Nicholson presented Antonioni with an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony. Nicholson asked Antonioni which American directors and films recently made he most admired. To everyone’s dismay, Antonioni visibly mouthed the word "none."

In 2000, Antonioni returned to Taormina in Sicily, the base of operations for the shooting of L’Avventura and traveled to the Eolian Islands where the girl vanishes in that film. Witnesses to this trip remarked on Antonioni’s physical toughness and fortitude in the face of difficult conditions.

Remarkably, Antonioni died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, July 30, 2007. He was 94. Bergman and Antonioni’s encounter in paradise was strained. Bergman regarded L’Avventura and La Notte as masterpieces but said that most of the director’s later films were overrated and boring.

Antonioni’s influence must not be underestimated. In my view, his style and technique for making movies has come to dominate the genre of international art films. Unlike the mercurial and perverse Godard, or the fundamentally traditional Bergman and Fellini, Antonioni’s trademark style is instantly recognizable and, problematically, readily imitated. Just about every prominent European filmmaker has made a pictures that appropriates stylistic devices and themes from Antonioni. And, in an important essay, the great film critic David Bordwell has shown that Antonioni’s stylistic devices are the signature of a specific genre – that is, the art film about alienation. Bordwell has demonstrated that Antonioni’s elliptical style, his long takes, and deliberate de-dramatization of action comprise characteristics of a genre just as surely as black streets reflecting neon in puddles or vistas of Monument Valley announce that a movie is film noir or a Western. I think a good argument can be made that Antonioni is the most influential serious film maker in the history of film as an art.

　

The Production of Il Deserto Rosso

The Red Desert was shot over a period of 19 weeks in the Winter of 1963 and 1964. The weather was cold and the production of the film was arduous. Antonioni made the picture in the industrial Po river delta, near Ravenna and at petrochemical plants located in that area. Monica Vitti, the film’s leading lady and a muse to Antonioni, was the director’s mistress at the time that the movie was shot. However, their relationship was strained and Vitti left Antonioni to initiate an affair with the film’s director of photography, Carlo di Palma before the picture was edited. Antonioni worked closely with Ms. Vitti in devising the screenplay (also written Tonino Guerra). Apparently, Vitti had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown in the months preceding the film’s production and she draws on that experience for her performance in the movie.

The film’s remarkable monochromatic color was accomplished by using blue filters over the camera lenses and by, literally, tinting the landscape with spray paint. Several examples of spray painted landscapes appear early in the film – the industrial debris that Vitti’s Giuliana sees when eating the roll was painted onto the canal-side detritus; similarly, the desolate street in Ravenna named after Dante Alighieri was spray-painted grey – this is obvious from the scene in which the street vendor roasting chestnuts offers produce, including apples, all colored a dreary and uniformly ashen grey. (In later scenes, a house has been painted entirely black and a grove of trees are also spray-painted black.)

Italian directors are effusive and Antonioni was no exception. He said that the film was conceived to demonstrate the birth of a "new man," a human being evolved to co-exist in harmony with vast, intimidating industrial facilities and high technology. (Antonioni answered Godard’s question about whether the robot attending on the little boy’s bedside was a good or bad thing by remarking: "It is a very good thing. The little boy will become used to living with science and scientific inventions and be well adapted for the future.") The Red Desert depicts the plight of a woman, Giuliana, who is unable to adapt to this future, someone who resists becoming a "new man." Like the Italian Futurists, Antonioni worshiped fast cars, airplanes, and machines – he declared the petrochemical plants belching fire and steam "far more beautiful" than the pine forests and swampy Po river marshes where these facilities were located. "The new laws of beauty does not lie with Nature," Antonioni declared describing the landscapes in the film, most of them examples of the "technological sublime." Human beings, Antonioni proclaimed, must adapt to this new environment or perish. How seriously we should take these kinds of proclamations, of course, is a question that the film poses. Like most great film makers, Antonioni’s images and editing, his use of music, and the design of his narrative, signifies meanings far more complex than his relatively simple-minded manifesto-like declarations about the movie. Indeed, the film’s esthetic, supposedly driven by Futurist principles, is, in fact, more akin to the Metaphysical School in Italian painting and art – the work of de Chirico with his enigmatic arcades, his towers and remote locomotives, the "mystery and melancholy" of his deserted and dreamlike streets. (And the color scheme in the film is highly influenced by the work of contemporary artists, the Catalan Antonio Tapies, and, most importantly, the still lives and cityscapes of the great Giorgio Morandi.)

