landscapes of deliquescence in michelangelo antonioni’s red desert

8/2/2019 Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonionis Red Desert

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Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 28 218237 2003ISSN 0020-2754 Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2003

BlackwellPublishingLtd

Landscapes of deliquescence inMichelangelo Antonionis Red Desert

Matthew Gandy

The cinematic landscape provides a rich opportunity to explore culturalrepresentations of place, space and nature. This essay focuses on the depiction oflandscape in Michelangelo Antonionis Red Desert

(1964). Previous approaches to thecritical interpretation of landscape in the cinema of Antonioni have been characterizedby three principal weaknesses: a narrow emphasis on formalist and auterist lines ofinfluence between different branches of the visual arts; an attachment to exceptionalistcharacterizations of the Italian cinematic landscape; and a transhistorical interpretationof existential themes such as alienation. In this essay we shall consider two neglected

themes: the significance of the technological sublime for the aesthetic experience ofindustrial landscapes; and the impact of abstract expressionism on Antonioniscinematic vision. We will counter simplistic categorizations of Antonionis work byconsidering the complexity of the relationship between the cinematic landscape andwider developments in twentieth-century modernism. The essay concludes by locatingRed Desert

at a unique juncture in the development of modernist conceptions of natureand landscape.

key words

landscape cinema modernity Italy Michelangelo Antonioni

Department of Geography, University College London, London WC1H 0APemail: [email protected]

revised manuscript received 31 January 2003

Introduction

Modernism was modernitys official opposition. It wasthe pessimist to modernitys eternal optimism. (Clark2002, 173)

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Antonionis films question the visible until theres notenough light to see any more. (Berger 1995, 10)

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The German migr and cultural critic Siegfried

Kracauer once remarked how the design of natureis the fountainhead of all visions (1960, 204), yetwe know comparatively little of the engagement between filmmaking and cultural responses tolandscape.

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More specifically, the relationship between the cinematic landscape and twentieth-century modernism remains only partially explored.This essay contends that a more nuanced readingof the cinematic landscape avoids the flatteningeffects of theoretical or metaphysical reductionismand has the potential to move beyond trans-

historical phenomenologies of human perception.Before proceeding further, we should pause a

moment over the word landscape, which has become so critical to recent discussions concern-ing place, space and cultural representations ofnature. A range of scholarship has highlighted howthe very idea of landscape implies a process ofalienation from nature and is an integral elementin the development of modern aesthetics.

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Thedepiction of landscape in film takes this process of

alienation a stage further by immersing us in apanoramic representation of space that radicallyextends the possibilities of aesthetic experience. Atthe outset, therefore, we can argue that the cinematiclandscape is a natural focus for any systematicexploration of the depiction of space in modernculture. Yet the core concept of landscape, in all itsetymological and historical complexity, is onlyrarely placed at the forefront of critical writing oncinema.

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The cinematic landscape presents a profound

challenge to established modes of critical inquirywithin architectural theory, geography, sociology


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Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonionis Red Desert 219

and other disciplines. The classic idea of landscaperests on a cultural mediation between space andthe human subject that is facilitated through art ordesign. In the modern era, however, this emphasishas shifted to encompass new kinds of landscape

experience engendered by technological transforma-tions in the use and representation of space. Withthe development of modern cinema, this techno-logical relation to landscape becomes double-codedso that we experience the movement of the imageitself at one further remove from the embodiedencounters with space which underpinned tradi-tional conceptions of landscape design. Yet thecinematic frame is also enclosed within its owngeometry of perception through the architecturalaspects to cinema houses and varying contexts

within which film itself is consumed as a culturalproduct. Though our focus is on the representationof space in film, it is important to recognize thatfilm encodes its own spatialities of production andconsumption, which are themselves undergoing aprocess of displacement through the shift towardsdigital media and other transformations in con-temporary visual culture. Cinema presents uswith a matrix of visual codes and symbols thatcan provide insights into broader historical andpolitical themes within the development of modernculture. Our intellectual task can be likened to theappropriation of geography in history through aninterdisciplinary and intertextual exploration of therelationship between cinematic topographies andthe evolution of visual cultures.

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Such a strategy ofinterpretation is naturally opposed to any normat-ive or narrowly idealist conception of aestheticsand finds a rich intellectual lineage through, forexample, the early film theory of Bla Balzs,the visual unconscious of Walter Benjamin, thevisible hieroglyphs of Siegfried Kracauer and theexploration of iconology in the writings of Erwin

Panofsky.

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In this essay we shall examine the significance oflandscape in Italian cinema through the work ofMichelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni was born in1912 in Ferrara, northern Italy, and began his earlycareer with a mix of film criticism and document-ary production. In the 1950s, Antonioni becameclosely associated with the development of neo-realist Italian cinema and established his reputa-tion through features such as I vinti

(1953) and Ilgrido

(1957).

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With the release of his critically

acclaimed trilogy Lavventura

(1960), La notte

(1961) and Leclisse

(1962) Antonioni established a

distinctive cinematic vision with its character-istic emphasis on themes of alienation and spatialdisorientation. In this essay we shall focus onAntonionis first colour feature film Red Desert [Ildeserto rosso]

(1964)

which proved both a commer-

cial and critical success on its release and remainsan important point of departure for critical debatesabout his work. Red Desert was one of a number offilms that marked a transition from the predomin-ance of neo-realist approaches in Italian cinema toan emerging engagement with a wider variety ofaesthetic and intellectual themes. The period fromthe late 1950s to the early 1960s was marked by aresurgence of public interest and internationalacclaim for Italian cinema, which gave Antonioni andhis contemporaries a new degree of self-confidence

in the cultural status of film and deepened the exist-ing dialogue between cinema and wider develop-ments in art and literature.

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The combination ofenhanced artistic freedom and commercial successfacilitated a shift towards more ambitious projectsthat sought to transcend the more technicallyrudimentary and small-scale dimensions of earlierproductions. The contemporary critic and filmmakerPier Paolo Pasolini, for example, claimed that RedDesert

marked a new level of sophistication inItalian cinema: the film came close to his ideal offree indirect subjectivity through the developmentof a distinctive poetic or oneiric form of cinematiclanguage (see Pasolini 1965). Although these earlyattempts to emphasize the semiotic basis for aputative cinematic exceptionalism now appeartheoretically anachronistic, there is little doubt thatthe work of Antonioni helped to raise the status ofcinema within the visual arts.

Landscape features prominently in many of themost critically acclaimed examples of Italian cinema.Consider, for example, the Mediterranean garigue

in Pier Paolo Pasolinis

The gospel according to St

Matthew [Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo]

(1964) or theurban vistas in Roberto Rossellinis Rome, OpenCity [Roma, Citta Aperta]

(1945). The centrality oflandscape to what Noa Steimatsky (1995, 3940)terms the Italian cinematic imagination hasemerged within the context of relatively late pro-cesses of industrialization and state formationin modern Italy. The primacy of landscape in theItalian cinematic imagination, argues Steimatsky,is grounded in the specific geographical condi-tions of Italy, its varied and rich conglomerates

of landscapes, and the cultural traditions, mythsand connotations that invest specific locales with


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meaning and value.

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The authentic Italian land-scape became a powerful cinematic motif duringthe early decades of the twentieth century anddrew support from across the political spectrum. Ifwe survey the history of Italian cinema, we find a

degree of aesthetic continuity running through thepre-fascist, fascist and post-fascist phases of Italianfilmmaking. The development of neo-realism in the1940s thus marked a political reappropriation ofthe cultural depiction of landscape that displacedthe nationalist sentiments of the fascist era with aneo-Marxian emphasis on landscape as a focus ofsocial and political struggle (see Steimatsky 1995,468). Yet, in the cinema of Antonioni, the depic-tion of landscape moves beyond the physicality ofspace as a locus for action towards an engagement

with the aesthetic effects of landscape on the psy-chological state of his protagonists. The cinematiclandscape becomes the dramatic setting for anexploration of the experience of modernity.

