Electric Shadow

522: Desert of Crowded Isolation


Il deserto rosso (Red Desert) was Antonioni's first film made in color. Desert is a forceful (if at times melodramatic) audiovisual treatise on loneliness and alienation in the post-industrial world. Antonioni seems to argue that all of the automation in daily life only serves to drive us further from our humanity. I took the film to imply that technology does not merely refer to the machines we build, but the routines that we construct mentally.
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522 (Red Desert Preview)

 

 

Il deserto rosso (Red Desert) was Antonioni's fourth film in a series preceded by L'avventura, La notte, and L'eclisse. It was also his first film made in color. Criterion's Blu-ray of Desert, which I watched late last week, is rich with texture and nuanced color. I need to re-watch it because I saw a vertical reddish-yellow streak in a few frames at one point and didn't note the timestamp so I could glance back at it. The transfer is otherwise visually flawless, with the look of a pristine 35mm print. More on this disc soon.