Everything That Happens in Red Desert (5)

Outside the factory

After the succession of blurry images and distorted sounds in the title sequence, the first scene ‘proper’ of Red Desert begins by snapping into a different perspective, surveying the industrial landscape with a more objective and dispassionate eye. We are quickly acclimated to this new perspective by three establishing shots. In the first, huge jets of fire erupt from below the frame: we find ourselves impossibly close to them.

The camera steps back, then steps back again, to put those flames in context.

We see that the fire comes from a flare stack, an industrial vent ‘primarily used for burning off flammable gas released by safety valves during unplanned overpressuring of plant equipment.’¹ Then the flare stack is de-centred, pushed to the top-left quadrant of the frame, and we see it as part of a much larger complex of buildings.

These three scene-setting images accomplish three things: they induce shock; they induce awe; and they create an intimacy between us and the industrial complex.

First, they shock us. Throughout the title sequence, we have occupied a position that corresponds to that of Giuliana. We see and hear as she does, with ‘her’ song gradually taking over the soundtrack until we cannot hear anything else. The aggressive cut at the end of the title sequence jolts us out of this perspective and, by the same token, helps us to understand Giuliana’s hyper-sensitivity to her environment. She experiences these distant explosions as though she were right in the middle of them; she ‘wakes up’ face to face with them.

Secondly, these establishing shots induce a sense of awe, not only for the scale and beauty of the factories, but also for the virtuosity with which Antonioni films them. ‘I no longer want to employ the subjective camera,’ Antonioni said in the mid-1970s, ‘in other words the camera that represents the viewpoint of the character.’² Instead, he sought to achieve a kind of technical objectivity. ‘[A]s the director I am God,’ he said, ‘I can allow myself any kind of liberty.’³ Although he was referring to the camerawork in his later films, Chung Kuo: Cina and The Passenger, something of this approach can also be seen in his earlier work. In Red Desert’s factory scenes, the camera’s omnipotence mirrors the seemingly limitless power of the structures being filmed. By not restricting itself to a human perspective, but instead ranging freely among the industrial apparatus, Antonioni’s god-like camera invites us to share in his sense of awe at these modern cathedrals.

The flames, seen up close, have a mysterious power and beauty; like the electronic noises in the title sequence, their origin remains unknown. Then, seen from a few feet away, their origin becomes clear and they are less mysterious (and perhaps less beautiful). Then, seen from below and from a great distance, they and the flare stack that generates them are dwarfed by an enormous smoke-stack and the cloud of smoke it generates. It is awe-inspiring that the camera is able to inhabit these different spaces with such apparent ease. It can see the factory from any angle, from any height, at any distance, plunging into fire, smoke or steam with impunity, re-configuring the spatial relations between objects (and between the audience and these objects) in any way it (or its director) chooses. This omnipotent camera-eye works alongside but also in conflict with the one that sees the world as Giuliana does, through a mis-aligned lens. The camera can make us share, in a very direct way, her disorientation and terror, but it can also place us in the role of the dispassionate machine, observing things and people from a distance.

As such, the third function of these shots is to create a sense of connection – of intimacy, even – between us and the industrial equipment. This is the comfortable intimacy with the mechanical modern world that Ugo and Valerio enjoy, but that Giuliana cannot attain. The three establishing shots have a kind of explanatory function, showing us a single, elemental phenomenon – fire – then showing us the single vent emitting the fire, then showing us the factory complex in which the fire-spewing vent operates. Even if this sequence does not literally explain the workings of the factory, the orderly, rational shot progression gives the impression that we are examining this setting through an expert eye.

‘Where is Antonioni in these films?’ asks Peter Brunette, and he goes on to argue that there is a kind of judgemental objectivity in the director’s attitude to Giuliana, infused with a strain of misogyny:

[T]o what extent is it legitimate, or productive, to interpret the film in terms of authorial intentionality? The situation is particularly acute for Red Desert, because the placement of the author is even less clear than usual. […] For the first time, Antonioni is dealing with a decidedly unbalanced female lead […] [T]he film seems to suggest a universal model of ‘hysterical’ woman that all women are or have the potential of becoming.⁴

Brunette’s critique highlights a potential problem with Antonioni’s god-like, objective camera-eye, but it is (I think) the central problem that Red Desert grapples with from the first scene to the last. What is Giuliana’s place, or Antonioni’s place, or indeed our place, in the red desert? Do we accept this place as our home? Does it accept us? How do we relate to those who thrive in this place? How do we relate to those who perish in it?

