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RED DESERT’s Inconceivable Values

This essay was commissioned in fall 2018 for an exhibition devoted to
Michelangelo Antonioni in Tehran curated by Sami Astan. — J.R.

[Antonioni’s] trilogy was concerned with differing aspects of love as the medium of
hope in our world. This film [Red Desert] is stripped to naked essence — hope or nonhope
unadorned: the prospect of human life in the midst of whirling changes. We live, as we know,
in the age of the swiftest transition in history, and all indications are that the speed of change
will increase: in everything from household appliances to concepts in philosophy, the whole
architecture of thought. Antonioni seems to be saying, without effervescent cheeriness, that
what was valuable can be preserved or can be transmuted to a new viability: that the future
may contain new, at present inconceivable, values. —
Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, March 23, 1963
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The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

There seems little doubt that Red Desert (1964) represented a major turning point in both the
art and the career of Michelangelo Antonioni, and not only because it was his first film in color.
It also concluded his collaborations with Monica Vitti as his lead actress — in L’avventura
(1960), La notte (1961), and L’eclisse (1962) — apart from the sole and significant exception
of The Mystery of Oberwald (1980) sixteen years later, which also worked with image
(including color) manipulations. And, perhaps most decisively of all, it marked a turning away
from the post-neorealism visual style of all his previous black-and-white films and a move
towards a form of expressionism that was prompted directly by the introduction of color to his
cinema. And what could already be read as an overall movement from narrative (often in the
form of mystery stories) towards stasis and abstraction in his earlier works becomes further
implemented here by literal (that is, cinematographic) changes of focus. It is hardly accidental
that the opening industrial shots of Il deserto rosso, seen behind the credits, are all out of focus,
privileging abstraction — in this case, by suggesting Impressionist painting — from the outset.
And the clearly focused bursts of flames coming from an industrial plant that immediately
follows already postulates a kind of dialectic between aestheticism and brute reality.

The aestheticism is emphasized throughout most of the film by focus changes, carefully
composed framings, uses of telephoto and zoom lenses, electronic music (along with
industrial noises) on the soundtrack, and expressionistic uses of color intensified by painting
or repainting certain locations, filters, and elaborate forms of color coding (most obvious in
the uses of red to represent sexual desire — especially in the not-quite-orgy that takes place
in a shack where several couples gather, but also in the pink aura of a bedroom much later to
evoke Giuliana’s postcoital state). And the brute reality is mostly a matter of the polluted and
often foggy industrial landscapes, as well as the often furtive and hesitant human interactions
that we see occurring within them.
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The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

For film historian Peter Bondanella, Antonioni’s black and white films, from his early shorts
in the 40s and 50s to his eight features from 1950 to 1962, weren’t so much post-neorealism as
a decisive “break with neorealism”, as suggested by the title of his fourth chapter in Italian
Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishing Co, 1983).
Perhaps such a distinction is mainly a matter of semantics, but it seems to me a distinction
worth making, because from a broader view of Italian cinema as a whole, Antonioni shared
with his neorealist predecessors a strong impulse towards bearing witness towards the spirit
and conditions of his own era, even if he intellectualized this interest by often making it a
matter of zeitgeist as much as physical and social realities. He also settled in all but one of his
features on wealthy or upper-middle-class characters rather than on the working-class, the
privileged terrain of the neorealists. (Il Grido in 1957 was the only exception.

In what Antonioni partially conceived as a movement from journalism to poetry, and from
traditional narrative to a more modernist form of filmmaking, he was already seeking in his
second short film — N.U. (Department of Sanitation, 1948), chiefly about spazzini (garbage
collectors), which might be regarded as a quintessential neorealist subject — to create “a
montage that would be absolutely free, poetically free”, thus rendering something closer to a
mood than an objective reality or a “logical” exposition of facts or appearances. But even
though the beginning and end of this twelve-minute film adheres somewhat to this approach—
already anticipating the powerful concluding sequence of L’eclisse (which I regard as the
climax and high point of all his black and white films)–by focusing on exterior locations and
conjuring up a kind of urban poetry out of the succession of shots and their juxtapositions—
this is soon accompanied by a brief male voiceover that squarely locates the film’s focus on
street cleaners and the fact that most people don’t pay much attention to them or think about
them, which clearly plants the film within a neorealist agenda. Yet even though the remainder
of the film follows an equally conventional neorealist format of being structured around a
single day, from dawn to dusk, various details veer away from the street cleaners to show other,
mostly (but not entirely) various related subjects. We see, for instance, streets being littered by
a few people, sometimes just before a streetcleaner arrives to clean up the mess. Some of these
incidents seem to be pre-arranged and staged for his camera, as in a fiction film (especially
when more well-to-do individuals are involved), but presumably not the apparently homeless
man who shakes out his blanket on the sidewalk before curling up at the foot of a building that
is revealed by an upward pan to be a church. We also later see evidence of how the garbage
being collected is picked through by scavengers (or gleaners, as Agnès Varda would call them)
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or else fed to pigs, while some other shots seem to qualify more as atmospheric than as
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illustrations of the early voiceover commentary or as explorations of class differences. One