Attempts to locate Red Desert

within a broaderterrain of cultural theory have proved elusive. Inthe 1960s, anti-modern critics were hostile towardsthe film, which they saw as antithetical to tradi-tional cinema, whilst modernist critics placed thefilm at the cutting edge of European cinema. Tradi-tionalists such as Henry Hart (1965, 181), for example,dismissed Red Desert

as intellectually bankruptand culturally reprehensible, whereas more sym-pathetic voices such as Jean-Andr Fieschi (1965,84) were delighted by the panoply of modernistcultural references. More recently, there have beenattempts to subsume Antonionis work within apost-modern cinematic canon simply on the basisof its complexity and concern with questions ofidentity (see Brunette 1998; Rohdie 1990). Yet noneof these simplistic categorizations are satisfactory.In interpreting Red Desert

it is useful to grasp twoshifting dynamics: first, the changing nature of

Antonionis cinematic vision and its articulationwith a wider cultural and political field; and sec-ond, the radically altered context for film criticismas it has passed through successive waves of the-oretical and conceptual transformation. If we surveythe existing literature on Antonioni, we find thatthere are three prominent weaknesses. First, therehas been a focus on the influence of twentieth-century art without any consideration of the politi-cal and intellectual tensions running throughmodernist aesthetics. Much of the critical writing

that exists on the relationship between film andart appears trapped within a formalist frame of

reference that is preoccupied with auterist linesof influence rather than any wider consideration ofhow different fields of cultural production interact.Angela Dalle Vache (1996), for example, takes atface value Antonionis attempt to emulate abstract

expressionism and never explores the limitations tohis neo-romantic conception of creative autonomyin the visual arts. Second, there has been a recur-ring emphasis on the essential characteristics ofthe Italian cinematic landscape rooted in a weaklydeveloped contextualization of the history oflandscape change. These static perspectives arefounded on determinist conceptions of the relation-ship between landscape and culture which areclearly at odds with the increasingly international-ist scope of Antonionis cinema. And third, we find

that Antonionis cinema has been read as emblem-atic of the human condition or some other trans-historical category derived from the legacy ofWestern humanism. Red Desert

has, for example, been characterized as a film which is almost beyond verbal description or analysis and whichtranscends social critique in order to focus onmore fundamental and permanent metaphysicalissues (Cameron and Wood 1971, 112).

In this essay two themes will be developed.First, we explore the significance of the technolo-gical sublime for the cinematic depiction of indus-trial landscapes. We find that Antonioni combineselements of the Kantian and Burkean sublime intoa distinctive synthesis as part of his aestheticambivalence towards the technological trans-formation of modern Italy. Second, we consider therelationship between Antonionis cinematic icono-graphy and the development of abstract expres-sionism in the visual arts. We encounter thelimitations of a Greenbergian emphasis on the cul-tural autonomy and teleological progression oftwentieth-century modernism. Taken together, these

two themes help to illuminate the relationship between Antonionis cinematic oeuvre

and thecomplexities of modernist aesthetics in relation tocultural depictions of landscape.

The technological sublime

In the countryside around Ravenna, the horizon isdominated by factories, smokestacks and refineries. The beauty of that view is much more striking than theanonymous mass of pine trees which you see from afar,

all lined up in a row, the same colour. (Antonioni1964b, 253)


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Filmed on location over a period of two months inthe autumn of 1963, Red Desert

is set in and aroundthe city of Ravenna in north-east Italy. Antonionisvivid depiction of Italys second largest portpresents us with a detailed insight into the

changing lives and landscapes of modern Italy. Insome ways the film marks a return to the place- based focus of Antonionis earlier documentaryfilms: the misty landscapes ofRed Desert

recall, forexample, his very first film, Gente del Po

(19437),which depicts the people and landscapes of thePo Valley. In Red Desert

Antonioni ignores the beautiful architecture of mediaeval Ravenna, beloved of Baedeker and countless other touristguides. Instead, he presents us with what theFrench critic Michele Manceaux describes as a

short course in economic geography:

If the alabaster windows of Galla Placida diffuse thesoftest light in the world, and if the blue mosaics arelike a plunge into the depths of the sea, all this meanslittle to him, all this belongs to the past. He choseRavenna for its smoky factories, its oil derricks, its steelpylons. After the war, the pinewoods stretched downto the sea and the town had thirty thousand inhabit-ants. Today the silos and oil refineries have killed offthe trees. Oil has been found here, artificial islandshave been built; and there are a hundred and fortythousand inhabitants. (Manceaux 1964, 119)

In the opening sequence of Red Desert

, we observethe main protagonist Giuliana (played by MonicaVitti) walking with her young son across a muddyand desolate landscape. The only bright coloursare her full-length green coat, her childs lightbrown duffel coat and the orange petroleum flaresin the background. Lines of workers shuffle past,some of whom are wearing transparent raincoatswhich resemble space suits or perhaps even specialclothing to provide protection from radiation andhazardous chemicals. She looks out across the

undulating expanse of oily puddles and refuse.Small swirls of steam emanate from the ground asif she were walking near the crater of a volcano.Beyond the blackened remnants of trees, and half-shrouded in mist, we can discern an array of com-plex industrial structures ranging from immensegas purification plants to elaborate water towers.Moments later she enters a factory to meet herhusband Ugo (played by Carlo Chionetti) and anew factory manager Corrado (played by RichardHarris). The camera tracks between an austere

modern control room and a vast hanger filled withpipes and turbines where we can scarcely hear the

human voices above the din of machinery. The sleekmodernist decor of the factory offices and controlrooms contrasts with the brutal and anarchiccharacteristics of the surrounding landscape.

At one level Red Desert

is a lament for what

Antonioni describes as the violent transformationof the countryside around the city (1964b, 253), butit is at the same time a multi-faceted immersionin the experience of modernity. The ambivalenceof technology is explored in Red Desert

throughthemes such as alienation, spatial disorientationand the chromatic dissonance of modern land-scapes. A sense of aesthetic estrangement is sig-nalled from the title sequence of the film, wherecaptions are superimposed on a series of deliber-ately blurred images accompanied by avant-garde

electronic music (composed by Vittorio Gelmetti).The environs of modern Ravenna provide a vividportrayal of a new and unfamiliar landscapeemerging under the post-war miracolo

of Italianeconomic prosperity. The political salience of thefilm is signalled from the outset by a man standingon top of a car outside the perimeter fence of afactory shouting through a megaphone. We learnthat the pretext for this industrial dispute is asomewhat incongruous plan to relocate workers toPatagonia, yet class antagonisms play only a minorrole in the film. Maps of Patagonia appear inseveral scenes in order to allude to the emerginginternational division of labour. The abstract dynamicsof industrial change are emphasized by thedetached and technical terms used to explain thefuture of the factory. We observe the pensive facesof workers gathered to hear details of their reloca-tion, but their experience does not become the focalpoint for the film. Antonionis exploration of socialchange develops not from the vantage point of theindustrial workers, but through an intense explora-tion of the alienation felt by the upwardly mobile

workers of the new Italy. This emerging techno-cracy of middle-ranking managers and skilledworkers is represented in Red Desert

as a distinctivesocial class who enjoy the material prosperity ofmodern Ravenna, but who are nonetheless ambival-ent about the consequences of this economic trans-formation. A new class is coming into existence inthis extraordinary landscape, suggests Antonioni,and my characters belong to this working-classbourgeoisie (cited in Manceaux 1964, 119).

