Word: antonioni
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Michelangelo Antonioni, in The Red Desert, has finally made a film which can be called entirely cinematic. With the added dimension of color, Antonioni has been able to do away with plot, characterization, and even music, elements which have detracted from the cinema for fifty years. Instead, the director concentrates on the purely visual, on the purely aural, and on the relationship between people and their environment, all proper pursuits of film...
Instead, the value of the film rests in Antonioni's use of the camera and the cutting room to create a series of extremely subtle impressions. Antonioni selects his images with the precision of an electronic microscope and puts them together with almost transcendent sensitivity to force his audience to make strictly visual comparisons. If you would criticize Antonioni for merely conveying a tone, you must remember that a painting does no more...
...backgrounds of The Red Desert serve as objective correlatives for the inner states of the various characters When Giuliana first appears, Antonioni gives us long shots of the chemical factory, filled with confusing detail, for Giuliana remains detached from modern life and very confused by it. But when Ugo, the engineer, is shown, we enter the factory for interior shots or else view particular pieces of apparatus outside. As Giuliana and Corrado begin to fall in love and Giuliana begins to open herself up to the world again, Antonioni takes us to the radar installations at Medicina, where the tall...
...clear and clean. The small, white sailboat which appears, in contrast to the grimy oil tankers which have drifted through the film before, represents escape and freedom. The rock formations along the shore, like the rocks in L'Aventurra, have a shape and character which nearly animates them. Antonioni, by this purely visual statement, gives us an idyllic alternative with which to measure the industrial world, either sordid or sterile, in which we live...
Like a painter, Antonioni uses the frame of the picture for his effects. When Corrado leaves Giuliana, he simply walks out of the frame. The camera continually moves off the characters and onto the landscape. At the very end, Giuliana and her son disappear into the lower right hand corner while Antonioni gives us a perfect still shot of the factory. In this way, the director is constantly making us aware that the frame seperates what we can see from what we cannot...