Red Desert (Il deserto rosso) (review)

One can only imagine the breathtaking opportunity that the advent of color presented to Michelangelo Antonioni. Considered by many to be a "painterly" director, Antonioni proclaimed that, for the filmmaker, "seeing" was a "necessity."¹ By the time of his first color film, Il deserto rosso (Red Desert [1964]), he was already renowned for the still-photography-like quality of his compositions and frames. The anticipation surrounding the release of Red Desert was quickly satisfied in the film's opening credits. It is not "color," exactly, that is revealed in these initial sequences of an industrial wasteland in Ravenna, shot in blurred deep focus and accompanied by the haunting rattle of an electronic score. Antonioni instead leavens the sepia and gray with hues and tints of red, blue, and pink. One feels as though the director were aware of entering some new visual terrain, one that had to be adjusted to gradually. The cautious chromatic textures make us conscious of color as a phenomenon consisting of wavelengths of light.

With the Criterion Collection's publication of Antonioni's Red Desert, cinephiles now have access to a newly restored high-definition transfer and digitally remastered soundtrack of what was for years a difficult-to-obtain and expensive DVD. In addition to the film, the Criterion DVD includes audio commentary on Red Desert by David Forgacs; interviews with Antonioni, including a reprint of one with Jean-Luc Godard; two early documentaries by Antonioni, La gente del Po (People of the Po [1943–47]) and N.U. (Department of Sanitation [1948]); and an essay on Red Desert by Marc Le Fanu. Together, the elements of the DVD point to the landmark status of the film, both for Antonioni's career and for the diffusion of color in European auteur cinema. Yet, surprisingly enough, the film has, since its original release, become relatively obscure outside of specialist circles. This has occurred in part because the film's abstract, palette-driven articulation can make it difficult for audiences to follow its plotline and grasp its aesthetics—though the ascent of color over content was far from Antonioni's intent. "I never thought of color per se," he insisted in his interview with Godard. "There are no 'paintings' in my films," he also said in an interview with French television from 1964 on the Criterion DVD; only color that added to the "story" attracted him. By including this wealth of supplementary material in the DVD and booklet, Criterion should make the terrible beauty of the film less inscrutable.

Red Desert was shot not only in color but Technicolor, a complicated series of film development processes that required the use of this company's special cameras, technicians, and consultants. "Technicolor," Murray Pomeranz writes, "tended to offer the intensely saturated, yet also slightly unreflective, and thus seductive, colour that we can see in what photographers call 'the magic hour,' that period before sunset on a clear day, when every hue is cast with a little red and the contrast between hues appears to heighten, with the effect that objects stand out from one another with augmented crispness and vitality."² The use of Technicolor in Red Desert gave Antonioni "consummate control of exposure, contrast, and saturation," with images ranging from "fruity or almost completely washed out flesh tones" to "chartreuse pollution in gray water" and mixes of "natural and industrial colour."³ The vigorous experimentalism of the film gives it an essayistic feel, as though Antonioni were seeking to do with color what his neorealist predecessors had done with long unedited takes in natural light and real time. Many do not realize that neorealism, in fact, provided Antonioni with his cinematic apprenticeship. For example, in the 1930s he wrote for Cinema magazine, an important source of ideas for the future neorealist generation. Moreover, the blend of poetic and realistic elements in La gente del Po and N.U. recalls the earthy lyricism of such neorealist classics as Vittorio...