Everything That Happens in Red Desert (3)
Noise and noise-music
There are four layers to the soundtrack in Red Desert’s title sequence. First, we hear a gentle white noise. The next two layers of sound emerge gradually and in tandem, and are distinctly less gentle: the continuous roar of the factories and a series of electronic noises. After about 50 seconds, we hear a single human voice singing, and within one minute and 40 seconds after that, the factory sounds and electronic music have faded away, leaving only the voice and the white noise for the final 30 seconds of the title sequence. The first sounds in Red Desert are as alien and confusing as the first images, and like those images they tell us some important things about how Giuliana experiences – and how we will experience – this world.
In his 1913 futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo wrote:
Ancient Life was all silence. In the 19th Century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of men.1
Russolo had an ambitious sense of the ‘evolution of music’ in the modern age. This evolution, he argued, was ‘comparable to the multiplication of machines, which everywhere collaborate with man.’2 The modern ear can take pleasure in the sounds produced by these machines, ‘since it is already educated to modern life, so prodigal in different noises.’3 Russolo’s language of ‘triumph’ and ‘sovereignty’ indicates his rather aggressive sense of how Noise (with a capital N) had taken over the world. For him, this conquest was something to be celebrated. His writing on music and his invention of innovative noise-making instruments were driven by his ‘desire to renew everything,’4 and he saw this renewed musical future in utopian terms:
Our multiplied sensibility, having been conquered by futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears. Thus, the motors and machines of our industrial cities can one day be given pitches, so that every workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noises.5
Something in our ‘sensibility’ was in the process of being ‘conquered’ by futurism, specifically by the eyes of futurism that were then active in the visual arts. Our other senses would soon be conquered as well, making the industrial landscape in which we lived (heavily ‘renewed’ as it was) an intoxicating sensory feast. As Matilde Nardelli puts it, ‘Russolo aimed to recuperate prosaic noise as music, re-defining both concepts in the process.’6 His project to transform something prosaic into something sublime (and vice versa) is prophetic of Giuliana’s crisis in Red Desert: looked at from another angle, Russolo could be envisioning a world where the everyday is invested with a kind of sublime horror, while formerly ‘transcendent’ experiences like love and art become prosaic and mechanical.
Russolo himself died in obscurity, but his ideas about noise-music proved influential on the next generation of composers. Pierre Schaeffer’s Five Noise Studies (1948) was an early example of musique concrète, cut together from everyday sounds recorded on magnetic tape. Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom Antonioni considered hiring to compose music for Red Desert,7 could make a piano sound like a factory machine, as in the insistently repeated chords of ‘Klavierstucke IX’. These chords fade away and then start back up again like a series of mechanised vehicles moving from one end of a warehouse to the other, their monotonous song echoing off the walls. Stockhausen’s ‘Studie II’ consists of a series of multi-layered noises played on a frequency generator, and although the piece is wholly electronic it creates a similar impression of space being traversed. Unearthly sounds ‘fade in’, increasing in volume as though rushing towards us through the ether.
Nardelli quotes a passage from Antonioni’s notebook, written in 1961 as he listened to the soundscape of New York:
All the noises now intensify: the horns, the siren even, then descend little by little. It’s almost silence. But no: another roar, and then again, louder, the siren. Irritating yet suggestive: it makes one feel the horizon.8
This last sentence could just as easily be applied to the music of Schaeffer or Stockhausen. The ‘concreteness’ of Schaeffer’s noise studies makes them physically irritating to listen to: we not only hear the objects being played, we feel them too. Listening to ‘Studie II’ is like having tinnitus, as though the music were occurring in your inner ear, so that the sensation I described above – of sounds rushing towards us through the ether – is combined with the one Antonioni described, of ‘feeling the horizon’ from which the sounds came. That horizon seems to be both external and internal. Later in Red Desert, Giuliana will say that her eyes feel ‘wet’ (‘bagnati’) from staring at the sea too long, and that she worries she will lose interest in the land. Not only does she feel the horizon, she is in danger of vanishing into it.