Much of the film is focused on the growing sense

of anxiety experienced by Giuliana as she wandersbetween different locations in the city. For Marxist


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critics such as Armando Borrelli, this fatalistic dis-avowal of class conflict marks an abandonment ofpolitical commitment, whereas Lino Miccich sug-gests that the film presents a radical critique ofbourgeois society (Borrelli 1966; Miccich 1975).

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The

cinema of Antonioni is largely devoid of the tenseconfrontation between Catholicism and Marxismthat marks some of the most self-consciously pol-itical films associated with the development ofneo-realism such as Roberto Rossellinis Rome,Open City

(1945) or Vittorio De Sicas The BicycleThief

(1948). The critical distinction between RedDesert

and most examples of Italian neo-realismlies in Antonionis emphasis on the effects ratherthan the causes of social and political change:

I think filmmakers should always try to reflect the

times in which they live not so much to express andinterpret events in their most direct and tragic form, but rather to capture their effect upon us. (Cited inStrick 1963, 8)

By focusing on the effects of modernity,Antonioni develops a cinematic engagement withwider developments in cultural modernism. RedDesert

does not present an outright rejection ofmodernity, but rests on a profound ambivalencetowards the post-war transformation of modernItaly. On the one hand, Antonioni echoes the

technological critique of the Frankfurt School in hisconcern with the gap between moral man andscientific man:

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The myth of the factory conditions the life of every- body here, denudes it of surprise and disembodies it.The synthetic product dominates, and sooner or later itwill end up by making trees into obsolete objects, likethe horses. (Antonioni 1964c, 83) 13

On the other hand, however, Antonioni marvelsat the scale and dynamism of modern landscapes,

noting that even factories can be beautiful:

I dont say that there ought to be a return to nature,that industrialization is wrong. I even find somethingvery beautiful in this mastery of man over matter. Tome, these pipes and girders seem just as moving as thetrees. Of course its horrifying to think that birds whichfly through these fumes are going to fall dead, that thegas makes it impossible to grow anything for milesaround. But every age, after all, has called for itssacrifices, and its out of these that something else hasgrown. (Cited in Manceaux 1964, 119)

Antonionis concern with the effects of modernityis founded on a perception that new technologies

have contributed towards a sense of humanalienation. This theme is developed by Antonioniin two principal ways: first, with the portrayal ofthe alienation of people from each other; andsecond, through the focus on alienation from

nature in its broadest sense, which is moststrikingly represented in Red Desert

through theoppressive characteristics of the industrial land-scape. Narrowly Weberian conceptions of modernalienation do not capture Antonionis emphasis onthe psychological drama of alienation as a formof social redemption or creative renewal whichmay expand our imaginative grasp of place andspace (see Moore 1995, 23). The sense of alienationdeveloped by Antonioni is phenomenological andpsychological at root and is not developed in a

neo-Marxian sense except in relation to his critiqueof consumer capitalism.

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The existential emptinesswhich Antonioni associates with many aspects ofconsumer capitalism is developed in Red Desert

through his tracking shots of rubbish-strewn wasteground, but for the most part the highly stylizedinteriors represent the acme of modernist minimal-ism. In one scene, Giuliana, Ugo and Corrado,walk by a polluted creek on the outskirts of thecity. Ugo comments in a matter-of-fact tone thateffluent must end up somewhere, and adds thatfishermen have abandoned this spot. They jokeabout overhearing a man in a local restaurantcomplaining that his eel tasted of petroleum.There is an air of resignation that pervades theirstroll along the riverbank. This eerie landscape,where there is scarcely a sound of bird song, is anecessary exchange for the technological dynam-ism and prosperity of modern Italy.

Antonionis ambivalence towards technology isdeveloped in Red Desert

through a series of juxta-positions between pollution and wealth, derelictionand construction, and most tellingly, in the tense

friendship which develops between Giuliana andCorrado. In one striking sequence, Giuliana andCorrado are seen walking under a series of giantradio masts, which form part of the Medicina radarinstallation on the outskirts of Ravenna (Plate 1). Asite worker explains to Giuliana that these mastsare a radio-telescope to listen to the stars. The tinyfigures we can see working high up within thesecomplex metal structures appear dwarfed by thevastness of the towers. There is something strange mythical even about these new and unfamiliar

industrial features in the Italian countryside. Butwhat conceptual vocabulary can we use to critically


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engage with the industrial aesthetics ofRed Desert

?These human artefacts are not just things in thelandscape, but they have been transformed byAntonioni into something far more mysteriousand laden with symbolic meaning. The scale andpower of these new structures is suggestive of

the sublime as a particular category of aestheticengagement with landscape. In its classic Kantianformulation, the sublime is used primarily in rela-tion to the aesthetic experience of nature, but in thewritings of Edmund Burke and in the formulationsof more recent scholars, the concept has beenextended to encompass the scale of human arte-facts in the landscape such as machines, buildingsand vast industrial installations. For Kant, the dif-ference between the beautiful and the sublimerests on a distinction between a bounded object of

contemplation and a formless object which hasthe capacity to extend the power of the human

imagination. The ideal of beauty in nature carrieswith it a purposiveness in its form, whereas anobject of sublime contemplation may

appear to be contrapurposive for our power of judg-ment, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as

it were doing violence to our imagination, but isnevertheless judged all the more sublime for that. (Kant2000, 129; 2329; see also the 1960 edition)

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The Kantian sublime is at root a philosophicalstate-of-being in the world rather than an identifi-able set of objects or sensory stimuli. We mightgo further and suggest that it is the quality ofthe sublime as an anti-landscape, to use Lyotardsapt term, that places the mysterious qualities ofindustrial landscapes in the realm of a sublimeaesthetic that lies at the boundary of human

comprehension. Or to put it in a slightly differentway, the Kantian concept of the sublime is rooted

Plate 1 Michelangelo Antonioni (1964) Red Desert. Giuliana (Monica Vitti) and Corrado (Richard Harris) at the

Medicina radio installation

Source: Courtesy of the British Film Institute, London


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in an aesthetic that is capable of transcending anynarrow association with pantheistic impulses inEuropean romanticism (see Lyotard 1994, 54). Theaesthetic character of an industrial landscape owesits geometry to a mix of abstract and concrete

elements that are combined to produce new spatialformations. The contemporary resonance of thesublime can be attributed to the intellectualdisjuncture between our aesthetic and cognitiveabilities to read these kinds of modern spaces.

If we develop the idea of the sublime beyond itseighteenth-century roots, we can identify an inter-connection between the experience of the sublimeand the cinematic landscape. The concept of thesublime helps us to locate Antonionis handling ofthe Italian landscape within a historically specific

cultural dynamic emerging from the engagement between the visual arts and the experience ofmodernity. Given the centrality of landscape toAntonionis cinema, it is surprising that so littleattention has been placed on the sublime as aconceptual vantage point from which to evaluatethe significance of his work. Discussion of thecinematic sublime has thus far tended to focus onthe imaginary vistas of science fiction film. ScottBukatman (1995, 273), for example, traces the cine-matic sublime in science fiction cinema to the vastcanvasses of the nineteenth-century Luminists andthe Hudson Valley school of painting, where wefind a distinctively American fusion of nature andtechnology.

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The mix of the sublime and thetranscendental, notes Bukatman, found its clearestexpression in the genre of Luminist painting,which emphasized impersonal expression, hori-zontality, minute tonal gradations, intimate scale,immobility, and silence. The luminist emphasis onsilence and emptiness can be contrasted with theeschatological themes of the Hudson Valley schoolwith their focus on the scale and power of nature.

