Red Desert (1964)

One of the powerful communicative devices of film is colour. It can be used to evoke atmosphere and change mood. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert (1964) uses colour to depict the bleak nature of an industrial landscape, to dehumanise the character. Colour adds another dimension to his films. Colour is just a fragment of human experience.

Antonioni: “Colour has a psychological and dramatic function for me”, Let’s Talk about Zabriskie Point, (Esquire 74:2, August 1970), The Architecture of Vision, p.98

Antonioni believed that “Colour is such a part of modern society...on the one hand [colours] gave me a more realistic picture of the external reality of people and things, on the other hand, the colours [from other films] were never the right ones to fully capture the feelings generated by the relationships between people and things (Cottino-Jones, 2008, p.283) (Antonioni, “Red Desert”, (Humanite Dimanche, 23 September 1964)

Red Desert is set in the industrial town of Ravenna, Italy, full of huge factories and machines and a polluted river valley. Everything is layered in soot and smog. The sea life has been killed by an oil spill.

The range of colours used in the film signifies the melancholy of the protagonist, Giuliana, and the melancholy of the landscape . Antonioni, discussed why he used colour in Red Desert: “I have tried to exploit each and every narrative resource of colour in such a way that it contributed to the mood of each sequence”, (Cottino-Jones, 2008, p.283)

In the opening sequence, Giuliana wanders through the marshland with her son, Valero. Her facial expression seems morose, as if it has been clouded or polluted by the industrial architecture. She is either numbed by the intoxicating fumes, or she is sad at seeing how much the landscape is being stripped of its life. Her face mirrors the colour of the industrial smoky landscape. The greyness in her face is a startling contrast to her bright red hair, wild and untamed, and her thick green coat . There is some emotional despair in Giuliana that is trying to release itself through vivid colour. We are reminded throughout the film of the greyness of the industrial landscape, even when the end credits roll on a painted backdrop of dull grey blocks of factories, chimneys giving out green smoke, and a mass of dirty yellow oil drums .

Mid-way through the film, when a part of the factory explodes off- screen, the smoke not only encompasses the characters on screen, but the whole cinematic screen. The industrial processes suffocate and cover everything in its surrounding landscape. The camera is incredibly still at this point, allowing itself to be smothered in the green-grey smoke. The same effect is recreated in another scene set on the harbour, when characters appear and disappear out of the fog. Giuliana seems to be the only character responding to the stifling, foggy atmosphere. The other characters remain still and silent as Giuliana finds her way through the smoke.

The violent transformation of the countryside surrounding the city had a profound effect on Antonioni. Antonioni went to extreme lengths in production design to show the devastating effect of industry on nature. A row of pine trees were painted white, to give the impression that the colour of life had been sucked out, and to highlight the unnaturalness of the urban landscape .

Antonioni said “I want to paint the film as one paints the canvas; I want to invent the colour relationships, and not limit myself to photographing only natural colours” (Chatman & Duncan, 2008, p.98).

Sounds, along with grey and white colours, are used to emphasise the nature of the industrial landscape throughout the film. The sound of repetitive ghostly ship horns and atmospheric electronics remind us of the constant mechanics and industrial creations that Giuliana and her family are surrounded by. The music creates a sense of unease, brooding and sinister, and seems to be “beyond signifying technology, but Giuliana’s neurosis itself” (Brunette, 1998, p.98).

Antonioni used telephoto and zoom lenses to flatten spatial distances and reduce the depth of field. This diminishes the difference between character and place, particularly when both are washed in grey and muted colours. Characters become objects in the dull landscape. When Giuliana and Zeller wander diagonally down an empty grey street in the old town of Ravenna, she bypasses a fruit-seller, who seems to blend into the background (Fig.23). He is as still as the fruit sitting in his cart. Antonioni decided to paint all the items in the cart grey to match the walls and ground of the old town, and the cloudy sky above. The buildings look like they are folding in on Giuliana and Zeller, creating a sense of claustrophobia.

In one shot of the street, Antonioni focuses the camera on a crack in the wall for a matter of seconds. The time given to this shot allows the viewer to start picking out the shapes, forms and colours that the cracks and erosions make. It looks like a painting by Jackson Pollock or Wassily Kandinsky. In reality, the buildings in the old town are being eroded by the chemicals coming from the industrial factories. At one point, Giuliana pins herself to the wall, overcome with emotion.

Colour is used in Red Desert to determine tactile differences between object and place. Giuliana, a fragile and soft character must deal with the hard metallic and plastic surfaces surrounding her. When she wanders through the factory to find her husband, she gets lost, and is startled by noisy machines processing all around her. Bright red, yellow and blue colours appear in small quantities inside the factory, on pipes that weave in and out of one another around the factory space. A line of bright red oil drums run along the perimeter of the building, in startling contrast to the metallic, blank colour of the factory facade. Antonioni uses primary colours to invigorate the grey landscape, and capture our attention.

Antonioni argued that every day the industrial world produces millions of objects of all types, all in colour. “Our houses are full of colour, and our streets and public places are full of colourful posters. With the invasion of colours we have become addicted to them” (Cottino-Jones, 2008, p.283).

Giuliana paints pastel colours on the white plastered walls of her shop in the old town of Ravenna. The patches of colour are randomly painted on parts of the wall, like a Jackson Pollock or Rothko painting. This sudden invasion of colour in the space signifies Giuliana’s internal anxiety at the rest of the dreary landscape, and these colours are her only freedom of expression. The colours of the walls were changed throughout the film to mark changes in the emotional state of the character (Cottino-Jones, 2008, p.285). The colours of the walls change from pastel blues to pinks and rich reds when she becomes intimate with her husband’s friend, Zeller.

In Red Desert, the invasion of colour is abstractly beautiful, but it is hard to understand why Antonioni uses colour in this way. In one sense, colour could be used to express Giuliana’s internal anxieties that the other characters might not be aware of. In another sense, the colours are painted into the landscape to bring it to life, showing that industry does not have to be grey and lifeless.