September 22nd: RED DESERT (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)

NOTE: This film will be projected in the high-definition Blu-ray format.

A woman recovering from a traumatic accident struggles with feelings of alienation.

Michelangelo Antonioni had a number of films under his belt before 1960, but the premiere of his L'Avventura that year at the Cannes Film Festival caused a major sensation, infuriating some and inspiring many. Credited with inventing a new cinematic language, he went on to become a major figure of 60s arthouse cinema alongside his contemporaries Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean-Luc Godard.

Working with the striking beauty of actress Monica Vitti, Antonioni would make two more films (La Notte and L'eclipse) in a similar vein, exploring existential feelings through the lens of modern ennui with an abstract style. These are now considered to be part of a loose trilogy despite sharing no story or character elements. For the director's first color film, he brought Vitti back again for a film with similar conceits, though stranger and more expressionistic, and set against the background of Italy's rapid industrialization.

The story takes place and was mostly shot on location in the Northeastern Italian city of Ravenna, much of the scenery dominated by factories, smokestacks, and chemical plants, all covered by the fog of pollution. While the setting proves oppressive for some of the characters, Antonioni was interested in highlighting the beauty of the various man-made structures in contrast with the natural world.

Claiming he wanted to use film as a painter uses canvas, Antonioni went to an extreme level of visual control. Working with talented cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, the director had such specific colors in mind, he had background trees, streets, and grass painted, and even tinted smoke. The long lenses favored flattened the images and allowed him to also use defocusing for effect.

Starring alongside Vitti is British actor Richard Harris, whose dialogue would wind up being dubbed over in Italian (post-dubbing the dialogue being common for local films of the era). Before the end of the nearly 5-month shoot, Harris would eventually quit the production, due to a combination of prior commitments and an inability to communicate with the non-English-speaking Antonioni.

The soundtrack would be as experimental as the visuals, with the mechanical sound effects manipulated and combined with a largely electronic score, lending the film an otherworldliness that some have compared to science fiction.

Red Desert premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it took the top prize, the Golden Lion. The critical reception was mixed as usual for the director, but it is now regarded as one of his greatest, most groundbreaking works.

Running time is 2 hrs.