Red Desert, a cinematographic exile

Sorry my readers (if I have any) for my delay in posting the last film tip review. This is all about my excessive amazement of this 1964's masterpiece of cinema, Red Desert by Michelangelo Antonioni.

Red Desert (1964) scares me. I watch it and just wonder how someone can go so deep with no much more than a camera. Red Desert is exiguous, dry and minimal, yet at the same time, this aesthetic of scarcity is immense. It conveys intensity and temporal perception. If I searched for a cinematographic experience of exile, here it is. This film revealed to me “what cinema could be”. Before that, I had barely grasped the potential of cinema. After that, I began to believe in cinema more than I could stand.

Red Desert astonishes me. Maybe this paralyzing effect is related to prolonged scenes that follow the quase-imoblity of the main character's body. Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is paralyzed in a vague gaze that just sees doom and emptiness. A precariousness of movements, a difficulty to act and almost noreaction constitute the fragile manner through which Giulina's body inscribes itself in landscapes and filmscapes: in the factory, in the debris, at the empty house, in an uninhabited alleyway. Frames and camera movements describe a loneliness that the character embitters, that her gaze delivers when it unveils the emptiness of that place. The outside is the disclosure of Giuliana's inside; thereby, the mystery of her madness is not restricted within dialogues and actions; it lengthens along the world she looks at.

Red Desert engulfs me. Maybe that happens because Giuliana's misery was everywhere, not only in the place or in the relationships, but also on us, the spectators. In one of the scenes, she eats a sandwich like a little cornered animal hiding behind a bush, which is just a banal action that reveals a lot due to the way it was filmed. Her experience of isolation, disorientation, disconnection, and despair, is our aesthetic experience. We see what she sees: sorrowful cinematographic landscapes and colors. That film seems to let us be led by the world. Antonioni gives himself to the world, to the time of things that simply are there, without giving his signature up. Like a film critic said, in a Film Quarterly review from 1965, that Italian director “is trying to make pictures, not dramatic movies”.

no  place  for  life,  only  for  sham  form

 

(quotidian exile#2)

Film tip:

Red Desert (original Italian title: Il deserto rosso ),1964

by Michelangelo Antonioni

Mizoguchi ∩ Bresson

An adaptation of two tales from an eighteenth-century collection of ghost narratives, Ugetsu (1953) tells the story of two commoners (a potter and his helper) and their wives, who have lived in a rural area until, in the middle of the war, they decided to try their chances selling ceramics in the city. Unfortunately, the man’s dream of triumph only brings havoc on themselves, and after some adventures - an affair with a ghost woman and a samurai’s fight - each man has to return to the poor life and still stick in that countryside tiny hovel.

We can immediately compare this acclaimed Japanese masterpiece, Ugetsu, with Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, as both films were made in the beginning of the 1950's (a period called post-war cinema), and both have this thematic and visual connection with otherworld (God and ghosts); besides, in terms of cinematographic choices, the two filmmakers are very close. Bresson and Mizoguchi are portraying common people, particularly how harrowing the ordinary life can be or how stifling someone's life can be when one - for any reason, money, war, work, faith, rules, love, etc - is a prisoner of one's own situation. It is timely here to remember Mizoguchi's notes about the Ugetsu filming process: “The feeling of wartime must be apparent in the attitude of every character. The violence of war unleashed by those in power on a pretext of the national good must overwhelm the common people with suffering—moral and physical. Yet the commoners, even under these conditions, must continue to live and eat. This theme is what I especially want to emphasize here. How should I do it?”

Bresson and Mizoguchi share some formal strategies to create that melancholic picture effect; both keep camera distance in the scene, use the long duration takes, and have the supreme ability of turning the scene into a geometric design or into a sort of impressionist painting. Finally, along the same lines, they create through the visual experience a sensory experience. An exemplary sequence of Ugetsu is the lake one, about which Phillip Lopate wrote: “The celebrated Lake Biwa episode, where the two couples come upon a phantom boat in the mists, is surely one of the most lyrical anywhere in cinema. Edited to create a stunningly uncanny mood, it also prepares us for the supernatural elements that follow. The dying sailor on the boat is not a ghost, though the travelers at first take him for one; he warns them, particularly the women, to beware of attacking pirates, another ominous foreshadowing. It is the movie’s supreme balancing act to be able to move seamlessly between the realistic and the otherworldly. Mizoguchi achieves this feat by varying the direction between a sober, almost documentary, long-distance view of mayhem and several carefully choreographed set pieces, such as the phantom ship”.

(about last film tip)