Red Desert
A film by
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy / 117 minutes /
Col
10th Aug ;5.45 pm /
Perks Mini Thetaer
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/
Red Desert is the most ambitious of all of Antonioni’s
attempts to ground the condition of our modern existence in a theory of
alienation. It is a disturbing ambient drama about post-natal anxiety and the
malaise of industrial society: a deeply depressed young mother Giuliana (Monica
Vitti), whose husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) runs a factory, finds herself drawn
to Ugo's handsome associate Corrado (Richard Harris) who arrived to recruit a
workforce for a mining adventure in south America. The landscape is a grim,
sludgy mass of churned soil and dark satanic mills, belching out smoke and
flame: Antonioni boldly counters the picturesque view of sunny, happy Italy.
Antonioni sought to paint a film, more than write it, and
indeed it is a film of picturesque framings and evocative moods. The extensive
use of doorways and passageways call attention to the operation of framing, and
the manner in which a character may come into or out of frame. The long takes
tend to hold both the moment before and after the character has entered the
frame, suggesting impermanence and the independent, though vulnerable,
existence of the landscape.
The use of color is the most dazzling aspect of Red Desert,
which on a purest level, is visual spectacle. There is one sequence of natural
color in the film, a brief story sequence related by Giuliana to Valerio.
Everywhere else, color is meticulously calculated and arranged, with dynamic
colorization correlating with Giuliana’s emotional states.
Antonioni has explored new visual techniques here for the
revelation of the inner moods and feelings of psychological narrative. Much of
what is conveyed is not presented in verbal terms, but almost outside the scope
of verbal expression. Antonioni achieves this expression not only by his use of
color, but also by his comprehensive use of composition, editing, character
movements, and camera techniques. in Red Desert: we are on earth but also on
some remote planet, in the present time but also (perhaps) the future. The movie is a beautiful, haunting, and
complex meditation on the spiritual cost of modernity.
(Source: Internet)
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni was born in 1912 into a middle-class
family and grew up in bourgeois surroundings of the Italian province. In
Bologna he studied economics and commerce while he painted and also wrote
criticism for a local newspaper. In 1939 he went to Rome and worked for the
journal "Cinema" studying directorship at the School of Cinema. As he
was indebted to neorealism his films reflect his bourgeois roots like in his
first movie Cronaca di un amore (1950) or La signora senza camelie (1953) or Le
amiche (1955).
His biggest success was the trilogy L'avventura (1960), La
notte (1961), and L'eclisse (1962), with which he won several prizes. This
success allowed him to go abroad and to work on international scale in English:
e.g. Blowup (1966) in London and Zabriskie Point (1970) in the USA as well as
Professione: reporter (1975). A stroke in 1985 severely inhibited his
productivity until his death in 2007.
(Source:Internet)