The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

memorable shot shows a streetcleaner walking with his girlfriend or wife while dragging his
broom lackadaisically behind him.

In short, Antonioni often uses a neorealist format as a launching pad more than as a goal or
destination — a practice that one can see replicated in the closing minutes of L’eclisse, where
a documentary-like exploration of a particular subject — in this case a particular location over
a single dusk and evening, also viewed without any sustained characters — takes on poetic and
thought-provoking qualities, although in the latter case with disturbing, frightening, and even
somewhat apocalyptic overtones. Coming at the conclusion of a 126-minute story centered
mostly on the fitful love life of Vitti’s Vittoria, including her flirtation with Alain Delon’s Piero
and their plan to meet at this street corner at 8 PM, this is above all a poetry of absence and
uncertainty, and not only because both Vittoria and Piero fail to keep their appointment (which
may or may not be significant). It’s also a way of saying, more profoundly, that the story stops
and the world in all its unfathomable mystery takes over.
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Throughout Antonioni’s celebrated early 60s trilogy, the main focus, as Stanley Kauffmann
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implies, is on the shifting relations and interactions between couples in the present world — in

The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

Sicily and nearby islands in L’avventura, in Milan in La notte, and in Rome (including that
desolate street corner) in L’eclisse. Red Desert seems more concerned with thoughts about the
future, even though it’s set equally in the present, this time in a polluted sea port. It doesn’t
quite qualify as science fiction, but it does suggest a form of what might be called “speculative
fiction” (Robert Heinlein’s proposed alternate name for the genre). What links it most to
Antonioni’s preceding black and white trilogy is the notion that shots should be regarded as
questions, explorations, or interrogations rather than as declarative statements that might
function as answers. According to this characteristic, the film’s title becomes still another
question: “red desert” can refer to either the film’s brute reality (with “desert” signifying
“wasteland” and/or a dry and burning form of absence) or to its aestheticism (which could refer
us to either unsatisfied sexual desire, according to the color coding cited above, or to the
presexual bliss of the girl in Giuliana’s story to her son, as represented by the pink beach where
she luxuriates in her innocence.

This leads one to consider the possibility that Red Desert may represent a key point of
transition between the view of eroticism as a form of contemporary sickness in L’avventura
and La notte and the unabashed celebration of eroticism that became the dominant subject of
much of his last (and, alas, much weaker) work. Regarding the first tendency, let me quote a
short, central passage from the notorious and lengthy statement Antonioni released in Cannes
at the premiere of L’avventura, which appears to have been as crucial to what made the film
controversial as its unresolved mystery and its slow pace:

…Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows,
and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this
preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy, that is, if it
were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering
him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic
impulse, and he is unhappy. –from a discussion in Bianco e nero (1961),
translated in Film Culture, Spring 1962
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The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

The intellectual, social, and philosophical claims being made by Antonioni in this overall
statement, which are only barely suggested here, postulate an existential crisis in Western
civilization that is spelled out in the major events of both L’avventura and La notte, most of
which are perceived as both erotic and futile. L’eclisse begins at the conclusion of a love affair
that is viewed in a similarly glum fashion, but the subsequent affair of the heroine, Vittoria
(Vitti), with a stock broker, Piero (Delon), however tentative, is seen in a less negative fashion.
And the same could be said, if not for the nonconclusive flirtations that we witness in the red
shack in Red Desert, at least for Giuliana’s telling her husband afterwards that she wants to
make love with him, as well as in the temporary dalliances of the hero in Blowup with two
teenage girls and Vanessa Redgrave, and in the more sustained bouts of lovemaking seen or
evoked in Zabriskie Point, Identification of a Woman, and Beyond the Clouds, moving
increasingly towards pornographic celebrations. Arguably, a diminished or abolished interest
in the zeitgeist seems to accompany and perhaps even corresponds to the obsessive
“preoccupation with the erotic” decried by Antonioni years or decades earlier. But given the
relative ambiguity of most of these sequences, and Antonioni’s intuitive rather than calculated
or systematic approach to filmmaking, this thesis must remain both tentative and speculative.
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The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