To explore this ambiguity, it is instructive to look closely at Antonioni’s comments in two interviews, this one from 1964:

In the countryside around Ravenna, the horizon is dominated by factories, smokestacks, and refineries. The beauty of that view is much more striking than the anonymous mass of pine trees which you see from afar, all lined up in a row, the same color. The factory is a more varied element, more lively, because behind it one can detect the presence of man and human life, his dramas and hopes. I am in favor of progress, and yet I realize that because of the disruption it brings, it also causes trouble. But that is modern life, and the future is already knocking at our door.⁵

And this one from 1967:

I shot some of Red Desert along a road where half the horizon was filled with the pine trees that still surround Ravenna – though they are vanishing fast – while the other half of the skyline was taken up with a long line of factories […] I felt the skyline filled with things made by man, with those colors, was more beautiful and richer and more exciting for me than the long, green, uniform line of pinewoods, behind which I still sensed empty nature.⁶

Given his explanation of the film’s title (discussed in Part 2), one might expect Antonioni to focus on the negative aspects of these industrial processes that have replaced the world’s oases with a ‘living, bleeding desert, full of the flesh of men.’ His surprising preference for the factories over the pinewoods adds another layer of meaning to that first shot of the title sequence, in which the camera panned from the trees to the refineries. The drabness of those tree canopies, which I noted in Part 1, was not simply a comment on how nature had been drained of colour, but was also a kind of critique of ‘empty nature’ with its monotonous colours. ‘I think the background that you see as the title credits roll is very beautiful,’ said Antonioni, referring specifically to the industrial components of that background. ‘The colors are superb.’⁷ And yet, in the statements quoted above we can still see him leaning towards Giuliana’s perspective: towards a pained consciousness of the natural world that is ‘vanishing fast’, and of the ‘disruption and trouble’ that progress brings in its wake.

The pulsing bursts of fire at the start of Red Desert represent the future Antonioni speaks of, the one that is ‘already knocking at our door,’ the door in this case being the cinema screen in front of us. If the rhythm of the flames is a parody of the ‘ah-ah-ah’ song from the title sequence, it also suggests a force that demands our attention, that announces its ongoing presence (and ongoing consumption of the oasis) from moment to moment. ‘That is modern life,’ says the director pragmatically; his futurist mindset insists on seeing and hearing this with absolute clarity.

But I would still argue that the central point of view in Red Desert is Giuliana’s, and that every scene in the film is fundamentally concerned with her emotions. It is not that Antonioni pretends to be like Ugo but is secretly like Giuliana, or that he claims to find the factories beautiful when, deep down, he finds them terrifying. As we will see later in this series, Antonioni clearly identified with Corrado in some ways, but he also seemed to regard the film as a critique of Corrado’s delusions about himself and exploitation of Giuliana. Brunette’s question, ‘Where is Antonioni in this film?’, is a productive one, but not because it prompts us to locate the director on one side or another (sympathetic or judgemental) of Giuliana’s crisis. Antonioni sometimes talked like Ugo or like Corrado, and may have been more like them than he was like Giuliana in real life. I have no way of knowing, but I do know that Red Desert (my Red Desert) is focused on exploring how it feels to be Giuliana, to be a casualty of modern life.

The camera in Red Desert imposes on us a kind of complicity, integrating us into the world that so intimidates Giuliana. At times, in subsequent scenes, it will feel as though we are staring at her through a cold, mechanical eye. However, even these moments serve to increase our empathy for Giuliana: we need to understand this cold-blooded perspective if we are to understand hers. Red Desert conveys her sense of being de-centred, marginalised, and found wanting by the robot-eyes that populate her world. This is why these establishing shots are so essential, and why we do not cut from the title sequence directly to a shot of Giuliana. We need to know how this world looks and feels to those who inhabit it more easily than Giuliana does, because she knows how it looks and feels to them. Even though she cannot see the modern world as they do, she has internalised their way of seeing, their voices, and their judgements.

Seymour Chatman frames this in helpful terms:

Even as we sympathize with Giuliana’s inability to cope with this environment, we marvel at its boiling energy. We see, perhaps, a way in which one could live in such an environment.⁸

The wording here is crucial: we see perhaps a way in which one could live, a possibility of living in harmony with the modern world, but one that remains hypothetical and available only to the indefinite, impersonal ‘one’, not to us. We are like Giuliana, at least for the duration of Red Desert, and we share her agony in sensing other modes of life that remain out of reach. Later in the film, she and Corrado discuss the questions, ‘What should I look at?’ and ‘How should I live?’, the answers to which remain in the realm of ‘Perhaps one could…’ without ever arriving at ‘I will.’

