thursday, november 20, 2008
Red Desert
We are so accustomed to the rich hues of colors that saturate movies that imagining a world at the point this revolutionary aspect of filmmaking was introduced can be difficult. While the introduction of sound is heralded as a revolutionary step forward for the medium but the advent of color seems almost mundane in comparison - an inevitability, if you will.Yet it seems a great deal of daring work by a number of directors in the early years of color broke incredible ground with this powerful tool and paved the way for the template of its use we take almost completely for granted today. It's helpful to step back and look at these efforts from time-to-time and none are more important than Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film, 1964's Red Desert (Il deserto rosso).
Like many of the famed Italian director's efforts, Red Desert defies conventional plot-driven storytelling in favor of an elliptical narrative that uses the visual strengths of the medium to explore emotional states and feelings. Antonioni's hallmark moodiness and existential concerns are in full display here as well as the director's fondness for long takes and stylized set work.
What sets the film apart is the bold adventurous use of color. In his youth, the director was a painter and that sensibility comes very much to the fore of Red Desert. Bright hues jump out in almost every scene and strange tints dwell in even the most mundane of shots.
Whole scenes are almost perfectly composed and waiting for the actors to move through them. They beg to be frozen and preserved but quickly dissolve and change as the film moves forward. It serves to accent Antonioni's preoccupation with the subtle paradoxes of our existence and the existential crisis it can induce.
"I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible," the director once said, "I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space."
Throughout Red Desert, colors have meanings in and of themselves and for a director keenly interested in the inner working of his subjects, it's another tool to express them. The shades of color they not only wear but are contrasted against suggest extremely complex - and often conflicted - internal feelings and thoughts.
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Antonioni doesn't simply use color to highlight aspect of scenes he also uses it negatively to accent the absence of it as well. The director mixes sharp bright swaths of color against foul grey backdrops enhancing both the repulsive aspects of the scene and sharpening the more appealing hues to a razor edge.
The hints of color in slag heaps, piles of refuse and poisoned water ways redoubles the abhorrence of the image and accents the reaction - or lack therof - by the observers of the tableau in the film.
Throughout the film scenes are draped in fog and mists that obscure vision and clarity. Antonioni reportedly emphasized this effect by painting trees and other parts of the landscape white prior to filming.
The effect adds to the air of mystery and dread that Antonioni's protagonist, Guiliana (Monica Vitti) seems to feel about the world but with the uncertainty of understanding where it comes from or how to escape it. The cognitive dissonance had pushed her to the point of suicide and threatens to push her into madness.
While the looming presence of the factory and the pollution it is creating seems to be a critical aspect of the environment Guiliana must contend with, Antonioni has suggested that the neurosis depicted by the characters in the film may not be a condemnation of the industrialized world as a whole.
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By the time Antonioni made Red Desert he had been working in film for more than twenty years and had been a director for almost 15. By 1964 he was completely versed in the language of his chosen medium. The sheer audacity of his debut in color suggests he had been considering its possibilities for some time and was simply waiting for the opportunity to exploit them.
The film is filled with ships passing suggesting movement over vast distances and journeys unfulfilled to those that watch from the shore. It's not by accident Guiliana finds herself being attracted to Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) a prodigious wanderer and outsider who is in the middle of arranging travel to Argentina, half a world away.
He constantly changes the point of focus in shots keeping the viewer off balance. A seemingly out-of-focus scene is revealed to be a foreground for someone passing in the distance who is in focus. Or scenes where the middle distance and far distance are equally in focus throwing the viewer off in a different manner.
Antonioni doesn't stop at the visual either. Dissonant electronic noises permeate the film giving apparently benign settings an ominous tone. The effect is magnified by the careful layering of sounds as well.
One of the most innovative ways Antonioni uses color is to create a sort of filmic code of each hue and then play with those meanings as the movie unfolds. The director takes paradoxical meanings that are associated with various colors and sets those against each other.
Green, the first color Guiliana is seen in, is often associated with growth, vitality and hope. But this is very much contrary to her behavior - disjointed, confused and slightly desperate. She almost begs for some food from a worker and then hurries into cover to consume it then looks out of the pollution that surrounds her.
