Red Desert (1964)

Here's a more recent one.  Went down to the Wexner Center and checked out Red Desert.  I have been getting into Antonioni a bit more lately, and had to write a paper two papers about something I saw at the Wex, so Antonioni seemed like a good choice:

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert tells the story of Giuliana (Monica Vitti), and her emotional struggles as she readjusts from time spent in the hospital resulting from a suicide attempt.  Longing for people and relationships but trapped in a decaying mechanical landscape, Giuliana longs to fill the void left by her cold and distant husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), and hopes to find solace in the arms of his coworker Corrado (Richard Harris).  Antonioni’s film is a meditation on alienation and loneliness in [by] industrial society.  He explores these ideas with the viewer through a variety of stylistic choices, most notably his use of mise-en-scène, sound, and his use of shot.  I would also like to touch on important thematic and technical similarities between Antonioni’s film and the works of Jacques Tati, so let’s get started!

The omnipresent fog and oppressive nuclear cooling tower are the first of many elements of the mise-en-scène Antonioni uses to communicate to the viewer about industrial society.  The fog lingers in every outdoor scene.  The nuclear cooling tower dominates nearly half the frame it occupies in an early shot in the film.  Titanic industrial machinery that spews forth steam and noise at Ugo and Corrado’s job, and a robot teddy bear further exemplify man’s loss of connection to the natural world.  The human figures in the industrial workplace are puny and insignificant in contrast to the enormous machines, machines which seem to have replaced many of the workers, seen few and far between, whose sole job seems to be maintenance of the machines.  Even in nature, industrial machinery bursts forth from the landscape.  When Giuliana escapes to the woods to eat her sandwich, flames from some horrible tower are visible through the canopy of dead twigs.  The only moments of escape from this industrial nightmare are also provided by the mise-en-scène in the form of the decaying shack and the calm and quiet sea, which stand in opposition of pretty much everything else about the mise-en-scène.

            In his use of sound techniques, Antonioni again uses his approach to highlight man’s alienation in/by technological society.  Human sounds are lost in the noise and steam blasted by the various industrial machines that fill this film.  Early in the film, sounds from the industrial landscape drown out a conversation between Ugo and Corrado, their words lost in the cacophony.  The nondiegetic musique-concrète score in Giuliana’s apartment is harsh, disconcerting, and alienating, indistinguishable from the harsh noises that suppress the dialog of the two men in the factory scene earlier in the film.  At points during the viewing I felt as though even I needed a break from all the noise, such is the sonic landscape occupied by our protagonists.  We do receive a break towards the end of the film, in a sequence where Giuliana and Corrado talk on the deck of the boat, accompanied by precious silence with the “natural” backdrop of the sea.  “I can’t look at the sea for too long, or else I lose interest in what happens on land,” says Giuliana, it seems to herself.

            Antonioni continues his line of logic, highlighting man’s separation from nature in his use of shot.  In the factory scene, not only is the dialogue overtaken by industrial noise, but our view of speakers in the factory is repeatedly intentionally obstructed by pipes and machinery.  Antonioni wants us to see that he is intentionally moving the camera to achieve this effect.  He favors this technique in this application over the typical shot/counter-shot because it establishes early on for us very clearly what he is getting at in regard to the aforementioned themes.  He also chooses to shoot characters in these industrial landscapes at a further distance than would be typical, highlighting the machines which are already titanic in proportion to the tiny/insignificant humans whose sole occupation it seems is to monitor and repair them.

In many ways, Red Desert is, though different in tone, similar in message and scope to the films of Jacques Tati, particularly Playtime and Mon Oncle, fanciful meditations on the [lack of] place for man in industrialized society.  Both directors go to painstaking lengths to explore many similar themes about technological “advancements” which overcomplicate the characters’ world and push humanity further apart from nature and from each other.  The two seem to focus on the same issues with a different sense of scale.  Where Tati prefers to focus his presentation and view on a grander scale, Antonioni prefers to focus in on a macro level.  Antonioni’s film focuses on the humans which occupy an increasingly bleak, separate existence, while Tati’s films focus more on the world that is occupied by these characters.  In Playtime, we see a parade of “faux-Hulots” before the real M. Hulot finally makes the scene, and we eventually lose track of him as the film careens out of control towards its finale.  Meanwhile Antonioni focuses on the personal dramas of a single character occupying and trying to cope with this world.  While Antonioni’s film is definitely less fun or whimsical than Tati, it is certainly just as intricate and rich as the worlds created by the latter.  It was probably more successful as well, as (I assume) no cities were built in order to film it.

I really enjoyed the film, having noticed intertextuality with things that I am already interested in (the general theme, Jacques Tati), and was a little bit different from the roving lens I have come to expect from Antonioni.  The lens wanders, but is far more purposeful in its wandering, than in, say, The Passenger.