The Red Desert

Michelangelo Antonioni, in The Red Desert, has finally made a film which can be called entirely cinematic. With the added dimension of color, Antonioni has been able to do away with plot, characterization, and even music, elements which have detracted from the cinema for fifty years. Instead, the director concentrates on the purely visual, on the purely aural, and on the relationship between people and their environment, all proper pursuits of film.

The plot elements are sparse. Giuliana, who has recently attempted suicide in a car accident, falls in love with Corrado, an associate of her husband Ugo in the chemical industry. Corrado seduces Giuliana in his hotel room, and they break up immediately afterwards. As the film ends, none of the characters has changed significantly, no important action has taken place, and no moral lesson can be drawn.

Instead, the value of the film rests in Antonioni's use of the camera and the cutting room to create a series of extremely subtle impressions. Antonioni selects his images with the precision of an electronic microscope and puts them together with almost transcendent sensitivity to force his audience to make strictly visual comparisons. If you would criticize Antonioni for merely conveying a tone, you must remember that a painting does no more.

The backgrounds of The Red Desert serve as objective correlatives for the inner states of the various characters When Giuliana first appears, Antonioni gives us long shots of the chemical factory, filled with confusing detail, for Giuliana remains detached from modern life and very confused by it. But when Ugo, the engineer, is shown, we enter the factory for interior shots or else view particular pieces of apparatus outside. As Giuliana and Corrado begin to fall in love and Giuliana begins to open herself up to the world again, Antonioni takes us to the radar installations at Medicina, where the tall masts stand bare along the level landscape. But lest we suspect that Giuliana has become disoriented, the director uses a small black shack as a focal point, the same way a painter might have used it, to keep us from any sensation of dizziness.

Giuliana reveals her deepest fantasy to her little son, and the setting changes to an unspoiled beach where water, previously shown as polluted, is shown as clear and clean. The small, white sailboat which appears, in contrast to the grimy oil tankers which have drifted through the film before, represents escape and freedom. The rock formations along the shore, like the rocks in L'Aventurra, have a shape and character which nearly animates them. Antonioni, by this purely visual statement, gives us an idyllic alternative with which to measure the industrial world, either sordid or sterile, in which we live.

Or in another scene, the characters hold a Roman orgy in a little black shack, during which the men pry up the skirts of their women but never actually make love. Bright red paint coats the walls, much discussion of aphrodisiacs takes place, and a fire casts its glow over the would-be lovers. This savage yet inhibited emotion represents the flip side of the new scientific rationality.

Like a painter, Antonioni uses the frame of the picture for his effects. When Corrado leaves Giuliana, he simply walks out of the frame. The camera continually moves off the characters and onto the landscape. At the very end, Giuliana and her son disappear into the lower right hand corner while Antonioni gives us a perfect still shot of the factory. In this way, the director is constantly making us aware that the frame seperates what we can see from what we cannot see.

To complete his rendering of the environment of modern man, Antonioni uses the sounds of modern industry throughout the film. Gears creak, steam valves blow, and spiked heels click loudly on asphalt pavements. The harshness of these sounds contrasts with the soft rolling of the waves during the beach scene and with the general silence which pervades the film.

Antonioni recognizes the beauty of that silence, as well as the enormous beauty of the factory itself. But, as Giuliana tells her son, the yellow sulfur flame from a smokestack, so similar to a candle, is intensely poisonous. Perhaps the world of the white-frocked scientist will be better than what has gone before it, perhaps there are dangers we do not recognize. Only one conclusion is clear: man has created his new environment and now must accept the consequences.

Antonioni shot most of Th Red Desert with a telephoto lens, using various degress of magnification to achieve just the amount of flatness and focus that he wanted at any given moment. Antonioni, the consumate film-painter, has manipulated every device of film technology to assure that each tiny smudge will help create the exactly correct impression. He has challenged us to develop, not only our aesthetic, but our human sensitivity as well.