Deserto rosso, Il (1964)

User Rating:

7.6/10   

Director:

Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers:

Michelangelo Antonioni (writer) &
Tonino Guerra (writer)

Release Date:

8 February 1965 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Cold, rain, and fog surround a plant in Ravenna. Factory waste pollutes local lakes; hulking anonymous ships pass or dock and raise quarantine flags...

Plot Keywords:

Imagery | Existential | Mother Son Relationship | Socialist | Neurotic

Awards:

4 wins

Cast

Monica Vitti	...	Giuliana
Richard Harris	...	Corrado Zeller
Carlo Chionetti	...	Ugo
Xenia Valderi	...	Linda
Rita Renoir	...	Emilia
Lili Rheims	...	Telescope operator's wife
Aldo Grotti	...	Max
Valerio Bartoleschi	...	Giuliana's son
Emanuela Paola Carboni	...	Girl in fable
Bruno Borghi
Beppe Conti
Julio Cotignoli
Giovanni Lolli
Hiram Mino Madonia
Giuliano Missirini	...	Radio telescope operator
Arturo Parmiani
Carla Ravasi
Ivo Scherpiani
Bruno Scipioni

Directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni

Writing credits
Michelangelo Antonioni		(writer) &
Tonino Guerra		(writer)

Produced by
Tonino Cervi	....	producer (as Antonio Cervi)
Angelo Rizzoli	....	co-producer

Original Music by
Giovanni Fusco

Cinematography by
Carlo Di Palma

Film Editing by
Eraldo Da Roma

Art Direction by
Piero Poletto

Costume Design by
Gitt Magrini

Makeup Department
Giancarlo De Leonardis	....	hair stylist
Giancarlo De Leonardis	....	key hair stylist (uncredited)

Production Management
Ugo Tucci	....	production manager

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Gianni Arduini	....	first assistant director
Flavio Niccolini	....	second assistant director

Art Department
Sergio Donà	....	property master

Sound Department
Mario Bramonti	....	boom operator
Renato Cadueri	....	sound assistant
Claudio Maielli	....	sound

Special Effects by
Franco Freda	....	special effects

Camera and Electrical Department
Gianni Antinori	....	second assistant camera
Claudio Cortini	....	still photographer
Dario Di Palma	....	camera operator
Romolo Romagnoli	....	key grip
Elmiro Rubeo	....	gaffer
Alberto Spagnoli	....	first assistant camera
Sergio Strizzi	....	still photographer

Costume and Wardrobe Department
Paola Carloni	....	wardrober

Editorial Department
Marisa Mengoli	....	assistant editor

Music Department
Vittorio Gelmetti	....	composer: electronic music
Carlo Savina	....	musical director

Other crew
Serena Canevari	....	script supervisor
Dino Di Salvo	....	production auditor
Eros Lanfranconi	....	production secretary
Rodolfo Martello	....	production auditor

Production Companies

• Film Duemila
• Federiz
• Francoriz Production (co-production)

Distributors

• Rizzoli (1965) (USA) (theatrical) (subtitled)
• Art Free (2003) (Greece) (DVD)
• Connoisseur Video
• Europa Filmes (2007) (Brazil) (DVD) (Portuguese subtitles)
• Kinowelt Home Entertainment (2006) (Germany) (DVD)
• Madman Entertainment (2008) (Australia) (DVD)
• Madman Entertainment (2008) (New Zealand) (DVD)
• Medusa Home Entertainment (2004) (Italy) (DVD)
• Sagres Filmes (19??) (Brazil) (VHS)

Other Companies

• Colorificio Italiano Max Meyer  'Tintal' paintings
• International Recordings  sound re-recording

Also Known As:

Désert rouge, Le (France)
The Red Desert (UK)
Desierto rojo, El (Argentina) (Spain) [es]
Czerwona pustynia (Poland) [pl]
Désert rouge, Le (Canada: French title) [fr]
Deserto Vermelho, O (Portugal) [pt]
Deserto rosso, Il (Greece) [el]
Kizil çöl (Turkey: Turkish title) [tr]
Kokkini erimos, I (Greece) (reissue title) [el]
Punainen erämaa (Finland) [fi]
Røde ørken, Den (Denmark) [da]
Rote Wüste, Die (West Germany) [de]
Vörös sivatag (Hungary) [hu]

Runtime:

120 min

Country:

Italy | France

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Australia:PG | Italy:VM14 | Argentina:16 | Singapore:PG | Finland:K-16 | UK:15 (video rating) (1995) | UK:X (original rating)

Filming Locations:

Incir De Paolis Studios, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Company:

Film Duemila

Trivia:

David Hemmings claims in his autobiography that Richard Harris was kicked off the film after he punched Antonioni and that the scenes that were still to be completed were done with another actor who was photographed from behind. Hemmings was apparently told this when Harris warned him about Antonioni when Hemmings was working on Blowup (1966).

