Slow Moving Pictures

Those times when filmmakers (Antonioni, Godard, Truffaut...) sowed (meaningful) books like pebbles in their films so that careful watchers could find their way (but sometimes it was a trap and designed to lose them in the woods)

From Antonioni's L'avventura: a close-up of the book Claudia has just handed to Anna's father, an Italian translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. On the cover is Henri Matisse's Dancer and Rocaille Armchair on a Black Background.

Henri Matisse's Dancer and Rocaille Armchair on a Black Background (1942). Image taken from artchive.com

In L’avventura, Anna has been reading Tender is the Night. On the cover is a painting by Matisse: a woman reclines languidly beside an empty chair (she does not want company), her features blank as though she has effaced herself. The image is both eloquent and opaque, like Anna's disappearance.

Everything That Happens in Red Desert (2) The desert and its colours

Yes, the title has many meanings I think. In one interview Antonioni said: 'Everyone can read into it what they like. "Desert" perhaps because there are few oases left; "red" because it’s blood. The living, bleeding desert, full of the flesh of men.' I discuss this on the blog, starting in Part 2.

Everything That Happens in Red Desert (45) The harbour

What do you do when one of your lead actors storms off set and ruins the ending of your movie? You wander around the Ravenna docks and invent a weirdly anti-climactic sequence that will haunt people’s dreams forever. Anti-fouling paint and toxic sludge have never been so mesmerising. #filmsky

A shot from Red Desert showing Corrado and Giuliana in the hotel room, with the novel Homo Faber visible on a bedside table.

The book cover of the 1959 Italian edition of Homo Faber

I think I’ve discovered the origin of the title ‘Red Desert’: it’s in the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch, which can be seen on Corrado’s bedside table in the hotel room scene. (This is the 1959 Italian edition.)

From Antonioni's Red Desert: a medium close-up of Corrado (Richard Harris) standing in Giuliana's shop, looking at her just before he leaves. His eyes seem a little sad, but otherwise his face is hard to read.

‘Even you haven’t helped me,’ says Giuliana to Corrado, in their final scene together. Red Desert’s screenplay states that he interprets this as an accusation, but Richard Harris’s face is more inscrutable: besides a mild sadness, it communicates almost nothing.

From Antonioni's La notte: to the right, Lidia and Roberto stand outside his car; the rest of the frame is dominated by the background, a railway line crossing the road; a train has just passed, and the barriers have begun to raise.

I also love this moment a few seconds earlier: like Laura in Brief Encounter, Lidia seems exhilarated by the train that has rushed by, but as she turns back to Roberto she realises what a clichéd scenario they are playing out. A speeding train, a brief encounter, a rainstorm...who cares?

From Antonioni's La notte: a medium two-shot of Roberto (seen from behind) and Lidia (facing the camera a 45-degree angle); her face is partly illuminated by the street-lamp, partly still in shadow; she looks at Roberto with a tender sadness in her eyes.

Jeanne Moreau, in La notte, gives a masterclass in non-verbal ennui. Soaked with rainwater, at what should be a moment of liberated passion, she looks at Roberto as if to say, ‘This too would amount to nothing.’ Her eyes express a profound inner sadness.

From Antonioni's La notte: from the side, through the window, we see Roberto driving his car with Lidia in the passenger seat; they are barely illuminated by the street-lamp they are passing under, and their faces are distorted by the rainwater running down the window; Lidia appears to be smiling.

This is the most beautiful sequence in La notte: the camera tracks alongside Roberto's car as it passes beneath street-lamps, alternately lost in darkness and half-illuminated. Rain dominates the soundtrack and distorts the characters' features; there are no fully legible surfaces here.

