Guest Blogger Alex ~ Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, Italy)

Alex's blog The Korova Theatre, is a new discovery for me. On the blog, Alex writes wonderful, thoughtful and concise reviews and I was delighted when he said he wanted to participate in my Guest Blogger series. He's also a fellow LAMB! Baa! Hope you enjoy his contribution.
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Hello friends, my name is Alex and I’m the curator of THE KOROVA THEATRE, my eclectic electric blog where I write about films that I show in my home theatre. I find that writing helps me to reach a better understanding of the story, both in its subtext and superficial elements. The fun of cinema is in dialogue with others because we each see Art through our own glass darkly; we apply our own subjective experiences and knowledge upon a story and many times have an appreciation that differs from the creator’s intention! When we view a film it becomes our own, subsumed by our own consciousness: we think, we feel, we are. Beautiful. Case in point: Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT, a complex character study that leads Giuliana down a dark path of depression, lost amid the clacking machinery of modernity; insignificant and lonely. Please, don’t take my perceptions as Rule Of Law but give it a chance and allow yourself to walk beside our heroine…or in her shoes.




Giuliana has become an empty vessel, her internal gyroscope deformed, her soft voice a hollow discordant plea submerged in an ocean of despair, and her emotional affect the metal language of machines. Director Michelangelo Antonioni uses bright vibrant colors to offset the drabness of Giuliana’s inner world; he wraps her in a cold dense fog of desperation and hopelessness. The film is constructed around her vague perceptions and undefined suffering as she spirals deeper into the vortex of an untreated mental illness. She is married to a successful businessman and has a child but this seemingly perfect life is kept afloat by surface tension, this precarious balance of her emotional thermodynamics. Giuliana becomes isolated from the world, detached from others and alone in a crowd, when she speaks it seems reflexive and passive, her physical actions pre-programmed and manufactured. When she has an affair with Zeller, her husband’s colleague, she is victimized because he takes advantage of her weakened emotional state. Antonioni films the tryst without love, using the cold steel bed frame to create stark right angles, the physical act very mechanical. The soundtrack utilizes foreground effects such as a lonely tugboat whistle or the jet-stream explosion of steam from a factory’s vent to contradict long periods of silence. This industrial montage of sounds produces an aural dichotomy that represents Giuliana’s split from reality. The rusting intertwining pipes and hulking steel of the factories and shipyards are painted in bright living colors while she is dressed in dull greens or black, breathing life into this static non-living matter. Antonioni lets his camera linger on polluted pools of sludge and piles of industrial detritus before cutting back to his characters; the whole effect is to subtract from the character’s humanity, to make them seem less important in the very environment that they caused, and have become by-product of their own devices. Antonioni shoots in medium long shots with empty space between characters, separating them from each other with expertly fabricated compositions. Giuliana is ultimately lost; diminishing in the foreground while a giant smokestack vomits yellow poison. (A)