Michelangelo Antonioni
“With one startling, painterly composition after another--of abandoned fishing cottages, electrical towers, looming docked ships--RED DESERT creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema's preeminent poet of the modern age.”
Winner of the Golden Lion at the 1964 Venice Film Festival
Every shot man and machine. Young woman (Monica Vitti) in green overcoat with small boy (Valerio Bartoleschi). Loud machine roars and hisses over dialogue. The Steam Scene. Hissing hell steam, escapes in giant billows from concrete. Rewind and do the entire scene again. Spend time with that hiss. Close eyes on the third. Find if the steam suggests anything to you. And see every shot. You set the camera there see the Thing. People who make movies are rad. Shit, I should turn it down. I remember Ravenna from my youth and father’s teaching. Businessman’s dad died, responsibility’s on his nice overcoat shoulders. Geysers explode sideways powerfully. See what happens when you scan the screen quickly rather than slowly, like a nervous animal from corner to corner, what do you notice in the shot? Like when the mother gently touches her sleeping son stare only at the 1960s robot – stare. Back and forth robot bonked wall. Gaze at the gray hole-punched metal lightbulb eyes disc ears hook nose and that smile. Giuliana, Mom, bugging in her white nightgown.
Her shop. She is, um, nervous, neurotic, always wrapping herself in a shawl, a scarf, a blanket, walking in fits and starts, pauses, turn and looks, like, seven thoughts away from the present possible spectrum. Dude - Corrado (Richard Harris) - moving in. There’s something. She stares off into space, into the modern distance. “Giuliana, are you tired?”
“I’m always tired.” Pause. “No, not always, sometimes.”
The accident. In the hospital for a while, due to the shock. An automobile accident but maybe she tried to kill herself. Breakdown to worse. As the film rolls, her ticks, touching, hand-wringing, stumbling worsen.
They’re rolling around together, Giuliana and the ginger Corrado. Just rolling around not his wife Italy during a labor strike. Why underscore the strike, and these Owners (walking) wandering around looking for workers talking about the accident, and why did Cannes go off on this in 1964. Meditate on 1964 – close your eyes, what did that look like in Europe. Oh! Tony Bruno owned that Alfa Romeo and we drove it to Karlsruhe for tuxes senior year and after he scored a goal he leaned over the sprawled keeper middle finger cocked yelled “fuck you!” That Alfa. What did audiences think about in 1964? What was my dad doing? What mom? What Sue? What Leo? I believe in 1964. Owners.
Now the capitalists hang as a bohemian commune in a rusty fisherman’s shack. Pier over water. Lying about drinking, sprawling on the floor reading, innuendo, perhaps an orgy’s on. Oh my god, a mattress in the small space size-like-elevator the fisherman’s shack. One by one, during conversation, they all join the reading lady on the mattress. This might get you at Cannes in 1964. Weird touching and laughing, feet rubbing, one dress unzip shoulder show bra strap. Aphrodisiac. “You’d be surprised what men in other countries do.”
Now they’re ripping up the shack board by board and jamming slats into the wood stove. Large merchant marine docked, raises a flag. One or two flags for infectious disease? One. “Let’s get out of here.” Can you build a panic to get everyone out of a room, as an actor? There you are assembled, six actors, and, action! Build-a-Panic. Let’s get the fuck out of here motherfucking smallpox on that boat! Grab coats, let’s go, where are my keys, let’s go now before we fucking die! Yeah. I could build a panic, get you to react and clear out, in front of camera. And while the whole thing is absurd, playing. Playing! Like kids in an attic. Her mental problems after the accident. She tried to kill herself once, foggy road and self-harm entwine. Neorealism and color play.
