Recent thoughts about mechanisation, society and humankind coincided with watching Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964), a tangential connection, perhaps; the characters inhabit an industrialised environment, only becoming machine-like themselves in so much as all who engage with heavy industry become...psychically, perhaps, enmeshed with the machine.
Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is alienated from humanity whilst inhabiting the alienating world of huge machines. Does she represent the 'soul of humanity' crushed by overwhelming technical power? Even the two lead men, her husband and lover, whilst in positions of authority seem insignificant when confronted by a massive blast of...what? Steam? Something billows out of a shed for a few minutes.
If there's no place for Giuliana in this environment, scanning a map of the world proves just as hopeless. You go, you come back. Do you leave yourself behind? Likewise, Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) cannot settle in one place. 'Sometimes I feel like I have no right to be where I am. Perhaps that's why I keep moving.'
Vittorio Gelmetti's electronic soundtrack is used to suggest the 'otherness' that Giuliana feels; machine music from a future of imagined techno-supremacy, quite unlike the hard mechanics of reality. Unfortunately, this world in which industrial waste is casually pumped into lakes and rivers resonates still today. Water here is a memory, save for that of the sea. The rivers and lakes are black with oil, thick with sludge from factories.
Antonioni's mastery of colour and composition create a tension between the beautiful (Vitti and the cinematography) and the brutal. Even fog could be said to symbolise the lack of clarity in almost all the characters' thinking, from hesitant affairs to half-hearted 'swinging' and uncertainty about what's been said and even heard. The same could be said of the viewer, beguiled and bothered in equal measure by this vision of misery and despair.
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