Every Saturday in 2025, I will be blogging about Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, a film that (for me) perfectly encapsulates how it feels to be at odds with the reality you live in. All content is free and all comments are welcome. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…
‘Everything that happens to me is my life,’ says Giuliana in Red Desert, which is our cue to dabble in existentialist philosophy and become weirdly fixated on shoelaces and Sisyphus. The main guest stars this week are Camus, Sartre, and (yet again) Musil. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…
Monica Vitti (in L’avventura) is surrounded by gawping men – it is like a scene from The Birds. The men look at her with frank desire and hostility, as if to say, ‘How beautiful she is, and how dare she exist.’ She treats this like a bad dream that just needs to be shaken off.
Antonioni made charismatic actors look like idiots: in The Passenger, Jack Nicholson struggles to improvise his way through conversations with strangers. The languages and contexts are alien to him; with a new identity and a new life come all-too-familiar communication barriers.
‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ said Shylock. ‘If you prick me, you don’t suffer,’ says Giuliana in Red Desert. How better to express incommunicability than through a halting dialogue with someone who cannot understand your language?slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…
Stromboli ends on a note of transcendence and renunciation: Ingrid Bergman looks down with contempt at her husband's village, and looks at herself with equal contempt. Like Anna in L’avventura, she finds that her relationship with reality has curdled, and she cries ‘Enough!’
Ingrid Bergman wakes after her long dark night of the soul on Stromboli. White flecks sparkle in the volcanic desert beneath her, as if the stars she gazed at the night before had descended to earth. She faces the morning sun with awe and fear; it re-energises and overwhelms her.
La notte: Marcello Mastroianni inspects a young woman in her hospital room. In this moment, he is a hollow man who casts no shadow; her shadow seems an integral part of her, an extension of the darkness in (and behind) her eyes, and a commentary on the surrounding white void.
The shipyard sequence in Red Desert finds Giuliana at her most isolated and imperilled, but it is also the moment when she shows the most agency. Navigating a treacherous landscape with a sense of purpose, she seeks out the origin of those unearthly noises that echo around her.
If you’re Ingrid Bergman, you resolve your existential crisis by climbing a volcano, standing amidst smoke and flames, and screaming to God as the scene fades to black. If you’re Monica Vitti, you meet a bemused sailor who offers you a hot beverage. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…
In L’avventura, Anna has been reading Tender is the Night. On the cover is a painting by Matisse: a woman reclines beside an empty chair (she does not want company), her features blank as though she has effaced herself, at once eloquent and opaque...like Anna's disappearance.
What do you do when an actor storms off set and ruins the ending of your movie? You wander through the Ravenna docks and invent a weirdly anti-climactic sequence that will haunt people’s dreams forever. Toxic sludge has never been so mesmerising. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…
I think I’ve discovered the origin of the title ‘Red Desert’: it’s in the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch, which can be seen on Corrado’s bedside table in the hotel room scene. (This is the 1959 Italian edition.)
‘Even you haven’t helped me,’ says Giuliana to Corrado, in their final scene together. Red Desert’s screenplay states that he interprets this as an accusation, but Richard Harris’s face is more inscrutable: besides a mild sadness, it communicates almost nothing.
The most beautiful sequence in La notte: the camera tracks alongside Roberto's car as it passes beneath street-lamps, alternately lost in darkness and half-illuminated. Rain dominates the soundtrack and distorts the characters' features; there are no fully legible surfaces here.
This week in Red Desert, it’s a wrap for Corrado Zeller: in his sullen farewell and his hangdog retreat into the darkness, we see a microcosm of his relationship with Giuliana. An epiphany takes place here, but he refuses to see it. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…
Monica Vitti, alone with her shadow and a blank wall, looks at her surroundings with wry disappointment. Earlier, Giuliana pictured blue walls and a green ceiling, but now the swirling white void seems more apt. Though not literally red, it is one manifestation of the red desert.
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