In the paintings of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Coleand Frederic Edwin Church, for instance, we findimmense dioramic depictions of the Americanlandscape which are rooted in powerful myths ofdivine providence and nation building. For Bukatman,these different aspects of the nineteenth-centurysublime are combined in American science fictioncinema to produce a distinctive synthesis whereour fantasies of superiority emerge from ourambivalence regarding technological

power, ratherthan natures might (1995, 279). The awe-inspiring

landscapes of Stanley Kubricks 2001

(1968), forinstance, can be conceived as typical of this genre

of technological mastery over nature and celestialspace. Antonionis cinematic sublime is not, how-ever, founded on the same mix of nationalist andtechnocratic fervour, but develops a more melan-cholic vision closer to the German origins of

romanticism and the philosophical elaborationsof Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer.Schopenhauer, for example, elaborates on Kantianaesthetics to develop a universal ontology of humantragedy, where all happiness and fulfilment areillusory. He introduces a profound sense of pessim-ism into modern philosophical discourse, whichis further developed in the resignationism ofNietzsche and the twentieth-century existentialismof Camus, Heidegger and Sartre. Schopenhauersemphasis on the non-mimetic arts, particularly

music, stems from his belief in the extraordinarypower of art that engages with metaphysicalthemes. It is this sense of a threshold betweenartistic creation and the recognition of humaninsignificance that drives Schopenhauers roman-tic pessimism and provides an insight into thecomplex aesthetic vision of Antonioni with its pro-found sense of loss and alienation.

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The cinemaof Antonioni develops the romantic motif of indi-vidual alienation expressed through a heightenedsensory experience of the world as an aestheticresolution or consolation for the emotional priva-tions of a technologized modernity. The conceptof the technological sublime, though only partiallydeveloped, is relevant to the interpretation ofAntonionis work in three respects: first, it providesan unusual synthesis of the Burkean emphasis onhuman artifice with the Kantian emphasis on thecontemplation of nature; second, it highlights Anto-nionis interest in aesthetic experiences associatedwith spatial disorientation through his explorationof the encounters between the interior psychologicallandscapes of his cinematic protagonists and their

disconcerting experiences of concrete spaces; andthird, following revisionist readings of the sublime,we might link Antonionis pre-occupation withperceptual disorientation to anxieties over the dis-turbance of a masculinist spatial realm.

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Antonioni plays with the idea of the sublime bydisrupting the possibilities for any straightforwardinterpretation of what we see. In an early scene, forexample, a fast-moving cloud of steam surges hori-zontally across the screen like a pyroclastic surgeand threatens to engulf everything in its path. The

bursts of steam which periodically obscure ourview during Red Desert

can be conceived as a literal


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representation of the power of modernity, but atthe same time they reflect the processes of abstrac-tion, reduction and dematerialization which con-tributed towards the implosion of modernismduring the 1960s (Clark 2002, 156). The extensive

deployment of fog and mist also adds to the aes-thetic tensions within the film as the landscape isrepeatedly distilled down to an indistinct form inwhich all traces of human life threaten to disappearcompletely. In one instance, we see a huge ship,partially obscured by mist, moving behind a row ofpine trees as if it were a train on land. In anotherinstance, Giuliana faces four of her friends on a jetty, but a thick fog descends so that the figuresmomentarily disappear completely from view. Inthese and other scenes, Antonioni tests the limits of

our perception so that there is a continual tension between what we can see and our imaginativegrasp of events. In articulating the anxiety thatthese moments induce for Giuliana, the film alsoexplores the aesthetic dimensions to spatial phobiasassociated with modernity. At one level, therefore,

Red Desert

is an exploration of the landscapes offear and the topographies of despair created asa result of modern technological and capitalistdevelopment (Vidler 2000, 2). Yet the film is notonly a representation of spatial psychosis, sincewe are presented with an ambivalent aestheticexperience of industrial landscapes as a source ofvisual pleasure as well as fear or dread.

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The sublime is not a transhistorical category ofaesthetic experience in the cinema of Antonioni, but something far more specific: a powerful per-ceptual device for the articulation of a particularkind of spatial longing or Sehnsucht

. Antonionisconcern with the horizon of events is predicatedon two rather different but interrelated perspect-ives: an intense focus on the concrete spaces ofhuman thought and action; and a struggle to articu-

late an abstract space at the boundary of humancognitive and imaginative possibilities. The pervas-ive restlessness and narrative irresolution of RedDesert

is a reflection of the kind of social andcultural tensions engendered by the rapidity anduneven effects of Italian modernity. This is notto suggest that the visual splendour of Red Desert

is merely a reflection of the particularities ofAntonionis neo-romantic aesthetic sensibility, butrather to emphasize how the film illuminates thelimitations of modernist aesthetics. In Kantian

terms, the realm of physical objects in Red Desert

isrepeatedly transmuted by the power of the human

imagination into a conceptual form. The cinematiclandscape radically extends the conceptual possibil-ities of the sublime by reworking the visual rep-resentation of spatio-temporal transcendence andat the same time blurring the distinctions between

different realms of cultural production. Cinemaplays a vital role in liberating the experience of thesublime from the realm of social exclusivity. Afocus on the cinematic sublime does not necessarilylead, therefore, to critical closure, but has thepotential to open the interpretation of film to amultitude of different possibilities. This idea of athreshold between form and concept also providesan important link between the philosophicalorigins of the sublime and the development ofnon-figurative art in the twentieth century. Leading

figures within the emergence of abstract expres-sionism such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko,for example, perceived clear links between theirwork and the experience of sublimity. The aestheticengagement between modernist abstraction andsublimation saw a move away from the material,the tactile, the objective and involved an attemptto articulate metaphysical themes drawn fromprimordial conceptions of human creativity (seeKrauss 1993, 247). It is in the post-war modernistdrive towards abstraction that we find the focalpoint in Red Desert

for an engagement betweencinema and wider developments in the visual arts.

Fulvous modernities

I want to paint the film as one paints a canvas; I wantto invent colour relationships, and not limit myself by photographing only natural colours. (MichelangeloAntonioni, cited in Strick (1963, 7))

The vivid use of colour in Red Desert

is used toportray not only the iridescent qualities of theindustrial landscape, but also to heighten our

identification with the visual acuity of the main pro-tagonist Giuliana (Plate 2). At an early stage in thefilm we learn that Giuliana is convalescing after acar accident which has left her psychologicallydamaged. One of the consequences of her accid-ent is that she has become much more aware ofthe aesthetic characteristics of her surroundings:What do people expect me to do with my eyes?,implores Giuliana, What should I look at?. Infocusing on the altered state of Giuliana, we find thatAntonioni has deployed an established romantic

trope of illness and suffering as a means towardsheightened states of creative insight. No two people


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see things in quite the same way, notes Antonioni,and what you see is going to depend on yourmental condition (cited in Manceaux 1964, 119).

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The vibrant cinematography in Red Desert

allowsAntonioni to develop his earlier explorations of

perception in new ways. For eighteenth-centurysubjectivists such as David Hume, the perceptionof colour was little more than a phantasm of thesenses, but subsequent philosophical enquiry fromKant onwards has sought to bring the experienceof colour within a workable intellectual frame-work. For studies of human perception, the senseof colour plays a critical role because this aspect ofvision is not reducible to the physiological char-acteristics of the human eye alone, but involvescognitive dimensions to sensory experience as a

structured process of apperception. Colour is, inother words, a complex visual language that com-

bines subjectivist aspects to human experience witha system of shared meaning acquired through lan-guage. Yet the human eye can perceive a vast rangeof colours ten million by some estimates whichfar exceeds our mental schemas for the naming of

individual colours.