　



Caution

An interpretive caveat may be in order: we perceive Antonioni’s "industrial sublime" through history now permeated with environmental catastrophes. In an era of global warming, after the Valdez disaster and the petrochemical pollution of the Gulf of Mexico, it may be difficult to grasp Antonioni’s ambivalence towards the clouds of toxin and the estuaries clogged with effluent in The Red Desert. But here are some facts to consider: Italians were delighted to discover large reserves of natural gas lurking under the marshes in the Po delta. This discovery in the mid-fifties played a vital role in Italy’s economic recovery from World War II. SARAM and INAC, the two big companies operating refineries in the Ravenna area, were highly respected and thought to be the engines of modernization in Italy. Joris Ivens was a radical left-wing film maker – he made The Spanish Earth, a famous documentary about the Civil War in Spain and, later, was invited to China by Mao where he shot several films. Ivens was hired by the Italian petrochemical industry in 1959 to make a documentary about the exploitation of natural gas reserves in the Po delta and Sicily – the film, which Ivens enthusiastically produced, is called Italy is not a Poor Country. Marxists saw the industrialization of Italy and its development of the petrochemical sector as a necessary pre-condition to the expansion of Communism in the country – you can’t have a Communist revolutions without an industrial army of workers. Indeed, the opening shots in the film depicting the strike, imagery that seems stranded in the movie and that leads to nothing in the narrative, articulate this theme. If a socialist regime is to be instituted in Italy this will occur only when the workers in industrial complexes such as those shown in the film’s opening develop class consciousness and organize. Like the dictatorship of the proletariat, a period of red terror preceding the institution of a classless society, the pollution enacted by the industrial complexes shown in the film represents a necessary byproduct of modernization – socialism can’t exist without workers; and socialism is dependent on industrial activities that (temporarily, it was thought) degrade the environment.

The soot-grey fields and debris-strewn river banks display a visionary desolation that Antonioni equated with certain forms of modern art. Antonioni was an admirer of the paintings of Jackson Pollock and some of the images in the film resemble that artist’s more monochromatic works. Antonioni felt that Abstract Expressionist art infected with anxiety, that this art showed the panic of human beings in the face of relentless modernity. He particularly admired Mark Rothko and wrote in 1958 that Rothko’s images expressed a "cosmic panic." Rothko reciprocated Antonioni’s admiration. He told Antonioni that he wished to give him a painting and the two men met at Rothko’s studio in 1964 when L’Eclisse was premiered in New York City. It’s not known exactly what happened – there may have been a quarrel; in any event, Antonioni doesn’t seem to have received the picture.

My point is that we must remember that there was a stage in Modernism, at least in Italy, that the kind of polluted vistas shown by the film were regarded as signs of economic vitality, opportunity, and, as Antonioni declared, landscapes suitable to a new kind of robust and liberated humanity.

　



An Example of Antonioni’s elliptical approach to narrative
About a half-hour into the film, Monica Vitti’s Giuliana walks the streets of Ravenna with Richard Harris’ Corrado. The two of them encounter a vendor and there is some discussion about "the live ones... costing more." This is puzzling to the viewer since the context of the discussion is not established. Suddenly, we see Giuliana startled, recoiling from something – she throws her hand up to her face and darts off-screen. In the next shot, we see her vanishing into a courtyard that seems to be forty or fifty feet away. Corrado starts to tell Giuliana about sea creatures in the ocean depths being "transparent". Giuliana says she doesn’t want to hear about that subject and that Corrado would be surprised to know the many things that frighten her.

This sequence is deliberately opaque and enigmatic. In the shooting script, Giuliana and Corrado see a vendor selling eels from a push-cart or truck. They approach and someone says that the live eels are more expensive than those already killed. A live eel is displayed and slips free of the vendor’s hand, falling to wriggle on the cobblestones. Giuliana is appalled and flees in fear. Corrado catches up with her in the courtyard adjacent to the vendor’s push-cart. Giuliana says that she has always been afraid of eels because they are "slippery and ugly". Corrado, then, makes his comment about "transparent" sea creatures to which Giuliana replies.

