Red Desert (Il deserto rosso) [DVD] [1964]

Red Desert (Il deserto rossi, 1964) is filmed in an industrial landscape filled with large machines, oil refinerys, garbage heaps, big buildings and so on. Despite this it is incredibly beautiful. The first shots show an industrial plant out of focus accompained to non-melodic electronic music, and the colours and forms reminds of abstract paintings, and Antonioni was inspired by modern art when he made this. His earlier films, L'Eclisse, L'Avventura and La Notte) also feels like paintings with beautiful compositions, but in Il deserto rossi this is abstract instead of hyper realistic, sometimes just layers of technicolor out of focus. This makes the movie visually unique I think.The story is, I would say, about alienation, and also psychic illness/angst. Monica Vitti plays Guiliana, a young woman who is recovering mentally from a car crash. She doesn't have any good contact with her husband nor her son, and she becomes attracted to a business partner of her husband. This story is framed within the theme of modernity with big industries and business, and how they affect humans - clearly the environments they produce is not healthy, neither physically nor mentally. In the film we never see any 'normal' milieus, as in Antonionis other movies, like the life in an italian city or village. Instead the environment is cluttered and dominated by industry, somtimes a big boat is seen behind some trees or a window, and the only city streets we see are muted grey. This is comically enhanced when in one scene we see a street vendor, and he only sells grey stuff (even the fruits are grey!...I think it is supposed to be fruits...). So the scenes are very stylized, Antonioni even painted the grass in some shots...The transfer of this DVD from Bfi is excellent, and a commentary track by a film scholar is included. Red Desert is a unique movie, and anyone interested in cinema or Antonioni should see or buy it.

Antonioni's use of colour in this film is more subtle than critics tell it but it is visually striking and very beautiful. This film is a great black and white artist's take on colour film-making with all the image art of black and white at its most sophisticated, but in colour. I am surprised that no one else has taken this approach up since. Vitti is at her best in a great performance and Richard Harris is compelling as well, even if dubbed. He is ideally cast and this is also one of his best performances in one of his best films. Apparently the Italians dubbed sound after filming, but this doesn't detract from the film or from this performance. This film is essential for Antonioni fans and for anyone who likes film-making as an art form. It is visually superb. Great DVD quality.

I suppose anyone looking at this would already be trying to complete a collection of 1960's iconic films.Out of favour by now, the Red Desert would have its place. Good bit of neo-realism; the superb blighted, polluted backgrounds reflect the blighted, polluted lives of the protagonists.. Low horizon (polluted lakes), big sky, (plumes of orange smoke) and a delightful if screamingly vulnerable Monica Vitti. An impossibly young Richard Harris too, if you can get used to not actually hearing his voice (it's dubbed in Italian).On the other hand if you've come across this by accident, and know something about estuaries (the lower Thames, Medway, Mersey, Clyde), it may say something to you, too.

Another great film by Antonioni, full of amazing images.

Il Deserto Rosso was Antonioni's 1st colour film, and a key work following the alienation trilogy, where the divorce between technology and morality, and the relationship between people and their physical environment, continues in this film.As in his previous films, the story is quite simple and revolves around a woman,Giuliana(Vitti),in industrial Ravenna, who has had a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide but,although married and a mother,is now embarking on a tentative affair with Corrado(Harris).Guiliana cannot adapt to her surroundings,the city's grim industrial landscape weighs heavily on her.This is reinforced by a frightening electronic soundtrack and Antonioni's enhanced bleak rendering of the painted grey marshlands.Plasticity and material weight,replace dramatic psychology,story and character development.Colour emerges as a central element in the film, mirroring her subjective mental states.Colour is integrally linked to character, as was landscape in the trilogy.Scenes are dominated by a single colour or colours.There is also the use of desaturated colours, and the flattening of space by tele-photo lenses.Giuliana is sharply focussed against unfocussed backgrounds or foregrounds.Corrado wants to recruit workers to set up industry in Patagonia and Guiliana catches his eye.He has no roots,is always on the move but feels a kinship and sexual interest with the lost,wandering Guiliana.However their consummation, brings no satisfaction to either.Harris is buttoned-up emotionally and physically, and is dubbed.He acts as a foil to the amazing central performance of Vitti.The only use of naturalistic colour in the film, is when Guiliana tells Valerio, her son, a story of a young girl on a desert island, visited by a mystery boat, and with the singing of sirens,her only way to escape her unspecified depression and malaise.There is a striking beauty to this film based as it is on a new vocabulary of cinema, with his expressive use of colour like a painter contrasting natural with artificial colours,the formalised framing of coloured objects,the colour balance,the beautiful imagery,the long tracking shots and use of fog to isolate groups of people.This film is not an attack on technology,as there was much sense of beauty of industrial technology from Antonioni:'It's the people who don't function properly,not the machines'.Mankind has to learn to fly like birds do around the toxic yellow smoke.A great influence on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Servicio muy bueno: el producto está en perfecto estado y se han respetado los tiempos de entrega. La película en sí es interesante desde el punto de vista artístico. Más parecida a una instalación de arte moderno que a una película de nuestros días. Pero esto quien compre un Antonioni, ya lo sabe.

Película interesante

El desierto rojo (Il desserto rosso, 1964) de Michelangelo Antonioni, es una de las obras más importantes del cineasta y primera que realizó en color (de ahí que el cromatismo sea relevante en la confección del film, ya desde su título). A continuación de su trilogía de la incomunicación (La aventura, La noche y El eclipse), El desierto rojo resulta un epílogo final perfecto.Imagen:Color de no gran calidad, pero es más que aceptable. No destaca ni para bien ni para mal (que ya es mucho decir). Imagen anamórfica respetando formato.Audio y subtítulos:Audio original en italiano 2.0 y en español 2.0. que suena hueco y parece un redoblaje, pero estos es algo que no puedo asegurar. Subtítulos en castellano (fuente blanca, sombreada y de tamaño correcto).Extras:El disco viene con las típicas fichas técnicas y con un libreto de 16 páginas (con cubierta de cartoné) con un interesante texto a cargo de Ana Melendo donde analiza y contextualiza el film en la carrera del director y de la corriente postmodernista.Presentación:Amaray negra.