21

The weakness of both empiricismand intellectualism, writes the phenomenologistMerleau-Ponty, lies in their refusing to recognizeany colours other than those fixed qualities whichmake their appearance in a reflective attitude,whereas colour in living perception is a way intothe thing (1962, 305). Merleau-Ponty continues:

We must rid ourselves of the illusion, encouraged byphysics, that the perceived world is made up of colourqualities . . . The real colour persists beneath appear-ances as the background persists beneath the figure,

that is, not as a seen or thought-of quality, but througha non-sensory presence. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 305)

Plate 2 Michelangelo Antonioni (1964) Red Desert. Much of the film is focused on the enhanced aesthetic sen-

sibilities of Giuliana (Monica Vitti) towards the places and landscapes of modern Ravenna

Source: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York


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Though phenomenologists such as Merleau-Pontyare right to dismiss mere subjectivism or thepositivist trappings of scientism in the realm ofcolour perception, their framing of the culturalmeaning and historical resonance of colour within

twentieth-century visual culture remains limited.The shift from black and white to colour cinemato-graphy, for example, had important implicationsfor the status of film within the visual arts andraised similar dilemmas to the demise of silentmovies in the 1920s. The closer the cinematicmedium came to the emulation of physical reality,in a narrowly figurative or representational sense,the less it was considered capable of articulatingprofound meaning on a par with other forms ofartistic or creative expression (see Koch 2000).

These tensions between modernist aesthetics,realism and popular culture provide a furthercontext in which to consider how Red Desert

explores the aesthetic unreality of forms of spatialestrangement associated with modern landscapes.

Colour is used in Red Desert

to provide a literalrepresentation of the chromatic dissonance ofmodernity, ranging from the translucent hues ofdiscarded plastic bottles to fluorescent puddlesof yellow water. This invasion of colour is forAntonioni (1964b, 253) an integral aspect tomodernity. Yet natural variations in colour arenot enough: in order to emphasize the intensity ofthe aesthetic experience in Red Desert

, Antonionidirectly altered colours to achieve his desired effect by painting trees, buildings and other features inthe film.

22

The deliberate artificiality of colour in

Red Desert

mimics the technological artifice of theindustrial landscape and also emphasizes the com-plexities of colour perception. Equally, Antonionisextensive deployment of variations in exposure,depth of field, colour filters and intentionally blurred sequences, underpins the extent to which

Red Desert

is an experimental film where thecharacters are lost in a world of artifice (Wollen2001, 4). The repeated use of a narrow focal range,for example, enables Antonioni to emphasize veryspecific elements in the frame, such as a humanface or the surface of a wall. In so doing, our atten-tion is shifted between different elements in thelandscape and there is a clear break with anyattempt to emulate cinematic realism in its narrowsense.

In Red Desert

we find a sustained critical

engagement with developments in architecture,design and the visual arts. The film makes reference

to a myriad of different influences ranging fromthe deserted agora of Giorgio de Chirico to thescarred and fractured landscapes of GiacomoBalla, Umberto Boccioni and Mario Sironi. Ofparticular interest, however, is the extensive

influence of abstract expressionism in Red Desert

.The sparse interiors repeatedly allude to the artof Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and MarkRothko, with splashes, stripes and blocks of colourused to transform austere spaces into sites ofintense creativity (Plate 3). But what does thismimicry of abstract expressionism reveal about therelationship between film and art? We know, forexample, that Pollock and his contemporaries werefearful that their work might be perceived aspurely decorative. If their work was seen as

mere

abstraction then the serious intellectual basis totheir art would be lost (Krauss 1985, 237). ForRosalind Krauss, the driving force behind twentieth-century abstraction has been the dialecticalimpulse to depict Nothing. The second greatwave of visual abstractionists, she writes, whichis to say postwar painters and most prominentlythe abstract expressionists, instinctively under-stood this Nothing, this dialectical signified(Krauss 1985, 238). The metaphysical void that liesat the heart of Antonionis cinema is exploredthrough his phenomenological exploration of thelimits of human creativity and perception. Anto-nioni develops an engagement between moderncinema and the visual arts in order to developways of expression that are absolutely free, as freeas painting that has reached abstraction (cited inArrowsmith 1995, 2). Yet Antonionis interpreta-tion of the critical significance of abstract expres-sionism is rooted in a Greenbergian conception ofaesthetic autonomy and the teleological develop-ment of modern art. For Clement Greenberg, theroots of abstract expressionism could be identified

in relation to a cultural lineage of Western civili-zation founded in a steady progression of differ-ent modes of creative expression towards higherlevels of sophistication.

23

The dominance of Green-bergs art criticism in the 1940s and 1950s providedpowerful intellectual support to the perceivedhegemony of American abstraction as the leadingedge of modernist culture. Greenberg provideda system through which to think the field ofmodern art which conceived the field of art asat once timeless and in constant flux (Krauss 1985,

1). Modernist abstraction became caught up inan impetus towards universal, teleological and


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228

Matthew Gandy

transhistorical modes of critical interpretation thatcombined the neo-romantic mystique of creationwith an emphasis on the intensely individualizedpsychological drama of modernist expressionism.In this sense Red Desert

can be interpreted as a self-conscious attempt to articulate high modernism

through the medium of film. With these diversecultural references to abstract art, as well as develop-ments in architecture, design and even avant-gardeelectronic music, Antonioni presents us with a kindof cinematic Gesamtwerk

that seeks to provide asynthesis of all the arts into a complete work ofmodern art.

During the 1950s, the work of American artistssuch as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwellwas widely perceived as a continuation and refine-ment of European modernism. The theme of creat-

ive freedom was extensively elaborated throughthe critical writings of Clement Greenberg, Meyer

Schapiro and other leading exponents of Americanabstraction. American art was perceived as thelogical culmination of a long-standing and inexor-able tendency towards abstraction in which whathad been characteristically American now becamerepresentative of Western culture as a whole

(Guilbaut 1983, 177). We now know, however, thatAmerican abstract art received significant logisticaland financial support from the US government andwas coopted as part of a cultural front during theCold War. The CIA-backed exhibitions that touredFrance, Italy and other politically unstable Westerndemocracies during the 1950s had a profoundimpact on the future development of European artand consolidated the perceived cultural hegemonyof New York over Paris. The influential exhibi-tion New American Painting

(19589), for example,

travelled to virtually every major European cityand the work of Willem de Kooning reached the

Plate 3 Michelangelo Antonioni (1964) Red Desert. Giuliana (Monica Vitti) and one of the abstract interiors

Source: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York


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Venice Biennale as early as 1948. We know fromAntonionis interviews and writings that thesedevelopments had a profound impact: he evenmade a studio visit to Mark Rothko and commis-sioned one of his paintings (see Chatman 1985, 54).

He would also have been familiar with a variety ofEuropean responses to abstract expressionismdeveloped by figures such as Jean Dubuffet, Wols,Alberto Burri and the Art Informel.