"…we know that beneath the image revealed there is another one, more faithful to reality, and that beneath there is another one, and again a new one under this last one, up to the true image of that absolute and mysterious reality that no one will ever see", - Michelangelo Antonioni

Everything That Happens in Red Desert (44) Corrado's exit

This week in Red Desert, it’s a wrap for Corrado Zeller: in his sullen farewell and his hangdog retreat into the darkness, we see a microcosm of his relationship with Giuliana. An epiphany is taking place here, but he refuses to see it, and Giuliana is left to deal with it alone. #filmsky

From Antonioni's Red Desert: a medium close-up of Giuliana (Monica Vitti) standing in front of the blank white wall of her would-be shop; she looks up at the ceiling, with the slightest hint of an ironic smile in her mouth, and a darkness in her eyes.

Monica Vitti in Red Desert: alone with her shadow and a blank wall, she looks at her surroundings with wry disappointment. Earlier, Giuliana pictured blue walls and a green ceiling, but now the swirling white void seems more apt. Though not literally red, it is one manifestation of the red desert.

From Antonioni's Il provino, a segment in the portmanteau film I tre volti: a close-up of a mirror in Princess Soraya's dressing room; in the foreground, on the surface of the mirror, black make-up is splashed across the glass, out-of-focus; behind it, we see the reflection of Soraya, her face partially obscured by the splash of black paint.

The following year, Soraya repeated Giuliana's gesture in Il Provino, vandalising her own reflection.

Giuliana had complained that 'Everyone talks to me about me.’ Both women want to reject the representational reality they are inserted into, the decorous reflections they are expected to cast.

A black-and-white publicity still for Red Desert: a wide shot of Giuliana's shop; paint is splashed over the (otherwise white) walls, and Ugo and Corrado stand (with their backs to the camera) looking at Giuliana; she stands facing Ugo.

This publicity still for Red Desert hints at an alternate ending, in which Giuliana vandalises the walls of her shop and faces Ugo and Corrado with a mixture of shame and defiance. In black-and-white, the dark paint-streaks look like blood, as though Giuliana has committed an act of violence.

Everything That Happens in Red Desert (43) Something terrible in reality

‘There is something terrible in reality, and I don’t know what it is.’ This week in Red Desert, we explore what it means to be reinserted into an intolerable reality, and we take a semi-deep dive into Robert Musil’s long, confusing, unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. #filmsky

From Antonioni’s Red Desert: Giuliana, seen through a telephoto lens, is running past a window with a red light in it; she has half turned around to address Corrado (who is following her) and to ask him to leave her alone; her face is mostly obscured by shadows. This image occurs a split-second later than the one in the previous post; Giuliana has turned a little more towards Corrado.

Red Desert is full of memorable split-second images like this: Giuliana runs down a dark Ravenna street, past a red light that evokes a warning, an emergency, or an open, bloody wound. She turns in mid-flight, her half-visible face expressing her state of mind, although we cannot hear what she says.

From Antonioni’s Red Desert: Giuliana, seen through a telephoto lens, is running past a window with a red light in it; she has half turned around to address Corrado (who is following her) and to ask him to leave her alone; her face is mostly obscured by shadows.

Lucio Fontana's 'Concetto spaziale, Attese' (1965): a wide red canvas with dark vertical slashes all along it.

This image from Red Desert may have inspired Lucio Fontana to make his slashed red canvas. On the back, he wrote: ‘I returned from Venice yesterday, I saw Antonioni’s film!!!’

Behind the blood-red surface, infinite shadows. Giuliana inhabits that behind-the-canvas shadow-realm.

From Antonioni's Red Desert: a medium close-up of Giuliana, looking just past the camera, her hair dishevelled and a look of intense distress in her face; the blank beige wall of the hotel room is behind her; to the right, we see Corrado (slightly out of focus) intruding on the frame.

‘What are you afraid of?’ ‘The factories, streets, colours, people, everything!’ Giuliana’s outburst, at this key moment in Red Desert, begins quietly and rises into a terrified scream. We are asked simply to look into her face as she says this, and to share her fear without understanding it.

From Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View: a close-up of Jack Younger (Walter McGinn) reclining on Frady's bed, looking at him with a gentle but shadowy pair of eyes.

Walter McGinn as the recruiter in The Parallax View.