It is worth drawing another parallel with the opening of La notte here. In the first shot of that film, we occupy a human-sized point of view, looking up at things that dwarf us, each bigger and/or higher than the last.

We see a Philips van (its shiny surface reflecting our fellow pedestrians), a tree to our left, criss-crossing overhead lines (to power Milan’s tram network), an archaic building occupying a nearby street corner, and (looming far in the distance) the recently completed Pirelli tower, Italy’s second-tallest building at the time.⁹ Familiar street noises fill the soundtrack. This is how we used to see and hear the world. The camera tilts up like a person craning their neck. We feel impressed and overwhelmed by the human activity around us, and by the human achievements towering above us.

Then, suddenly, we find ourselves at the top of that faraway skyscraper, looking from left to right via a cut, not via a pan or a tilt that would simulate human movements.

We see a space, equipped with rails to carry heavy machinery, that only maintenance workers would ever access. No people are visible, the car horns are more remote now, and we hear (presumably from nearby) a mysterious alarm sounding differently pitched notes. In the next shot, we descend in a smooth, steady (again, inhuman) motion down the side of the building, carried by an unseen elevator.

Our eyes are not on the city of Milan itself, but on the image of the city in windows that only reflect: we cannot see what is behind them, except to notice that some of the windows have internal blinds or shutters which alter the external reflection. As Chatman puts it:

Since nothing else in Milan is as high, the glass reflects only the city below, from whose business it appears completely divorced. Even the noise of traffic cannot rise high enough to disturb its impersonal and useless tranquility.¹⁰

John David Rhodes notes that what we see reflected in the glass are

the skyscrapers and highways that indicate Milan’s rapid postwar urban and economic expansion […] the surfaces of objects whose existence is predicated on and proclaims Italy’s accelerated entry into and competition in the global economy in the postwar period.¹¹

Antonioni found the industrial landscape beautiful because ‘behind it one can detect the presence of man and human life, his dramas and hopes.’¹² The journey from the street corner to the top of the Pirelli building is like an allegory of human aspiration, in which we are forever exceeding our capacities and proportions until we can ascend, as if by teleportation, to a state of ‘impersonal and useless tranquility’ – Chatman’s phrase evokes the static bliss of heaven. It is easy to see why Antonioni finds in this spectacle ‘the presence of man and human life, his dramas and hopes,’ but the fulfilment of these hopes also does away with ‘the presence of man and human life’ altogether.

We hear electronic noises as we descend the Pirelli building, and as in Red Desert these noises are not easy to distinguish from industrial sounds. They are like the alarm we just heard; they might be the beeping noises the elevator makes when in motion; they might be coming from the building itself or from the city down below. In the next shot, one side of the frame is occupied by a direct view of the city, the other side by the city’s reflection in the skyscraper windows, now seen from a different angle.

This is how we see the world now, in the modern age: from an impossible height, in a reflection, through a mechanical eye, with exclusively mechanical movements, scanning structures that could only be built with the help of highly mechanised industrial processes. The camera tilts down vertiginously – one false move or faulty mechanism and we will die.

We live among the robots and at their mercy, with their increasingly unfamiliar songs in our ears.

Compare this sequence, as filmed, to what we find in the screenplay:

Milan, noontime. Window washers are working on the tall Pirelli Building, from which they see a wide panoramic view of the city, whose streets are jammed with traffic. Inside the building, people are leaving their offices to go to lunch. The sidewalks are crowded with people going to and fro; the police have their hands full directing traffic; streetcars are packed with sullen and tired people.¹³

In the screenplay, La notte begins by establishing a human perspective – that of the window washers – so that we know how, and from whose point of view, we are seeing the panorama of Milan. We then broaden our human perspective to that of the office workers in the building, who in turn bring us to the ground level as they break for lunch. In the completed film, the direction of travel is reversed and no longer has any clear motivation. We start at ground level, then suddenly ascend the Pirelli building, then descend back towards the ground without ever getting close to it. There are no window washers to justify our perspective or to explain our descent, and we are not able to see (nor are we in any way conscious of) the people inside the building. The film asks us to stop being human for a few minutes and consider the world from a new, frightening, exhilarating point of view – all before introducing any of the characters.

The opening of Red Desert does something very similar, but this time the ‘human’ perspective (in the title sequence) is that of the disturbed protagonist. Now the modernity of our surroundings is more pervasive, the transition to the robot’s-eye-view more sudden and even less explicable than in La notte. At least in that case we could picture the elevator on the side of the building, even if (unlike the elevator shot in Beyond the Clouds, pictured below) the camera did not show it.