24

In essence, Antonioni adopts a neo-romanticstance in relation to abstract expressionism thatfocuses on its non-figurative spontaneity and creat-ive freedom without engaging with the widerpolitical and intellectual complexities of post-warmodernism. This neo-romantic dimension to RedDesert is exemplified by the emphasis on nature

as a source of both authenticity and creativerenewal. The emphasis on the embodied dimen-sions to perception underpins the extent to whichRed Desert presents a phenomenological responseto the experience of landscape. It also highlightsthe degree to which the landscapes of Red Deserttake on strongly anthropomorphic qualities inorder to emphasize the distinctions between nat-ural and artificial modes of perception.25 This is best illustrated in Giulianas imaginary landscapesequence, where she relates a story to her youngson. We are immersed in a natural experience ofcolour, which profoundly disturbs the industrialcolours used elsewhere in the film. Giulianadescribes how the sea was transparent and thecoral was pink, yet the depiction of gulls, cormor-ants and even rabbits suggests that this somewhatincongruous mix of elements is closer to a half-remembered Mediterranean scene than any accur-ate depiction of a tropical atoll (the distinctive pinksand was in fact filmed on Budello Island off thecoast of Sardinia). Like the phenomenon of con-densation in dreams, we are confronted with vari-

ous fragments of experience and memory woveninto some kind of narrative coherence. A younggirl swims in the sea and observes the different fea-tures of the landscape as they are related byGiuliana. A strange voice can be heard singing (thesame voice that we hear during the title sequenceof the film). A little cove among the rocks saysGiuliana, She had never realized they were likeflesh. And the voice . . . at that moment the voicewas so sweet. Who was singing? asks her child.Everything was singing. Everything, replies

Giuliana. The camera pans slowly across anexpanse of flesh-coloured rocks, which resemble

the desert landscapes of Georgia OKeefe. This softand rounded anthropomorphic landscape contrastswith the poisoned and jagged environs of Ravenna.This is a landscape which for Antonioni showsreality as Giuliana wishes it were that is, different

from the world that appears to her as transformed,alienated, obsessive to the point of being mon-strously deformed (1964b, 254). The tropical beachsequence also challenges any simplistic assumptionthat the entire film is simply a reflection ofGiulianas perspective or even the vision of thedirector himself: the jarring juxtaposition of differ-ent scenographies, whether material or imagined,underlies the fractured and alienated human rela-tionships towards landscape that are depicted inthe film.

If we survey critical responses to cinema in the1960s, we find a tension emerging between thoseauthors who saw purely visual cinematic experi-mentation of the kind seen in Red Desert as a threatto the established narrative conventions of cinemaand an alternative perspective, principally devel-oped in Europe, which sought to raise the statusof cinema within the visual arts. The ideologicaldimensions to cinematic representation lie at theheart of this dispute, since the prevalence of auter-ist modes of critical exposition suppressed thepolitical and historical significance of film as acultural artefact. With the deepening politicizationof cultural discourse in the 1960s, new life was breathed into the earlier critical interventions ofBalzs, Benjamin, Kracauer and other radical theor-ists of visual culture. The innovative structure andscenography of Antonionis cinema proved pivotalto this new emphasis on the theoretical sophistica-tion and critical significance of film within thevisual arts. This shift in the scope and dynamics offilm criticism was reflected in leading film journalssuch as Cahiers du Cinma and Screen that enthusi-

astically embraced new developments in Europeancinema and provided a forum for film theoristsinformed by debates in anthropology, linguisticsand other disciplines. Andr Bazin (1967, 168), forexample, sensed that film had the potential to offerart a new form of existence. The film of a paint-ing, countered Bazin, is an aesthetic symbiosis ofscreen and painting, as is the lichen of the algaeand mushroom. Bazins emphasis on cinema ascultural synthesis anticipates the interventions ofRoland Barthes, Peter Wollen and a wave of critical

scholarship emerging during the 1970s which began to articulate a much more sophisticated


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230 Matthew Gandy

account of the iconic significance of cinematicimages.26 Cinema was now conceived as part of awider field of cultural production that extendedfrom the audience to a nexus of social, economicand also technological structures. Barthes, for

example, extended his literary insights to theexploration of visual culture and dispelled notionsof unity and consistency in the creation of mean-ing. Barthes insisted that the subtlety of meaningin the cinema of Antonioni enhanced its politicalpoignancy and at the same time protected his workfrom becoming a mere instrument of power (citedin Brunette 1998, 13). This emphasis on the com-plexity of film is also developed in the writing ofWollen, who brought a greater level of sophistica-tion to film criticism commensurate with the newly

invigorated status of film within the visual arts andin clear distinction to the nave theoretical excep-tionalism of early contributors to semiological andstructuralist analysis. Wollen, for example, sug-gests that any iconographic analysis of cinemamust be sensitive to three interrelated realms ofmeaning: the symbolic (myth), the iconic (visualpleasure) and the indexical (mimesis of concretereality) (see Wollen 1972). The lasting value ofWollens conceptual schema, like that of Kracauer,is to contextualize film as a cultural form embeddedin a wider set of social and political dynamicswithout diminishing the richness of cinema as afocus for critical inquiry. The film-maker, notesWollen (1972, 154), is fortunate to be working inthe most semiologically complex of all media, themost aesthetically rich. The cinema of Antonioniwas easily assimilated in this critical shift fromauterist to more structurally complex modes ofcritical inquiry during the 1970s and has remaineda focal point for intersections between film andphilosophy ever since.

The oblique narrative structures employed in the

cinema of Antonioni anticipate a shift in criticalfilm discourse from its earlier focus on linguisticsto a more multi-faceted conception of cinema as akind of social technology (see de Lauretis 1984).In Red Desert, Antonioni extends modernist aes-thetics through a radical industrial synthesis thatprefigures the extensive blurring of boundariesthat would ultimately contribute towards thedemise of modernism as a rarefied cultural realm.Gilles Deleuze (1989, 59), for example, chroniclesa shift in Antonionis cinema from the discon-

nected space of his earlier films to the empty ordeserted space of Leclisse (1962) onwards. For

Deleuze, these non-Euclidean and amorphousspaces reflect a crucial juncture in visual culture between the movement-image and the time-image that denotes a different kind of historicalpossibility for the cinematic imagination. The

assimilation of Antonioni within a deconstructivistcinematic canon is difficult to reconcile, however,with the self-conscious attachment of cinematichigh modernism to well established cultural tenetswithin Western humanism. Though couched inthe visual language of ambiguity, the cinema ofAntonioni remains firmly grounded in a dichoto-mous arrangement of cultural coordinates rangingfrom gender to technology. The essentializedtopography of sexual difference in Red Desert is, forexample, a corollary of Antonionis phenomeno-

logical search for the essence of aesthetic experi-ence as a metaphysical dimension to nature. And,from a contemporary neo-Marxian perspective, thefilms of Antonioni play a transitional role withinan emerging geopolitical aesthetic, to use Frederic Jamesons (1992) term, wherein cinema takes onan increasingly polyvalent and allegorical form. Jamesons (1992, 1) concern with the residues ofthe modern places European cinema within aglobal arena of cultural and political transforma-tion in which different conceptions of cinematicmodernity vie for historical significance in the faceof a threatened cultural erasure. Yet, in adoptingthe terminology of Jameson and contemporaryneo-Marxian film criticism, we should be carefulnot to substitute the structuralist analysis of thepast with a new constellation of deterministic ele-ments. It is the complexity ofRed Desert that lendsthe film such rich possibilities for exploring thechanging meaning and significance of film in mod-ernist culture.

ConclusionsThe representation of industrial landscapes in RedDesert provides an insight into the complexities ofcultural modernism in Italy during the social andeconomic transformations of the 1950s and early1960s. The film reflects a shift in Antonionis workfrom his earlier association with Italian neo-realismtowards an exploration of the existential dilemmasthat lie at the heart of the post-war Fordist modelof Italian prosperity. What Antonioni (1964b, 254)refers to as the malaise of progress is most

strikingly explored through the fragile mental stateof the films main protagonist as she encounters


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different facets to this strange new landscape. Thedisorientating and unfamiliar locales used in RedDesert serve as a powerful motif to raise questionsabout the effects of modernity that range fromthe aesthetic characteristics of industrial land-

scapes to sensations of spatial displacement. Thesedisordered spaces provoke deep ambivalence intheir inhabitants as they traverse the remnants offamiliar landscapes strewn with the debris ofmodernity. The present is always wanting, writesZygmunt Bauman, which makes it ugly, abhorrentand unendurable. The present is obsolete . . . Themoment it lands in the present, the coveted futureis poisoned by the toxic effluvia of the wasted past(1991, 11). In many of the critical responses to thecinema of Antonioni, however, these themes are all

too often explored, not in relation to the distinctivecharacteristics of twentieth-century modernity, butrather as ciphers for existential commentaries onfractured human experience. Much of the existingliterature on Antonioni has tended to interpret hisfilms in terms of a set of putative universal aspectsto human experience. We have seen how trans-cendent perspectives tend towards transhistoricalor even neo-romantic conceptions of place andspace that obscure the historical and geographicalspecificity of cinematic landscapes. Antonionisdesire to capture a certain truth of the landscape(cited in Brunette 1998, 97) is predicated on asearch for primal aesthetic energies inscribed in thelandscape that he uses to reflect the psychologicalstates of his cinematic protagonists.