With his wearily sympathetic eyes, he tells you that he understands and doesn’t judge…but he also sees right through you.

If McGinn hadn’t died in a car crash three years later, we would know him as one of the great American character actors.

Everything That Happens in Red Desert (42) Two failed projects

From a scary pink room to a somehow-even-scarier white one: this week in Red Desert, we plumb new depths of the existential void as we begin our brief but densely disturbing farewell to Corrado. We also learn the true meaning of boredom, courtesy of Alberto Moravia. #filmsky

Touchscreen keypads are good for Freudian slips, unless autocorrect jumps in and censors them.

Washington Square is one of my favourites, as is The Heiress. Given the timelines (1850, 1880, 1905) I guess you could have Lily making friends with a 40-something Isabel (single again after Gilbert's mysterious death) and a 70-something Catherine (happily drinking from Morris's skull).

That's a brilliant idea, I love Portrait of a Lady. Add Olive and Verena from The Bostonians and the first couple of seasons write themselves...

Agreed, although it's getting a theatrical re-release and BFI blu-ray now, so hopefully more people will discover it! I love the novel too - Davies does an incredible job of adapting it, simplifying where necessary but retaining all the emotional impact.

From Terence Davies' The House of Mirth: a close-up of Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson), her face stained with tears, dressed in dark clothing and framed against the dark fireplace in Lawrence Selden's apartment.

‘My genius would appear to be my ability to do the wrong thing at the right time. Is there any final test of genius but success?’

Gillian Anderson, in The House of Mirth, makes us empathise with failure: we see Lily making all the wrong decisions, and we know we would have made them too.

From John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness: John Trent (Sam Neill) wakes up on a bus to find that the whole world is tinted blue; he is screaming wildly, surrounded by alarmed-looking fellow passengers.

‘Did I ever tell you my favourite colour was blue?’

Look at Sam Neill's face, in this scene from In the Mouth of Madness, and tell me that colours aren't terrifying. They remind us that we are contingent fragments of reality, created against our will and doomed to be annihilated in the same way.

From Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: a wide shot with Jane's bed (in which Jane lies sleeping) in the foreground; behind the bed, a large pair of theatrical black curtains are partially drawn, revealing the rest of the room; Cesare has broken through the window in the background, and approaches the bed, looking towards the camera. The image is tinted green.

From Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter: a wide shot of Willa and Harry's bedroom, with the bed (in which Willa lies on her back) in the foreground; it seems to exist slightly separately from the rest of the room, which floats in a black void; we can see the edges of the walls and ceiling within that void, and the interior is filled with triangular light and shadows; Harry stands beside the bed, his head cocked backwards at an awkward and sinister angle.

From Antonioni's Red Desert: a wide shot of Corrado's hotel room, including the bed in which Giuliana and Corrado lie naked and half-asleep; everything else in the room is coated in pink.

From Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View: a wide shot of Frady's rented room; to the right, propped up on the bed, is Jack Younger (the Parallax recruiter); to the left, standing looking at him, is Frady.

Four creepy bedrooms: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Night of the Hunter, Red Desert, and The Parallax View.

The frames are theatrical, artificial; the characters trapped within a construct, a pathology, dogma, shadowy conspiracies, or (in the case of Red Desert) something more nebulous.

Everything That Happens in Red Desert (41) The transformation

The most dream-like but also, strangely, the most memorable scene in Red Desert: an entire room turns pink, to the sound of sinister electronic music. This will inevitably suggest different meanings to different viewers. For me, of course, the scene is about horror and despair. #filmsky

That is very surprising - maybe a bad case of vote-splitting...

From Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique: a blurry image of the orchestra and concert hall slipping through our vision as we collapse to the floor; we are seeing this moment from Weronika's point of view, as she has a heart attack in the middle of a performance.

It's like the Weronika-POV we inhabited when she died on stage, and when she was lying in the grave - embodied by light and the camera, the film-maker's two most important tools, as though our relationship with a film (or a song, or art in general) is what gives us that sense of a 'double life'.