Because now she’s bugging: I swear! It was an accident. I didn’t mean it. The fog confused me. I made a mistake, I’m sorry. I swear it! Place actors in small fisherman’s shack place actors on an oil platform in the sea have them stand in fog mysterious and conversing before billowing steam. They live in a building on the docks, on a canal, large ships passing bedroom window, place actors in a busy port, ship’s blasting horns and water’s foghorns, industry movement, rust, steel, oil, machinery. Her young son can’t get out of bed. Says he can’t feel his legs. Has he had his vaccinations? Of course he has! The doctor wouldn’t forget them. Can’t move his legs. Mother stressed, as you can imagine, their domestic stressed. Ship blaring seen through bedroom window.
Bunch of bourgeois lying around semi-orgy picnicking on some form of insane, aimless adventure while there’s a strike on, not once commenting on their own role in the unrest. Huge industry churns, meanwhile. And now the boy. What now? The boy! Perhaps the toxic system gets to them after all and hits the most vulnerable.
Elisabeth Maersk, Kobenhavn. That people build ships should be our redemption, and our story’s core. Giuliana and her son and housekeeper/nurse just hanging out all day living this private hell, while gigantic oceangoing vessels pass through the canal and the men always on the road. Private domestic bliss hell while the industrial world spins and mankind buzzes with gigantism while women suffer and children suffer. She caught the kid walking! He was lying! The fuck, kid! Tulipa, registered Palermo. The boy lied to her, his own mother. This deception alienates her further. The men keep her away. She’s alone, a woman and all these males, and now her son - total isolation. I mean, she stumbled along the hallway her right shoulder bumping the wall and hotel room doors, bumbling along the wall, leaning into it while stumble-trotting. So fucking weird. I mean, if anybody presented that anywhere anytime that person would be cray-gone or stupid drunk. And here she is. Have actors in hallway. Have female lead Antonioni’s muse stumble bang bump down the long hall. Corrado stands at the end, shot construction.
My son? No, he doesn’t need me, it’s me who needs him. My hair hurts. “It didn’t get better. It will never get better. Never.” A lot of clasping and gripping.
“You brood on your illness,” he said, “but it’s just an illness, like any other.”
I think the book on the nightstand rotary telephone is called Hot Babe. Hey, pause and stare and write your own damn book. “Help me.”
I’m scared – Calm down! “What are you scared of?”
“Streets, factories, colors, people – everything!”
Acting is sometimes fully stupid. What are we doing this for? Do we have this much time on our hands? Here, you don’t have to hunter-gather anymore: watch TV, theater and cinema. Now they’re making out, face grinding, hell neck grinding she wears her slip. Lot of ginger torso wrestling arm pretzel. You’ve got to at least aspire to that old man hobbling cobblestone. Shot from several stories above.
Sure, sure, I love film first in line but this is some wack shit. Bodies in shots, though, moving bodies framed, art. Now running through nighttime streets. And there’s the Alfa. Tony! On the Autobahn, friend! And then you disappeared. No, that was a hard disappear. Suppose most dudes just aren’t destined to know one another after childhood. Suppose we just keep flying, keep flying, get out there young one. A friend of mine killed in Iraq. Some stayed in Germany and England. But fly to the Pacific Ocean from Central Europe, and again to the Atlantic, to Boston this time, and again, and once more make it hero each stop and do not minimize the myth. It’s your job to sing the myth! Fly to the Pacific triumphant return, pause, then to the Mississippi and back to the Atlantic, to Narragansett Bay large world-class body. Build foundation among the oaks with a song to the sea. Build, roots, create, stand tall here, Dr. Dopeness, the one they’ve tried to kill.
Place actor against white stucco wall. There’s the Art Shot, now speak in front of the wall.
‘There’s something terrible about reality.”
So you’re watching this in Cannes in 1964 and you’re like “fuck yeah.”
Now she’s stumbling, lost, among machinery next to a massive ship.
The boy asks, “Why is that smoke yellow?”
“Because it’s poisonous,” Giuliana replies.
The last shot mega-factory with the poisonous gas. FINE.
Industrialization, factorization, rational planet madness, nobody honest with anybody, yellow smoke wreaks havoc on bodies especially women and children.
