RED DESERT (1964) C widescreen 117m dir: Michelangelo Antonioni

w/Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti, Xenia Valderi, Rita Renoir, Aldo Grotti, Valerio Bartoleschi, Giuliano Missirini, Lili Rheims, Emanuela Pala Carboni, Bruno Borghi, Beppe Conti

From the Turner Classic Movies website, www.tcm.com, this article about the film by Rob Nixon: "By the early 1960s, Italy had recovered from the devastation of World War II and was well on its way to becoming a prosperous, modern industrial nation. The preceding years were known, as they were in Germany, as the 'economic miracle' (an era critically examined by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1980s). Vigorous industrialization and development brought new wealth and progress to the country but also disturbed the physical, emotional, and moral landscape. In this atmosphere, Michelangelo Antonioni created a landmark series of films that exposed the alienation of contemporary life and modern humanity's psychological and spiritual crisis in the face of a changing world.

"Although Antonioni had been directing shorts since 1947 and feature-length films beginning with Story of a Love Affair (1950), he established his international reputation as one of cinema's leading avant-garde artists with his trilogy L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962). Their slow pacing, often non-communicative characters, and minimalist visual and narrative style, combined with ambiguous story lines and brooding themes, led critic Andrew Sarris to coin the term 'Antoniennui' to describe their style. 'Ennui,' as in 'boredom,' is misleading as an approach to these works. For all their empty spaces and silent stretches of soundtrack, the films are richly poetic examinations of individuals lost in landscapes, both interior and exterior.

"Red Desert (1964) was Antonioni's first film in color, and he made use of a broad chromatic scale, from the boldness of plastic objects in primary hues to subtle shades covered in mist and fog to paint the world his people inhabit. Where the actual locations didn't render the tone he was seeking, according to the film's initial publicity, he had his art director, Piero Poletto apply paint to the landscape itself and to such selected objects as fruit in a vendor's cart. Some stories claim he even had smoke tinted yellow to reinforce a sense of death and desolation.

"On the other hand, Antonioni once told Jean-Luc Godard that he was actually aiming to celebrate the beauty of the industrial landscape and dismissed the notion that he intended the focus to be on an inhuman, industrialized world that crushes his heroine and leads to her fragile, imbalanced mental state.

"In any case, the film was an exciting new step for the director and the audiences who appreciated his work. 'I want to paint the film as one paints the canvas,' he said. 'I want to invent the colour relationships, and not limit myself to photographing only natural colours.' (Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, and Paul Duncan. Michelangelo Antonioni: The Investigation. Taschen, 2004)

"The story is set in Ravenna, an Italian coastal city that underwent significant industrialization in the postwar period. Giuliana, the wife of a plant manager, wanders the bleak, toxic terrain, doing her best to hide the mental illness she suffers from and briefly dallying in flirtation with an engineer.

"Giuliana is played by Antonioni's muse, Monica Vitti, who starred in the earlier L'Avventura and L'Eclisse, had an important supporting role in La Notte, and would work for the director again in The Mystery of Oberwald (1980). A couple in real life at the time they made these first four movies, theirs has been one of film history's major collaborations between director and actress, on a par with Gish and Griffith, Dietrich and von Sternberg, and Karina and Godard. Their work together in this period is a dance of gazes--the actress's much acclaimed way of looking at her surroundings and the people she encounters and the director's equally penetrating look at her face and movements, using the camera like a detective to investigate the nature of her psychological state.

"The engineer with whom Giuliana flirts is played by Irish actor Richard Harris. The production was not a happy one for him. Antonioni apparently spoke little or no English, making communication difficult. The picture was completed without Harris, although stories differ about why. Some claim Harris behaved erratically, taking LSD for the first time while in Italy and acting bizarrely in public. Actor David Hemmings wrote in his autobiography that Harris warned him about working with the director before Hemmings began production on Blow-Up (1966) and told him he was fired after punching Antonioni. Harris's remaining scenes were then finished with another actor shot from behind. Other stories claim Harris stormed off the set when Antonioni directed him to walk diagonally across a yard and told the questioning actor, 'You don't ask me why. You're an actor, just do it.' Whatever the case, it probably had most to do with the fact that the production was behind schedule (19 weeks shooting in all) and Harris was due to start work on Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965).

"Red Desert was co-written by Antonioni and his frequent collaborator Tonino Guerra, who also wrote Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973), a nostalgic and decidedly different take on the coast near Ravenna before the war. Carlo Di Palma shot Red Desert, the first of six films he did for Antonioni. In recent years Di Palma has become mostly associated with Woody Allen, directing the cinematography of 11 Allen films, including Hannah and her Sisters (1986)."