Nardelli observes that Antonioni’s account of the New York soundscape
may be seen as the product of the very conditions shaping the experience of aurality in the ‘phonographic’ age. Its enhanced discrimination of sounds denotes a phonographic sensibility, an aesthetic shaped by the existence of sound reproduction technology, and also, perhaps, a phonographic sensitivity, an ear whose perceptiveness has been trained on the model of the heightened receptiveness of the machine.9
This sounds like Russolo’s dream of aligning the orchestra of noise-making instruments outside and the ‘multiplied sensibility’ (and sensitivity) inside. But there is also something disturbing in Antonioni’s sound diary, a sense that noise has become inescapable, that it perpetually irritates us, fading away but then coming back again, making us ‘feel the horizon’ whether we want to or not. The disturbances we sense outside are reflected in our equally disturbed minds and bodies, leaving us with no place of quiet refuge.
In the first few seconds of the first shot in Red Desert, two mournful industrial whines fade in: one low and continuous, the other high-pitched and oscillating. Their volume increases as the camera pans into the factory complex, closer to the source of these noises. We were looking at the trees, with nothing but an organic-seeming white noise in our ears, but now we notice the factories and the grinding, incessant din that emanates from them. We recognise it as an incessant noise, as something that will not stop. Roberto Calabretto quotes Vittorio Gelmetti – who composed the electronic music for Red Desert – extolling the virtues of machines that can create unceasing noise:
[T]he characteristic of an electronic sound [...] is that it can be continued indefinitely. Once it is turned on, a generator can continue to play without any effort; it is no longer a traditional instrument that requires the player’s effort.10
For most of the title sequence, and for several minutes afterward, Red Desert will make us painfully aware of the ‘indefinite’ noise that pervades the factory complex, but at least here there is a prospect of the factories shutting down from time to time. As Gelmetti says, the electronic sounds he works with have an even more ‘indefinite’ quality, in that they can safely be left to play for any amount of time without human intervention. By the same token, like a relentless tinnitus whine, they cannot necessarily be avoided or interrupted.
The electronic sounds that play over the factory whines at the start of Red Desert are not incessant or indefinite – indeed they come in fits and starts, then disappear entirely – but they are imbued with a distinct sense of menace. To describe them, I will resort to what F. T. Marinetti (the pioneering futurist who inspired Russolo) called ‘free words’, onomatopoeic letter combinations meant to represent the sounds of the modern world.11
Red Desert’s title music begins with an echoing rattlesnake-like ‘sch-sch-sch-sch-sch’ noise, which is then repeated at a louder volume, followed by a distant electronic ‘raaao’. Very quiet at first, we hear a kind of ‘tt-tt-tt-tt, tt-tt-tt-tt’, a single echoing consonant that could be an object tapping against a metal surface or a human utterance electronically transformed into a rhythmic stutter. Then, slightly louder, there is an echoing, bubbling noise, ‘bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup’, with a drawn-out ‘ssshhhh’ and a high-pitched metallic shimmer (like a blade glancing along an abrasive surface) erupting behind it as it increases in volume.
These sounds are almost familiar, as suggested by the similes in the previous paragraph, but they are also very much ‘renewed’ and transformed by Gelmetti. At the same time as we notice the factories and begin to hear their constant droning, we also hear the creatures that inhabit this environment: something like a rattlesnake, something like a lion, perhaps something like a bird chirping or pecking at something. But we also know that there are no snakes, lions, or birds in these factories. Such animals can be predatory and frightening in themselves, but here they have been translated into the same realm as ‘Studie II’, an ethereal space invisible to human eyes. We cannot know where these sounds are coming from or what creatures are making them, so the sense of danger they evoke (like the sense of danger evoked by the colour red) is hard to comprehend and impossible to evade. Russolo spoke admiringly of ‘the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws.’12 Again, though he intends to evoke the variety and beauty of these industrial sounds, he is also describing a treacherous jungle inhabited by motorised animals that mutter, throb, and shriek.
The continuous factory noises fade in underneath these electronic notes, like the rhythm section of a band fronted by robots. Gelmetti described his music for Red Desert as ‘electronic compositions with the continuous sound presence of machine noises,’13 so it is appropriate to consider these layers of sound as different components of a band or orchestra. After their first few stuttering, shimmering vocalisations, the robots begin singing in earnest over shot 2, the one in which the film’s title appears. The robots start with an almost inaudible split-second ‘beep’ which transitions immediately into a series of intense roaring noises: ‘Beep-vvwup, vvwooorp, vwwup. Beep-vvwup. Vwwwwwup, vvwooorp, vwwwwup.’ More beeping noises echo in the background, as though emanating from the primary noises made by the robots, like excess energy rippling across the airwaves.
