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”.