Clearly, the film is far more mysterious than the shooting script. Antonioni has edited out the explanatory narrative integument. What we see in the film is that something unknown startles Giuliana without warning – she responds viscerally, running away. The dialogue mentions something about life and death and commodifies those characteristics, putting a higher price on "living ones" – we are not told what kind of "living ones" are meant. Antonioni mystifies us: Giuliana’s crippling anxiety is not explained, not given an object; it is an emotional state that seems triggered by anything and nothing. The dialogue between the characters is clipped and seems to consist of non sequiturs; crucial copula are elided – we don’t know why Corrado suddenly mentions undersea creatures or how this comment should be taken. A narrative is truncated by a process of elimination into disconnected lyrical ejaculations – what began as dialogue is cut into a fragments of monologue that each character seems to be expressing to himself or herself.

Antonioni said that in L’Aventtura, he wrote and even shot a sequence in which the body of the young woman who disappearance engenders the films’ narrative is dragged out of the sea. But, of course, he cut that sequence from the finished film, thus, producing the haunting sense of enigma that is characteristic of the director’s most famous pictures.

　



Questions

Antonioni’s mature films are, often, strikingly beautiful and concern wealthy, attractive, and sybaritic characters. As in the work of Fellini, there are many parties, much carousing, and, frequently, the implication that the merely convivial is about to evolve into an orgy. But, despite these surface characteristics, at heart, Antonioni’s films are austere and puritanical. His important films insist upon the importance of questioning, the necessity to interrogate experience and the environment. This concern is programmatic to the movie that initiated Antonioni’s international fame, L’Avventura. In that movie, a beautiful young woman on a pleasure-cruise to islands off the coast of Sicily simply vanishes. For two hours, the characters search for her until, being merely mortal, they give up the quest and forget about her. In Antonioni’s eyes, the abandonment of the quest is the ultimate betrayal. Human virtue, in the modern world, is embodied in questioning and maintaining faith with those questions, never ceasing from questioning.

Martin Heidegger and other Continental philosophers posit questioning as central to retaining humanity in the modern, technological world. To act is to be, Existentialists maintained. But Antonioni’s films, in keeping with Heidegger’s interrogations of modernity and technology insist that human being is inextricably bound up in questioning. This idea is a variant on Descartes cogito ego sum – "to think is to be." The mode of thinking required by modernity is questioning.

Heidegger and others argue that all true questions, all interrogatories that are truly Fragenswuerdig, that is, things worthy of being questioned, are unanswerable. Significant questions can’t be glibly answered. Rather, they lead to more questions. Within this philosophical structure, the search is not for answers, but for better, more penetrating, questions. A valid questions opens a space in the world that otherwise presents itself to us as sleek, impenetrable, seamless, glistening, and self-evident. The space hollowed out in the self-evident world is a place for human beings to stand, a place where human being can be present. The question opens a space where human beings can stand in some relationship to the truth. This relationship can’t be characterized with any authenticity as "grasping" or "representing" the truth – rather, the relationship is defined as questioning, interrogating, a mental activity that opens a path for a motion toward more incisive and precise questions.

Antonioni presents modernity as unheimlich. The German word is typically translated as "uncanny" but literally means "un-homely." Giuliana is not "at home" in her world. She is surrounded by peculiar and inexplicable phenomena that she can’t comprehend. Antonioni’s soundtrack burps and wails and a female voice intones a strange melody that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere. Huge clouds of toxic fumes roll out of industrial facilities – why? What is the meaning of these eruptions of steam and fire? Periodically, ships that seem to be landlocked cruise across what appears to be dry land. The lanes of the city are strangely depopulated. Where have all the people gone? Are they in Patagonia or otherwise at the ends of the earth? People gaze off into space but we can’t see what they are looking at. Giuliana’s house seems built at the edge of a canal where ocean-going vessels dock. The house is singularly unheimlich – that is, not cosy nor comfortable; its furniture and furnishings seem purgatorially uncomfortable.