The cinema of Antonioni reveals much about thecontradictory dimensions to what we might termhigh modernism and its various manifestationsin the visual arts during the 1960s. Antonionisconception of the relationship between the visualarts and wider social and political developmentsremains trapped in a narrowly Greenbergian inter-

pretation of the development of cultural modern-ism. In the final analysis, however, Antonionissearch for pure cinema is predicated on a concep-tion of creative autonomy and teleological progres-sion within the visual arts which has now beensuperseded by more sophisticated bodies of criticalanalysis. The blurring of perceptual boundaries inRed Desert leads us towards the cinematic sublimeas a powerful conceptual link between the neo-romantic apprehension of nature and the aestheticexperience of modern cinema. By developing the

concept of the sublime in relation to modern land-scapes, we can begin to locate cinematic repres-

entations of spatio-temporal transcendence withinan identifiable genealogy of landscape aesthetics.The experience of the sublime in the cinema ofAntonioni takes us beyond the eighteenth-centurydistinctions between beauty and the sublime.

These oppositional categories are no longer adequateto account for the complexity and irrationality ofmodern space, since the experience of the sublimeitself has become fractured into new kinds of spa-tial disorder (see Nesbitt 1995). The shifting focusfrom natural or even quasi-natural landscapes tomodern landscapes requires a more complex set ofanalytical tools than the classical trope of aesthetictheory can provide. The discourse is no longer between beauty and the sublime, or even betweennature and culture, but between categories of the

sublime and different kinds of conceptual configura-tion. The modern landscape transcends binaryconceptualizations of either landscape change orthose categories of thought employed to mouldcomplex phenomena into pre-existing analyticalforms. In Red Desert, modern landscapes becomea source of profound mental anguish as if everyfeature has become transmuted into a threateningpresence within Giulianas fragile psyche. If thelandscapes of modern Ravenna and its environshave been anthropomorphized, it is a mechanizedembodiment of living machines that forms thedominant visual motif rather than fleeting repres-entations of human form.

The move away from narrative convention inRed Desert can be interpreted as a cinematic corol-lary of the shift towards non-figurative art. Itplaces Antonioni within a cinematic tradition influ-enced principally by painting in contrast with amore literary cinematic avant-garde.27 It could beargued that Red Desert displays some of the charac-teristics of avant-garde cinema as set out in Ger-main Dulacs classic definition with her emphasis

on films, whose techniques, employed renewedexpressiveness of image and sound, break withestablished tradition to search out, in the strictlyvisual and auditory realm, new emotional chords,and on filmmakers who, detached from motives ofprofit, march boldly on towards the conquest of thenew modes of expression . . . to expand cinematicthought (cited in Hoberman 1984, 59). Yet in manyrespects Red Desert was a mainstream film in itsday: it achieved significant commercial success; itwas widely distributed; and it paved the way for

Antonionis three-picture deal with Metro GoldwynMayer studios. In commercial terms, therefore, we


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232 Matthew Gandy

cannot claim that Red Desert is an example of anavant-garde film, but it is undeniable that the filmbreaks new ground in terms of the aesthetic scopeand complexity of modern cinema. For JohnHoberman it was only in the twilight of modern-

ism, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, that anauthentically modernist avant-garde came intoexistence (1984, 64) through the work of filmmakerssuch as Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow. In con-trast, Antonionis Red Desert leads in a differentdirection and prefigures a process of institutional-ization and coalescence between cinema and thevisual arts that would develop into the commer-cial avant-garde of the 1970s represented by, forexample, the New German Cinema and militantThird World cinema.

Over the last 25 years, the European art film hasfound itself increasingly marginalized in theoret-ical, political and commercial terms: the auteristvision is at odds with much contemporary culturaldiscourse; many well-established directors havefaced difficulties in distributing their work; and theidea of the film director (or artist) as social or polit-ical commentator now carries far less credence.This period has seen the decline and decay ofEuropean film culture both as a mode of culturalproduction and as a significant dimension to publiclife, as countless former art-house cinemas havedisappeared or lie in ruins (see Barber 2002). Eventhe corporate studio system and its vast multiplexdistribution networks are struggling to maintain agrip on the consumption of visual culture as newforms of film production and distribution colonizethe cultural interstices of the contemporary city.Yet the idea of critical or artistic autonomy remainsof vital significance for the visual arts: the fact thatAntonioni resisted studio diktat or audience grati-fication in the development of his work is animportant element in its enduring appeal. In 1958,

for example, he stated that one does not work forthe public (cited in Leprohon 1963, 11) and hiswork with MGM studios ended in acrimony afterthe political storm ofZabriskie Point (1969) and thecommercial disappointment ofThe Passenger (1975).A range of cultural commentators from PierreBourdieu to Susan Sontag have sought to promotethe idea of an autonomous creative sphere which isnot open to political or economic manipulation.The expense and complexity of film production hasmade it especially vulnerable to these pressures,

yet Red Desert remains a testament to the creativepossibilities of modern cinema. Antonionis fascina-

tion with the deliquescence of the industriallandscape derives from his exploration of the shift-ing boundary between cultural and economic pro-duction as devalorized fragments of the landscapeacquire new meaning as a focus of reverie and con-

templation. That Antonioni aspires towards a formof universalist or even metaphysical abstraction inhis cinematic landscapes tells us much about thetrajectory and limitations of modernist aestheticsand the centrality of cinema to any sustainedengagement with the cultural legacy of twentieth-century modernism.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the detailed and thoughtful com-

ments received from the referees. Thanks also toDonnatella Bernstein for assistance with the trans-lation of Italian sources and to Peter Wollen forsharing some of his insights from working withAntonioni in the mid-1970s. Embryonic versions ofthis paper were given to various audiences, includ-ing the Landscape and Politics conference held atthe University of Edinburgh in 2001 and the TodSpieker Colloquium Series in the Department ofGeography at the University of California-LosAngeles in 2002.

Notes

1 In Clarks (1999) survey of modernism he placesexamples of Italian neo-realist cinema at the leadingedge of modernist culture just before its implosionand decline in the 1960s.

2 Bergers close engagement with Antonionis repres-entation of landscape underlies the degree to whichhis work has been taken seriously by a variety ofscholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. RolandBarthes, Gilles Deleuze and Frederic Jameson, forexample, have all at various times drawn on thecinema of Antonioni in order to develop their theoret-ical reflections on the development of visual culture.

3 Cited in Steimatsky (1995, 32). Kracauers observa-tion was made in relation to the films of RobertoRosselini.

4 Key sources on landscape as a historically specificinterplay between social and aesthetic perspectivesinclude Barrell (1980 1993), Cosgrove (1998), Daniels(1989), Schama (1995) and Williams (1973). See alsothe edited collections by Mitchell (1994) and Wredeand Adams (1991).

5 Recent examples of the study of the cinematic land-

scape include Barber (2002), Bruno (2002), Clarke(1997), Shiel and Fitzmaurice (2001 2003), Foot (1999),


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Gandy (1996a 1996b), Natter (1994) and Rohdie(2001). For the most part, however, these studies haveemerged outside of the disciplinary context of filmstudies and have drawn heavily on other areas ofscholarship such as architecture, geography and history.

