At that time, Antonioni was a critic, but he would soon direct his first feature film, and by the mid-1960s he was a legendary figure in the art cinema world, having garnered both acclaim and derision for this “alienation trilogy”: L’Avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L’Ecclise (1962). Yet, despite his early interest experimentation with color, he did not make a color film until his ninth feature, 1964’s Red Desert (Il deserto rosso), which followed the alienation trilogy and immediately preceded his scandalous English-language hit Blow-up (1966). At the time, the majority of European films were still being made in black and white (as were many American films), so Antonioni’s decision to shoot in color was something of a provocation in and of itself.

Like his previous films, Red Desert is a conundrum; methodical in its meandering and almost maddeningly slow-moving, its lack of narrative interest despite clear-cut psychological characters and a central love triangle almost insists that you focus on it as a purely audio-visual experience (the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovksy decried Red Desert as one of Antonioni’s worst films for this very reason--he “got high on pictorial aesthetics” at the expense of story, theme, and feeling). Not only does Antonioni experiment with color in the film, casting large swaths of celluloid in unnatural, desaturated tones (achieved with both filters and literally painting physical objects), but he also plays with the film’s soundtrack, deploying a discordant, echoing electronic score that puts you on edge during the blurry opening credits sequence and maintains a sense of disharmony and unease throughout the entire film.

One of Antonioni’s strengths as a filmmaker has always been his ability to convey a powerful sense of location, often at the expense of characters who are literally dwarfed by their surroundings; even if you don’t remember the story in L’Avventura, you can’t forget the craggy beauty of the rock island on which the protagonists find themselves, and no one who has seen it can forget the montage of empty urban spaces that ends L’Ecclise or the evocation of swinging London in Blow-up. In this respect, then, Red Desert may be his true masterpiece, as it makes viscerally palpable the rise of the petrochemical industry in Italy in the 1950s, with its massive cooling towers, jumbles of iron pipes, and enormous steel buildings that house complex refining machines and employ hundreds of anonymous workers who constituted a new working class in postwar Italy.

The opening shots over which the credits fade in and out are out of focus, giving us an abstract sense of modern industrialization before coming into sudden, shocking focus with a shot of a tower belching flames into the sky that is followed by a shot of a petrochemical plant pouring steam and smoke into an already colorless sky. Antonioni and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma (who would become favorite of Woody Allen’s in the 1980s and early 1990s) paint a dispiriting portrait of industrial toxicity, with the surrounding landscape not just dominated by the petrochemical plant, but literally poisoned by it, with everything (including the trees and grass) reduced to the same sooty ash-gray. It is as damning a portrayal of environmental ruin as anything ever committed to film, yet Antonioni curiously denied that Red Desert had a socio-political agenda, insisting instead that he was simply documenting in his own artistically heightened way the rise of industrialization (he even said in one interview with Cahiers du cinema that he wanted to depict the “beauty” of the factories).

It is within this world of black and gray that we are introduced to the film’s protagonists: Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of the plant’s chief engineer Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), and a petrochemical engineer named Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris, dubbed and cast against type as a man of great sensitivity) who is trying to recruit workers to go to South America to start up a refinery in Patagonia. Giuliana is the film’s protagonist, and it is her psychological complexities that the film slowly probes, eventually revealing that she suffers from various anxiety disorders following an incident several months earlier. Her rattled psychological state and inability to truly connect with her husband or child (Valerio Bartoleschi) is a typical theme in Antonioni’s work, suggesting that he is a prime example of Jean Renoir’s contention that great directors make the same film over and over again. By setting the story against the backdrop of industrialization and pollution, Antonioni encourages us to see a connection between interior and exterior, with the contaminated industrial wasteland of the film’s opening moments suggesting a visual literalization of Giuliana’s damaged emotional state. The fact that Antonioni continually stages scenes in empty streets, depressingly antiseptic rooms, and various industrial sites only confirms this, as does his major stylistic break when he shows us breathtakingly beautiful images of an idyllic island as Giuliana tells her son a symbol-laden story about a young girl (Emanuela Paola Carboni).

As with all of Antonioni’s films, Red Desert is a challenging, provocative experience, one that does not necessarily reward on first viewing beyond its powerful visual nature and unconventional marriage of sound and image. The characters are understandable, if not particularly compelling, and its various narrative detours and apparent lack of focus can make for frustrating viewing if you’re not open to his unorthodox methods. Yet, for those who are familiar with Antonioni’s cinema and for those who are willing to explore those “wide horizons” to which Antonino alluded in his story about Samuel Goldwyn, Red Desert is a multi-layered treasure that offers much, but never easily. It is, as Stanley Kauffman wrote in The New Republic back in 1965, a film that “enlarges our vision of what a film can be and do.”

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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