The Red Desert Effect

When it was released in 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert announced a radical departure from the documentary approach. The film was experimental for its color, sound work, slow camera movement, and its subversion of a traditional cinematic structure. Haunting images of an industrial wasteland of mining tips, fire-belching smokestacks, and hulking merchant ships pushing through Ravenna’s sulfurous industrial harbor shaped the narrative thread of an otherwise inanimate environment. Red Desert was about the striking artificiality of color, the poetry of a landscape recognized by its author as modern, the acknowledgment of a world that shared the surfaces of Pop art and introduced the postminimalism of arte povera. As Antonioni explained to his fellow filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, “Today what counts are things, objects, matter.”

The film revolved around the question of the individual’s relationship with the present, and it was precisely on this point that Roland Barthes addressed Antonioni’s extraordinary work. In January 1980, Barthes deliveredof his time. As Barthes remarked, Antonioni’s acute sensibility toward “the Modern”—his vigilance, wisdom, and the fragility felt toward his present—was the source of beauty and seduction in his films. Barthes was struck by Antonioni’s nondogmatic nature, as well as the elusiveness of his characters, whose existences were bound to landscape and had neither fixed identity nor a sense of reality.