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Antonioni also uses explicit meanings to reinforce this effect as he does with the color yellow. Its brightness makes its use stand out sharply but not necessarily in a manner that gives it direct significance or meaning. That changes dramatically when the ship moors near the party in the film and hoists the yellow quarantine flag - signifying the vessel carries a person with an infectious disease.
From then on the color is loaded and recurs at points to suggest sickness or illness.
When Guiliana describes her time in the hospital to Corrado the two are standing on a sea derrick and she is framed by a yellow vessel behind her. At the end of the film her son asks about the yellow smoke and she tells him it is because it is poisonous.
So not only does this 'color play' put specific impressions in the mind of the viewer, it suggest the confusion and the uneasiness Guiliana feels facing an growing collection of ontological paradoxes in her worldview.
Guiliana seems to be the only character in Red Desert who is fully aware of this terrible truth and the rest of those around her see her as ill or disturbed. Thus her alienation from the world around her is compounded by the gulf between her and those around her.
The exception is Corrado who seems to share her awareness of the actual condition of the world and sympathizes with her suffering. At first this is a kind of relief for Guiliana and as the horror of the meaninglessness of things grows she seeks solace in him.
The director is famous for inhabiting his films with disconnected characters who allow themselves to be devoured by material wants. This is often a vain effort to appease their ennui and unease in face of the growing suspicion their lives may actually be without meaning and purpose. Guiliana stands in contrast to this and an odd sequence in the middle of the film emphasizes this.
Guiliana, her husband and Corrado are in a small cabin or shack on the waterfront having a party. It has overtones of an orgy given the lurid discussion of the participants - an impression that is reinforced as the group falls into a cordoned off sleeping area that is painted vivid red.
The location suggests a womb which is emphasized by the debate over the aphrodisiatic nature of quail eggs - one of which Guiliana consumes.
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Her fascination with sex is tempered by her revulsion of the hedonistic excess she sees in many around her. It is as if she suspects there may be some type of spiritual epiphany within the act if she were to approach it in the right way.
When she finally allows herself to submit to an affair with Corrado she recognizes even this is insufficient - in fact, it is actually just another type of hedonistic excess indulged in to avoid the truth.
In the end, Guliana seems tempted to take Corrado's solution of moving through the world the next step - moving beyond it. She already attempted suicide in the hospital but her failed attempt to board the boat at the end suggests a more spiritual passing.
Watching Red Desert today it becomes a template on how to understand how many other directors chose to use the power of the new technology to their full advantage. While Antonioni's efforts are justifiably regulated to "art house" designation, more mainstream films quickly rise to the challenge.
An excellent example is John Boorman's effort three years later, Point Blank. In this magnificent Lee Marvin starred film, the overt use of color is a key means to understand the inner state of the largely silent protagonist. Steven Soderberg - another artist who is influenced in the use of color by Antonioni - says as much in the current DVD commentary.
Yet, perhaps, the influence of cinematography in Red Desert is probably most felt through the way it serves as a obvious antecedent to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The vivid cinematographic effects employed by Kubrick in his 1968 science fiction masterpiece clearly echo the efforts of Antonioni four years prior. Throughout 2001 you are presented with wide panoramas with bold colors leaping out at odd places to keep the viewer entranced.
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Both scenes are saturated with a strange sense of detachment due to the monochromatic hue of their setting. In both the furniture and objects in the room are unexpectedly threatening as they lurk around the edges of the set or loom menacingly over the bed itself.
Both places are a purgatory for the occupants - a location of emptiness where one must wait for something else. Still, it is fascinating to see the contrast between the way the later film uses the techniques to reflect mental states in comparison with Antonioni's depiction of emotional states in Red Desert.
Still, it seems farfetched to believe the dynamic efforts with color by directors who simply produced films after Antonioni were all influenced by his earliest experiment with the new aspect of the medium. Yet, it does seem clear that Antonioni was one of the earliest to see color as a valuable tool to be used in the depiction of the work rather than just a way of saturating a black and white film.
And for directors that followed, certainly, Red Desert was a starting point to initiate their own experiments with the profound nuances color brought to the medium of cinema.
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