6 See Bruno (1993, 4). In Brunos study of Naples in thesilent films of Elvira Notari, she interweaves thehistorical and political context for Italian cinema witha sensitivity towards the corporeality of visual cul-ture and new methodological developments across arange of disciplines.

7 See, for example, Ferretti (1989), Frisby (1986) andKoch (2000).

8 For an overview of Italian neo-realism see, for example,Bazin (1971), Bondanella (1994), Marcus (1986) andOverbey (1979). An alternative genealogy of earlyneo-realist cinema is provided by Bruno (1993). Forfurther details on the life and work of Antonioni see,

for example, Barthes (1988), Bernardini (1967), Bru-nette (1998), Cowie (1963), del Rio (1996), Fonseca(1985), Goddard (1964), Goldman (1971), Jacobowitzand Lippe (1997), Micheli (1991), Perry and Preito(1986), Reynolds (1996), Rifkin (1982) and Rohdie(1990). Where appropriate I have referred to films inthis essay by the names that are best known to English-speaking audiences: unlike Leclisse, for example, RedDesert is usually referred to by its translated title inmost Anglo-American publications.

9 On literary influences in the cinema of Antonioni see,for example, Aristarco (1961) and Basting (1995).

10 These historical and regional antecedents can berelated to an early emphasis on the use of locationshooting in Italian filmmaking. See, for example,Bruno (1993), Marcus (1986) and Steimatsky (1995).The role of the human figure in the cinematic land-scape is the focal point for Noa Steimatskys (1995,276) study of landscape in Italian film. She concludesher analysis by suggesting that the frequent empty-ing out of Antonionis landscapes mark an importantdistinction from the figuration of the landscape inthe films of his contemporaries such as Rossellini,Visconti and Pasolini. For greater detail on the polit-ical and economic dimensions to modern Italy see,

for example, Atkinson and Cosgrove (1998), Forgacs(1986 1990).

11 For an interesting overview of different criticalresponses to Antonionis films in the 1960s and 1970s,see Brunette (1998).

12 Antonioni cited in Tinazzi (1974, 9). See also Antonioni(1964a).

13 Authors translation. The original Italian reads: Ilmito della fabbrica condiziona la vita di tutti, qui, laspoglia dimprevisti, la scarnifica, il prodotto sinteticodomina, prima o poi finir per rendere gli alberioggetti antiquati, come I cavalli.

14 Antonionis critique of consumer capitalism reachesits apotheosis in the finale to Zabriskie Point (1969).

For greater detail on Marxs theory of alienationsee, for example, Axelos (1976), Mszros (1970) andOllman (1976).

15 For more detail on the concept of the sublime and itsapplicability to the arts see, for example, Bhme(1989), Crowther (1989 1992), Deleuze (1984), Freyssinet(2001), Gandy (1996a), Lyotard (1982 1984 1989 19911994), Monk (1935), Patterson (1999), Pries (1989),Pillow (2000), Riese (1998), Schaper (1992) and Vidler(1987). On Kantian conceptions of space see alsoGarnett (1965) and Parsons (1992).

16 Bukatman echoes the insights of David Nye on theemergence of the American technological sublime asa distinctively republican aesthetic based on a celebra-tion of vast engineering projects such as bridges,dams and aqueducts (Nye 1994). See also Weiskel(1976), MacDonald (2001), Marx (1964 1991) andWilton and Barringer (2002).

17 For greater detail on Schopenhauers romantic pes-simism see Foster (1999), Magee (1983), Janaway(1999), Simmel (1986), Soll (1998) and Tanner (1992).A range of authors have drawn attention to thephilosophical dimensions to Antonionis cinema.Gilles Deleuze (1989, 95), for example, suggests thatAntonioni is the only director to have taken up theNietzschean project of a real critique of morality,whereas Frederic Jameson (1992, 20) draws attentionto Antonionis Heidegerrian and metaphysicaldimension. See also Elder (1991), Maunier (1995) andSchliesser (1998). We should note, however, that

Schopenhauer adds comparatively little to Kantsoriginal reflections on the meaning of the sublime, but is more significant with respect to the role of artin eliciting access to metaphysical sources of mean-ing. For a critique of the ideological implications ofromanticism in art see, for example, Eagleton (1990)and Gandy (1997).

18 On the gendered dimensions to the sublime see, forexample, Yaeger (1992).

19 On the aesthetic aspects of modern infrastructure andindustrial structures see, for example, Kaka andSwyngedouw (2000), Seidel (1993), Vidler (1994),Wigley (1993), Williams (1990) and Wollen (1997).

20 Dalle Vache (1996, 47) suggests that Antonioni usesthe character of Giuliana in Red Desert as a form ofvisual ventriloquism in order to communicate thedirectors female alter-ego. In so doing, however,Dalle Vache presents a narrowly dualistic reading ofthe film based on a gendered differentiation between(male) rationality and (female) creativity that merelyreplicates Antonionis own iconography of sexualdifference. In fact, she merely reiterates Pier PaoloPasolinis interpretation of Red Desert in his 1965essay on the cinema of poetry, where he argues thatthe director looks at the world by immersing himself

in his neurotic protagonist, reanimating the factsthrough her eyes . . . because he has substituted in toto


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234 Matthew Gandy

for the world view of a neurotic his own delirious view of

aesthetics (Pasolini 1965, emphasis in original). If weaccept Dalle Vaches contention that Red Desert isa historical melodrama about the female condition(p. 61) we effectively ignore feminist insights in filmcriticism that have developed since the 1960s.

21 On the philosophy of colour see, for example, Hardin(1988), Hume (1965 [1757]), Merleau-Ponty (1962),Raffman (1988) and Sibley (1967).

22 Antonioni even tried to paint a whole stretch of pineforest white but had to abandon the shoot the follow-ing day because the bright sunlight left the woods insilhouette thereby destroying the grey mise en scnethat he was trying to create (see Antonioni 1964c).Further debate over the significance of landscape inAntonionis cinema can be found in, for example,Benayoun (1965), Bou (1995), Forgacs (2000), Scemama-Heard (1998) and Tomasulo (1993).

23 On the significance of Clement Greenbergs writingssee, for example, Brger (1984), Clark (1982 1999),Foster (1996), Frascina and Harris (1992), Guilbaut(1990), Harris (1993), Krauss (1985 1993) and Wallis(1984).

24 Other likely influences on Red Desert include neo-expressionist depictions of the new industrial land-scapes of modern Italy by, for example, FernandoFarulli and Arturo Tosi (see Bartoloni and Mennucci2001).

25 On the physiognomy of landscape in cinema see, forexample, Balzs (1972), Koch (1987) and Steimatsky

(1995). On the phenomenology of space see, forexample, Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Kaelin (1966).26 Key theoretical advances in film criticism that

emerged during this period include, for example,Heath (1981), Metz (1974 1982), Mulvey (1975) andWollen (1972).

27 On the two cinematic avant-gardes see Wollen (1975).

References

AntonioniM 1994 [1964a] Il mio deserto in LEuropeo (16August 1964) reprinted in di Carlo C and Tinazzi GedsFare un film per me vivere: scritti sul cinema Marsilio,

Venice 789Antonioni M 1994 [1964b] Il deserto rosso. Interview

with Franois Maurin in Humanit dimanche (23 Septem- ber 1964) reprinted in di Carlo C and Tinazzi G eds Fare un film per me vivere: scritti sul cinema Marsilio,Venice 2514

Antonioni M 1978 [1964c] Il bosco bianco in di Carlo CedIl deserto rosso 2nd edn Cappelli, Bologna 804

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landscapes of deliquescence in michelangelo antonioni’s red desert

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