The film begins with a familiar gesture toward neo-realism, the cinematic school that is the basis for all post-war Italian cinema. We are at the locus classicus of neo-realism, the industrial strike. But what is the strike about? Why are the workers striking? A situation that lends itself to some sort of narrative is immediately abandoned – the strike is forgotten as the film proceeds. But the strike has a symbolic meaning.: a strike is intended to induce a kind of industrial paralysis – this paralysis is metaphorically linked to Giuliana’s inability to progress with respect to her mental illness and her child’s literal, if probably feigned, paralysis. Paralysis engulfs the world. In the face of strange and inexplicable phenomena, all these pipes and tubes designed for God-knows-what, these storms of fumes and off-screen noises that no one can explain, these spidery radio telescopes interrogating the center of the galaxy, no one can act. The ground is unstable. Abysses open up under your feet. Giuliana drives her car to the very end of the pier in the fog. At any moment, it seems that she might lunge off that pier or dive into the cold waters beneath the oil-drigging rig or, perhaps, simply throw herself through the window of a building.

Within the first few minutes of the film, the audience is confronted with this question: What is the matter with Giuliana? The protagonist is represented as desperately hungry at the most basic level – she buys a roll from one of the managers watching the arrest of a striking worker and, then, abandons her child to slink off into the wasteland to eat. In the context of Italian society, traditionally convivial with respect to food and eating, the image of Giuliana gobbling down the roll, alone, in the sooty, denuded wasteland is, perhaps, the most transgressive image presented by The Red Desert. This sequence raises the film’s central problem – what is the relationship between Giuliana’s malaise, her anomie, and the environment around her?

Clearly, Giuliana is unhappy with her marriage. Her glib, somewhat smarmy husband, doesn’t seem to grasp the depths of Giuliana’s despair and believes that her car accident triggered her melancholia. But, in fact, we come to understand that this car crash was, in fact, a suicide attempt and that the accident is a symptom of her mental illness, not its cause. The narrative, therefore, asks not only "What is wrong with Giuliana?," but also, "What can be done to help her?"

All traditional avenues for reconciliation with the world are barred: Giuliana’s attempt at work is nonsensical – she plans to open a shop to sell something to someone, customers whom she can’t quite characaterize, apparently choosing the most desolate possible location in a town that is empty of people and, itself, totally desolate. There is no trace of religion or its consolations in the film and the movie is wholly apolitical – there is no sign that political engagement is an option for making sense of the world. Similarly, society offers no meaningful consolation – the one social gathering that the film presents, the flirtatious encounter between the three couples with the detached and sullen Corrado along for the ride yields nothing but flirtation and a would-be orgy that deteriorates into haphazard, half-hearted groping; the worker and his girlfriend with the beehive hairdo openly express their contempt for the upper class managers and their sluttish, frustrated wives babbling about aphrodisiacs – "I prefer doing to talking," the girl says with a smirk on face. Religion, family, work, marriage, society, politics – none of these concerns offers any hope to Giuliana. Accordingly, she is left to the one haven remaining in a heartless, inhuman and unheimlich world – this is the hope of romantic love in the form of a liaison with Corrado Zeller. If there is nothing else in the world to which we can cling, at least, we can embrace one another and work out our mutual salvation from within that embrace. The notion of romantic, illicit love as salvation, our last, best chance, as it were, drives most of the film’s narrative or, if you like, it’s non-narrative.