Quotes:

Giuliana: I feel my eyes tearing up. What should I do with my eyes? What should I watch?
Corrado Zeller: You ask what you should watch. I ask how I should live. It's the same thing.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004) (TV)

There's Something Terrible About Reality

As The Red Desert opens the camera pans across a stark, gray sky populated with jarring industrial forms that vivisect the take. The camera cuts to fireballs emanating from one of them. A few moments later we see Giuliana, {Monica Viti} wife of power plant manager Ugo {Carlo Chionetti} with her son Valerio {Valerio Bartoleschi} on their way to meet up with him. She wanders across the scene, seemingly confused or lost, unsure of her surroundings, there's a sense of foreboding around her mannerisms and movements yet she appears almost pure or an innocent, adorned in earthy tones set against the bleak backdrop, sapped of any vibrant color, life or energy. The scenery and the plant appear as some sort of oppressive work camp. It's a grave beginning that takes us through a human condition facing modern times.

The film is set in Ravenna, Italy, chosen by Antonioni because he wanted a place that represented, as he put it, "the technical change in our lives, the progress which slowly conditions our existence, our psychology, our morals and our sentiments." This is a film concerned primarily with this notion and to emphasize this idea of the physical and psychological landscape eroded, poisoned and destroyed by industry, Antonioni makes two critical choices. First, he manipulated facades to heighten the idea of an altered reality, a reality tampered with to fit the mind of his frail central character, Giuliana. By coloring the scenery Antonioni was able to find a palate that matched Giuliana's view, the way she doesn't see color the way the rest of the characters see it.

In the director's words "color was needed for psychological moments to accentuate the realities within these moments, to express a certain state of mind." We come to learn Giuliana's condition is a result of a car accident that has left her seemingly riddled with neurosis and anxieties about herself, her place in the world, her surroundings and the way she should live her life. The second choice was of a woman in this central role. Antonioni said once that "women are more subtle filters of reality" and they have closer naturalistic sensibilities and are more mysterious than men and thus this was a closer fit in this role.

Giuliana strikes up a relationship with plant engineer Corrado Zeller {Richard Harris} with whom she seems to find a common bond in her feelings. Zeller confides that after spending time moving around often he doesn't know "how to live", let alone where. Giuliana in turn confides in him details about her stay in hospital. The pair spend many of the more moving and thoughtful scenes alone together on screen, engaged in this concurrent discourse, expressing concerns about the modern world and how to live in it. Giuliana doesn't appear however, to be seeking any grand "meaning" to life as she is merely just confused lost and feeling alien in an increasingly unidentifiable, strange, hostile and possibly harmful {to her eyes, her being} landscape and world around her. She just wants to know why she feels the way she does and how to live her life in a more stable, tranquil manner, she seems to want a peaceful equilibrium amidst the mechanical din and carnage around her. She's playing a neurotic who, in Antonioni's own words is "possibly psychotic" in her neurosis.

Giuliana proffers a very unbalanced, unstable view-- which happens to coincide with the feelings garnered {both by her and the viewer} from the landscape. There's a feeling of altered realities through her eyes, in the scenes where her vision is blurred and the swirling colors she sees don't match the purported "real" ones. This coupled with the fact Antonioni altered many of the colors we see in the film is very interesting in its layered theoretical talking point. This lends to the idea that there is, as she says, something "terrible about reality" to her but more importantly that there is not a meaning she is seeking. In the conversation with the sailor near the end there's the anguished acceptance that all she has is her life and that is it. In a sense this is her final acceptance and coming to terms.

Visually The Red Desert throws up some fascinating metaphors. Most striking is the use of red, as the title suggests, it's everywhere. This is the red desert in terms of the caustic, alarming landscape the color conjures up but also the alarmed, dangerous and harmful red desert of the mind, the heart and the souls, the human condition as a red desert, littered with the grotesque mechanical forms that populate our existence in all their gaudy decor. Red facades, beams and bars are juxtaposed against human skin. Stained yellows and tainted blues streak across the eye line like some arcane veinal system awaiting deconstruction by the mind.

Ships drift ominously as if hulking mausoleums of the machine age, daunting and almost terrifying, pervading key scenes in terms of relationships {with Giuliana and her son} and trope {the epidemic scene}. Giuliana, her husband and their friends spend time at a dilapidated shack once used by fisherman who no longer fish there because of the factory waste in the canal. What's interesting about this scene is the irony contained in the joy and revelry in further destroying the structure in order to have firewood. Also fascinating is the scene on the pier in the mist where she looks at the others and there's an almost ghost-like effect, as if these people were swirling transparencies, figments of her own mind.

The Red Desert was a bold vision by a filmmaker who had reached an apex of a particular form of expression he had been building upon. This film was the height of that expression. Soon after he moved in another direction, with a fresh voice though The Red Desert will always stand as one of his finest achievements.