The ‘vworp’ sounds recall the famous grinding noise made by the Tardis in Doctor Who. Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop said that when he designed this sound effect in 1963, he wanted to evoke the ‘rending of the fabric of time and space,’14 hence the increasingly strained, high-pitched growls the Tardis emits as it dematerialises. The ‘vworps’ in Red Desert are more irregular and unpredictable, veering between curt, matter-of-fact ‘vvwup’ sounds and an insistent, agonised ‘vwwwwwup’. As with the Tardis, there is something unmistakably violent about these more high-pitched noises: something is either being torn or tearing at something else, furiously biting a strip of flesh from its prey or crying out in pain as its own flesh is ripped off. Unlike the Tardis ‘vworp’, the Red Desert sounds resemble vocalisations, and possibly human ones. It is as if someone were trying to say something and being constantly frustrated by the distorting effect applied to their voice.
Any of these interpretations – a high-tech machine, a furious animal, a frustrated human voice – could apply to the sounds we are hearing, but no one interpretation can fully explain them. The sounds (and images) that occur when a film’s title appears on the screen often underline an important aspect of what the film is about. In this case, just as we do not see anything obviously resembling a red desert behind the black lettering of ‘IL DESERTO ROSSO’, so the ‘vworps’ on the soundtrack do not denote anything specific that would help us to decode those words. Like the blurry industrial edifices, however, the sound effects seem well matched with the idea of a red desert. In Part 2, I argued that the film’s title applies as much to the blurriness and instability of the image as to the dehumanising industrial complex we are squinting at. Gelmetti’s music provides an aural counterpoint to both the red-desert-factories and the red-desert-distortion applied to them. This is the red-desert-song, sung through a red-desert-filter and heard with red-desert-ears. Walter Faber’s ordeal in Homo Faber centres on his sense of how things can be (not just ‘be like’) other things, and the comparisons I have been making in trying to describe Gelmetti’s music are intended to capture a similar sense of instability. These sounds are machines and animals and human voices, and they are a kind of red desert.
Next: Part 4, Robotic and human songs.
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Russolo, Luigi, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), trans. Barclay Brown, p. 23. For the connection between Antonioni, futurism, and musique concrète, I am indebted to Matilde Nardelli’s article (cited later in this post and in Part 4).
Russolo, Luigi, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), trans. Barclay Brown, p. 24
Russolo, Luigi, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), trans. Barclay Brown, p. 24
Russolo, Luigi, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), trans. Barclay Brown, p. 30
Russolo, Luigi, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), trans. Barclay Brown, p. 29
Nardelli, Matilde, ‘Some Reflections on Antonioni, Sound and the Silence of La notte’, The Soundtrack 3.1 (2010), pp. 11–23; p. 4.
Calabretto, Roberto, ‘The Soundscape in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cinema’, The New Soundtrack 8.1 (2018), pp. 1-19; p. 9
Nardelli, Matilde, ‘Some Reflections on Antonioni, Sound and the Silence of La notte’, The Soundtrack 3.1 (2010), pp. 11–23; p. 12. The piece quoted from is also printed as ‘From a thirty-seventh floor over Central Park: Soundtrack for a film in New York’, in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, pp. 189-194.
Nardelli, Matilde, ‘Some Reflections on Antonioni, Sound and the Silence of La notte’, The Soundtrack 3.1 (2010), pp. 11–23; p. 13
Calabretto, Roberto, ‘The Soundscape in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cinema’, The New Soundtrack 8.1 (2018), pp. 1-19; p. 10
Brown, Barclay, ‘Introduction’, in The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), pp. 2-3
Russolo, Luigi, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), trans. Barclay Brown, p. 26
Calabretto, Roberto, ‘The Soundscape in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cinema’, The New Soundtrack 8.1 (2018), pp. 1-19; p. 9
Mulkern, Patrick, ‘Doctor Who’s Brian Hodgson on how he created the Tardis and Dalek sounds’, Radio Times (29 July 2009)