But in Red Desert, how does Carlo di Palma (the cinematographer) get his camera so close to those flames? Viewers can imagine the crane and the long lens that must have been used to capture these images (assuming this isn’t an identical but easier-to-film flare stack in another location), but the quick editing in those three establishing shots locates the flames in a remote, inaccessible place, and thus makes us feel that we have witnessed them from an impossible perspective. We will find ourselves occupying this kind of perspective many more times throughout the film.

The third establishing shot in Red Desert pans from the factory to a crowd of striking workers, then cuts to a human’s-eye level, which is where La notte began.

The panning shot tells us something about the relationship between the factory and the workers. It echoes the opening panning shot of the title sequence: just as that shot blurred the distinction between trees and factories, so this one blurs the distinction between factories and people. Tellingly, whereas that first shot panned right and tilted upwards (from the trees to the factories that overshadow them), this one pans right and tilts downwards (from the factories to the people they overshadow). We see the workers as a distant, anonymous mass: some of them are further de-humanised by their transparent caul-like raincoats.

Would we guess from this shot that the crowd of people are workers on strike? We might expect this scene to evoke a sense of militant protestors standing up to and resisting the monolithic structures that loom over them, but the industrial action here seems weirdly inert. Brunette argues that

the entire episode – which goes unexplained, uncontextualized, and unresolved – seems little more than a gesture on Antonioni’s part, a kind of a quotation or ‘reality effect’ to serve as a background for Giuliana’s problems.¹⁴

But if anything, this strike seems quite unreal, too much so to serve as a mere ‘gesture’ or ‘reality effect’. In the strike sequence near the end of Il grido, the frantic energy of the protestors contrasts starkly with Aldo’s lethargy, as he returns to the refinery they have just vacated.

In Red Desert, lethargy is the norm. The workers do not make any noise as the strike-breaker passes by; they just gather, ominously, at the roadside. One man speaks to another, but he seems to be whispering.

Indeed, it only becomes clear that this is a strike, and that the man walking down the road is a strike-breaker, when a car pulls up with the word Sciopero (‘Strike’) printed on a flyer stuck to its window. The driver addresses the scab, Romeo Salviati, by speaking into a microphone, while another man holds up a speaker and points it over the wall. The first human voice we hear after the title sequence is artificially amplified, distorted, and displaced, making the would-be impassioned speech sound robotic.

In short, the strike action seems to have been mechanised along with everything else, as if the robots were trying to imitate humans by going through the motions of protest. Later in the film, Corrado will remark that the ANIC factory is active again, meaning that the strike must have ended, but we never learn anything about the workers’ grievances or whether they have been addressed. There is no sense of meaningful resistance here. Everyone is dispassionately performing their assigned roles.

Perhaps the most powerful gesture of ‘resistance’ in this sequence comes in the form of Giuliana’s green coat, its texture suggestive of grass, complementing her red hair and defiantly standing out amid the prevailing greyness of her surroundings.

As well as seeming lost and out of place, she also seems like an oasis of brightness and clarity in an otherwise discoloured and distorted world. This is how we are introduced to the film’s protagonist.

Next: Part 6, The sandwich and the slag-heap.

View the Contents post to browse the full series.

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1. ‘Gas flare’ (2024), Wikipedia

2. Bachmann, Gideon, ‘Talking of Michelangelo’, in The Architecture of Vision, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; American edition by Marga Cottino-Jones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 326-332; p. 331

3. Bachmann, Gideon, ‘Talking of Michelangelo’, in The Architecture of Vision, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; American edition by Marga Cottino-Jones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 326-332; p. 330

4. Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 96, 100

5. Maurin, François, ‘Red Desert’, in The Architecture of Vision, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; American edition by Marga Cottino-Jones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 283-286; p. 286

6. Antonioni, Michelangelo, ‘Apropos of Eroticism’, in The Architecture of Vision, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; American edition by Marga Cottino-Jones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 148-167; p. 152

7. Maurin, François, ‘Red Desert’, in The Architecture of Vision, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; American edition by Marga Cottino-Jones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 283-286; p. 286

8. Chatman, Seymour, Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 107

9. Nardelli, Matilde, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 173

10. Chatman, Seymour, Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 103

11. Rhodes, John David, ‘Antonioni and The Development of Style’, in Antonioni: Centenary Essays, ed. Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 276-300; p. 286

12. Maurin, François, ‘Red Desert’, in The Architecture of Vision, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; American edition by Marga Cottino-Jones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 283-286; p. 286

13. Antonioni, Michelangelo, Ennio Flaiano, and Tonino Guerra, ‘La notte’, trans. Roger J. Moore, in Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni (London, Souvenir 1963), pp. 209-276; p. 211

14. Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 101