Couples and environments both exist as facts of life in Red Desert — a married couple with
a child and factories and industrial wastelands in or around Ravenna — but the emphasis on
interactions has become secondary, to be replaced more often by the states of mind and the
feelings of a single character: Monica Vitti’s Giuliana, as represented by her surroundings. Yet
Giuliana — the wife and mother, who eventually takes on a lover (Richard Harris’s Corrado)
after her husband (Carlo Chionetti) leaves on a business trip — is arguably no more developed
as a character than Vittoria was in L’eclisse, and the fact that we rarely approach the
consciousness of the men (apart from the scene in which Corrado distractedly speaks to
workers about Patagonia, the only occasion in the film when Giuliana isn’t present) suggests
that social or aesthetic placement may ultimately matter more to Antonioni than psychological
adjustment in any normal sense. Complicating this distinction is the fact that, in spite of the
intellectual cast of many of Antonioni’s public statements and his responses in many interviews
(such as his dialogue with Godard), his creative decisions as a filmmaker often appear to be
more intuitive than intellectually calculated.

One could therefore argue that, as with the neorealist trappings of N.U. and the romantic
trappings of L’eclisse, Antonioni is using Giuliana’s neurotic consciousness as a springboard
into exploring a poetry of places — more specifically, a poetry anchored in the problem of
adjusting to the alienating aspects of industrial landscapes. Within such a world, Giuliana’s
frequent attraction towards the arrival of ships seems connected to dreams of escape — the sort
of escape readily available to Corrado, who is currently recruiting industrial workers for
employment in Patagonia, but not to her.
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The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

What makes the film expressionistic is Antonioni’s having repainted many of the
environments she passes through or inhabits in order to render her mental and emotional states
— in some ways to counter them (as in counterpoint), when he finds these forbidding
landscapes beautiful, and wants therefore to enhance them, and in some ways merely to accent
or inflect them, by dramatizing Giuliana’s alienation from them. Our lack of certainty about
what we can regard as objective or as subjective within this doctored and composed universe
remains the film’s perpetual zone of mystery and uncertainty — indeed, the principal focus of
both Antonioni’s explorations and our own questions. Far more vulnerable than any of the
characters in L’avventura and La notte (with the notable exception of a mental patient and
nymphomaniac in the latter film), Giuliana, as we gradually discover, is recovering from a
suicide attempt that is usually described euphemistically to others as a nervous breakdown. Her
instability is already made apparent in the opening sequence, when she insists on buying a half-
eaten sandwich from a stranger outside an industrial plant.

When Giuliana’s young son temporarily becomes paralyzed from the waist down — a malady
that we’re led to conclude has some relation to him having absorbed or intuited aspects of his
mother’s mental state — tells him a story of her own poetic invention that the film illustrates,
in a sequence featuring a young girl and filmed on an island off the coast of Sardinia.
Significantly, this is the only part of the film that shows us nature in an untroubled state and
where the colors that we see are natural (that is, non-expressionistic and doctored by neither
painting nor filters), even though paradoxically the story being told is utter fantasy. One can
conclude from this that most of this film springs from Giuliana’s consciousness—which is
largely a vision of hell, but also contains this vision of heaven. (Whether this latter vision
belongs to Giuliana’s past or her future—or possibly to both—is one of the film’s other
unanswered questions.) The solo female singing voice heard behind the credits and then in the
latter part of Giuliana’s fairy tale — where she says that “everyone” and “everything” is singing
— implies a kind of mournful duet between her own soulful song and the “music” of
Antonioni’s sounds and images, unifying both visions.
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The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.
 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/red-deserts-inconceivable-values/

A shot of Farsi version of the essay in the Antonioni’s exhibition in Tehran.

the Photo by Narges Astan

Back cover page of the booklet

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The essay has been translated to Farsi by Sami Astan and published in above mentioned exhibition in the form
of booklet. So the copy right of Farsi translation version of the essay is in hand of Sami Astan.