Comments on: Industrial Dilemmas: Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Red Desert”

By: Jim Clark

Jim Clark — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:03:20 +0000

For a writer/filmmaker like Antonioni, following Patagonia-bound Corrado’s precept, that a new historical setting could spell renewal, might have been very tempting. That would sort of be in line with the popular supposition, “travel is broadening.”
But for an endeavor with a view to a poise or equilibrium in face of gales of destabilization, there would be advantages of familiar haunts tracing back to memories perhaps facilitating revitalization of current stalemates.
The disorientation of occupying new places may elicit fresh starts; but that kind of acceleration may come up short as to full-scale social links within which to manoeuvre with sureness of touch
I’m reminded of Jacques Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), so full of buoyancy in its disappointments, followed by Model Shop (1969), made in LA, with its acrid distemper

By: mark s.

mark s. — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:15:18 +0000

I think you’re right. ‘Red Desert’ was Antonioni’s last great film and maybe it had something to do with Antonioni abandoning Italy for the hipness of Swinging London and the heavily metaphoric Death Valley.
He never seemed comfortable or ‘at home’ with either the Brit mod scene or the Youth Revolt in America, though both ‘Blow-Up’ and ‘Zabriskie Point’ contain scenes and sequences of striking beauty.
But the films from “L’Avventura through “Red Desert’ are an unbroken string of great work.

By: Jim Clark

Jim Clark — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:17:27 +0000

Jamie, you’re too kind. What I’ve got is excitement that, during years when I did a sort of rock climbing with words and the silences they come from, there were film artists putting out work way more dashing and subtle than mine.
I, too, came late to Red Desert, and when I first saw it I felt Antonioni was so thrilled to be putting out there those weird settings that he’d slipped back to his theatrical roots. (I always loved the three classics for their silences and their sort of naturalistic ballet, a form I could relate to far more easily than film.) I thought Monica’s yappy Giuliana was a waste of her virtuoso physicality.
But, taking more care about the sandwich, the wardrobe and the drug-like environmental deluge, I began to see her as an amateur researcher, like her husband and child, but looking at another field. That has made much more sense of her stream of non sequiturs, blind alleys and sexual experiments you’d think she might have outgrown. I now feel it’s a mistake to see Giuliana as Monica IV; she’s far better educated (not necessarily formally) than the other three. Her sort of bandaged up cruising is more in line with the relentless and rather self-destructive range of Marie Curie. Only, she can’t look forward to any prizes. All she can feel good about is becoming more disciplined and more coherently physical.
Thanks, also, for the link to Jasper Johns.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:25:44 +0000

Oh and it was interesting to me, from what I know about the film and many of the visuals (the Rothko comparisons etc) are so beautifully saturated reds and oranges creating these ‘humming’ visual noises, and then the criterion cover is this equally great, but exact opposite, subdued grey image. For modern art purposes it’s like a Jasper Johns, when he was painting everything in those cool greys (http://www.amazon.com/Jasper-Johns-Gray-Institute-Chicago/dp/0300119496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304004292&sr=8-1). Which he continues to this day.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:19:19 +0000

I really like Antonioni’s aesthetic, and yet I’ve never seen this film… I have the new criterion on my netflix which I’ve just bumped to #1.

I’ve read other essays on it, that are loaded with screen caps and the Rothko connection seems incredibly apt. Can’t wait to see this one, I’ll return with my thoughts.

As usual Jim is fantastic, as I said last time, we continue to get a glimpse into his viewing schedule chronologically, his taste, and how his brain acutely connects visual data and ideas. Mentions of RED DESERT have been popping up here and there in your last few reviews so obviously here it is. You’re one of the best writers out here.

By: Jim Clark

Jim Clark — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:02:45 +0000

Barton Fink could be called Red Desert Inside Out. Whereas Antonioni whips up the dilemma from the point of view of a loner, the Coens track a devotee of the ordinary in order to belt down a stiff shot of what a true loner is up against.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 02:01:20 +0000

Yes good point too. Thanks for reminding me about this film. I’ve been meaning to watch it again as it’s been quite some time. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen it on DVD, only an old VHS copy. I owe myself the favor of seeing the Criterion version.

By: Jim Clark

Jim Clark — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:55:56 +0000

You raise a great point here, Jon. Some efforts are so complex and volatile that it is extremely difficult to sustain and develop them.
I think, with their film, Barton Fink, the Coens sagely recharged their reflective bedrock as to uncanniness imperiled by canniness, for the sake of proceeding into the future. Although other film factors are in play there—Kiss Me Deadly’s Christina, for instance—there are shades of Giuliana in their Audrey, who struggles to bring grace into a fantastic mess.

By: Jim Clark

Jim Clark — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:35:54 +0000

Thanks, Sam. It’s great to have readers with such vast film experience as yours maintaining the stature of an artist widely suspected as mired in a moment of the past. Antonioni’s modernist bona fides—that could strike viewers as remote and effete—were so intensively focused on structures of consciousness that he was able to work from a bedrock as compelling today as it was in the 60s.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:30:12 +0000

I think Red Desert was Antonioni’s last great film. I think he personally got caught up in excess and self parody following this film. Red Desert might be his best one actually, although L’avventura is pretty great too.