The inconsolable, crazy Giuliana poses a serious problem, I think, to most viewers. The film is too long and Giuliana, despite her great beauty, is ultimately too fragile a vessel to carry the weight of the movie’s many insoluble enigmas. In fact, Giuliana is not particularly mysterious. She is the paradigm of a figure that most people know and have encountered – the crazy girlfriend who seduces with her neediness and, then, ultimately repels her lover with her continuous, hopeless demand to be saved. Giuliana is the type of the female hysteric who is exquisitely successful at seducing men – her desperation is highly attractive to the male ego: "you have what is necessary to save me," the kind of woman declares: "it is you and only you who can redeem me with your love." But, of course, once the lover succumbs to this appeal, these blandishments directed to his ego, he finds himself trapped. What is wrong with Giuliana is not going to be solved simply by making love to her – sexual arousal and pleasure is not the answer to Giuliana’s ongoing, existential crisis. Her persistent demand that her lover rescue her becomes irritating, then, repellent, and, at last, infuriating. The film has a crazy authenticity about Giuliana’s panic and desperation. But this authenticity is so great that the audience, like Corrado, ultimately, rejects the heroine as appalling, self-centered, a hopeless case. The problem with The Red Desert, in my estimation, is not that it is too mysterious and poses too many questions that it can’t really answer – these are not defects in a film of this kind. The problem with the movie is that the restless, selfish, perpetually needy and demanding Giuliana is too banal, too obviously the "crazy girlfriend" that most men have encountered and, then, had to flee. (I write from my personal perspective; but, no doubt, women reading these lines can imagine male correlates to Giuliana, men who offer their love on the basis of this exchange: I will love you if you will rescue me – from what? From my unhappy marriage, from my unhappy past, from my sorrow or alcoholism from, ultimately, myself.) Those of us who have endured the misery of having a crazy girlfriend, don’t really want to be reminded of that suffering and, certainly, not at the length proffered by this picture. The film’s overriding question – how is the toxic environment related to Giuliana’s mental distress? – can be answered all too simply: it isn’t. Giuliana is crazy, mentally ill, and her sickness isn’t caused by the fumes and banging sounds or, even, the fruit and vegetables painted soot-grey. (Of course, answering the film’s central interrogatory in these terms destroys the movie – it makes the picture’s fantastical surface completely meaningless.) Most people have made love to a crazy man or woman and, probably, reject as banal the notion that the crazy persons hysteria was caused by the alienating conditions of modern life.

That said, the film suggests a mechanism for reconciliation with the unheimlich and disquieting aspects of the modern, technological world. The mechanism is suggested by the film’s mise-en-abyme, that is, its story within a story – this is the narrative that Giuliana tells to her ill child, the fable about the girl alone on the island with the beach with pink sands. We should notice that this narrative answers no questions; it doesn’t solve anything and, in fact, merely poses additional questions that can’t be answered. Why is the girl alone on the island? What is the meaning of the strange sailing vessel that approaches her, but that departs when she tries to swim toward it? What is the source of the singing in the world? Why do the forms of rock in the hidden cove suggest naked, and contorted human bodies? Certainly, the story that Giuliana constructs mirrors her plight – like the girl on the island, she is completely alone. Human beings around her seem to have been frozen into statuary – the cove with its metamorphosed human bodies suggests the Laocoon implied by the industrial piping that we see on the petroleum drilling rig, serpentine, voluptuous forms that vaguely suggest the human body. The sailing ship that moves without apparent guidance and meaning represents, simultaneously, the wish to escape this paralyzed, technological world, the technology that controls the world but that no one, in turn, seems to control (the ship is without captain or crew) and, at last, escape by suicide or death – the girl’s swimming out to sea toward the sailing vessel that then retreats away from her suggests eluding the meaningless of the world by committing suicide. The story has no meaning. It merely replicates Giuliana’s plight. But here is the key point: Giuliana’s narrative, although we can’t construe its meanings, seems to cure her son of his paralysis. Antonioni’s argument may be that asking questions in the form of a narrative is some sort of remedy for the illness that besets his heroine. In this context, the film itself, Il Deserto Rosso, is the medicine that Giuliana, and others like her, need to survive in the world. The movie offers itself as a pharmakon, as a powerful medication against the anomie that envelopes its characters.

In the end, Giuliana recognizes that the yellow smoke is toxic. The birds survive because they avoid it. The huge vessels soundlessly gliding through the lagoons of our cities carry men speaking incomprehensible languages and are marked with enigmatic signs that no one can read. A yellow flag, the color of the toxic smoke, is raised above these vessels – this flag means that the vessels’ crews have succumbed to the plague and must be quarantined; the ships are full of contagion and cadavers. But, at least, we can read the sign in the yellow puff of poison and, perhaps, avoid inhaling the toxins ourselves. Why is yellow a sign of poison? What exactly is the toxin? Why is it being produced? We don’t know the answer to these questions. But, at least, the film inoculates its protagonist and us against exposure to those fumes – if you see the yellow flag, either smoke or a banner, then, you must flee.