DVD of the Week: Red Desert

Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Red Desert,” from 1964, which I discuss in the clip above, is the first film that he made in color. His approach to color is greatly responsible for the film’s emotional and intellectual power, and, in his writings and interviews compiled in “The Architecture of Vision,” he describes that approach in surprising ways. Soon after the film’s release, Antonioni wrote that it was “the least autobiographical” of his films, and added, “If there is still some autobiography, it is precisely in the color that it can be found.” When he decided to film in color, he prepared carefully for the experience:

I painted when I was young and I kept it up as a student; I enjoyed it…. But I never had any artistic ambitions. Then, when I was working on “Red Desert,” I took up my brushes again in order to refamiliarize myself with color.

And he took painting as the literal means to realize his cinematic vision:

In “Red Desert” I had to change the appearance of reality—of the water, the streeets, of the countryside. I had to paint them with real paint and brush. It was not easy…. I tinted an entire forest gray to make it seem like cement, but it rained and the color ran off. With video cameras, all of this can be done electronically; it is like painting a film.

The colors in the film are acidic, garish, unnatural, and irresistible; they, together with the industrial forms they adorn, are among the film’s incomparable and distinctive beauties. Speaking of the part of Ravenna where he shot, and where factories were juxtaposed with forests, he said,

I felt that the skyline filled with things made by man, with those colors, was more beautiful and richer and more exciting for me than the long, green, uniform line of pinewoods, behind which I still sensed empty nature.

He has the insight and the audacity to display the environmental and emotional damage that the creation of such beauty entails, but he repudiates simplistic and sentimental responses to the challenge that it poses:

In this film, machines, with their intrigue of power, beauty, and squalor, have an enormous effect and they have taken the place of the natural landscape. But machines are not the cause of the crisis of the anguish that people have been talking about for years. I mean that we must not long for the more primitive times, thinking that they were a more natural landscape for man.

This is the paradox of Antonioni’s humanism. Last year, in the magazine, I reviewed the splendid Criterion DVD of “Red Desert” and there, too, discussed Antonioni’s visual attraction to industrial creations and his depiction of characters—in particular, Giuliana, played by Monica Vitti—as inseparable from them. I’ve always thought of Antonioni as far more than the poet of alienation; he recognizes that intellectual, industrial, and commercial creation is the natural province of mankind, and he’s interested in the ways in which people are, in turn, conditioned by their works and those of their peers. The characters in his movies seem thin because their environment is developed so thickly; yet that environment, he suggests, is, though exterior to them, an inextricable part of them. The radical subjectivity of his filmmaking—and the reason, besides the utter sublimity of his visual compositions, of the enduring significance of his work—emerges in his recognition, long before we heard of social networks and media that are messages, that the modern mind is a vast, collective, exteriorized undertaking, a feedback loop, a ubiquitous physical reflection of extravagant abstractions.