The final moments of Red Desert make me think of Dar Williams’s ‘Mark Rothko Song’, and vice versa.1 The song begins by describing a visit to a museum, where the speaker reacts instinctively to the abstract art they encounter:

The blue it speaks so full,

It’s like the beauty one can barely stand,

Or too much things dropped in your hand.

And there’s a green like the peace in your heart, sometimes,

Painted underneath the sheets of ashy snow.

And there’s a blue like where the urban angels go, very bright.

Now the Calder mobile tips a biomorphic sphere,

Then it swings its dangling pieces round to other paintings here.

This is like Sabeth’s ‘game of comparisons’ from Homo Faber (see Part 44). Everything is ‘like’ something, only now we are playing the game as Giuliana might, not with identifiable objects but with the vaporous colours of a Mark Rothko painting. The deliberately bad grammar of ‘too much things’ recalls Giuliana’s tendency to amalgamate the things and people she loves (so that they are ‘too much’ rather than ‘too many’), and the phrase ‘speaks so full’ is also grammatically awkward. ‘Fully’ and ‘many’ have one too many syllables for the chosen metre of this song, so they are abbreviated or replaced. These truncations are integral to what the speaker is saying about their response to abstract art: how that response exceeds their capacity to express it and is compromised by being inserted into a specific medium (such as song); or, from another point of view, how that response exceeds the expressive capacities of correct grammar and the spoken (as opposed to sung) word.

The verse moves from overwhelming beauty, to a transient sense of peace (‘sometimes’), to the cold burial sheets of ‘ashy snow,’ to a heaven that caters specifically to city-dwellers (too bright for rural angels, perhaps). There is something here of Giuliana’s turbulent emotional response to the world, and of Red Desert’s preoccupation with colour as a determinant of emotional states. This blue-green haven of peace, hidden under a layer of ash, is like the celeste e verde ceramics shop Giuliana planned to open on the greyed-out Via Alighieri (see Part 14). It is cooling and soothing, but tinged with unease. Somehow we cannot stay with it for more than a few seconds before other forces (or forces within the blue-green fantasy itself) wrench us away. We are buffeted between these intense colours until the nearby Calder mobile distracts us, and then distracts us from itself as well, seeming to point at other artworks. Williams evokes the sometimes contradictory experience of engaging with art. You have an intense, transcendent reaction, you try to understand or articulate it, then you give up and move on to the next masterpiece, the next thing. There is also a sense that, like Corrado faced with Giuliana’s final breakdown, the speaker has seen more than they wanted to and is desperate to be directed elsewhere.

In an interview, Williams explains that this verse was inspired by an encounter with a Rothko painting in the Fogg Museum at Harvard:

The painting was called Untitled (Blue, Green). And I thought, ‘What an ironic title, because it’s grey.’ But then as I stood there, it was very much blue-green, it was just underneath that kind of smog, and it hit me very strongly how melancholy that is, when people can show you so much of who they are, if you just pause, for just another second, and take them on their terms or look a little bit more closely. And I think I just started to write the song right there.2

Here is the Untitled (Blue, Green) currently listed at the Fogg Museum:3

The ashen quality Williams describes may have been a result of colour degradation, and the painting may have been restored since she saw it in around 1991 (or earlier). I wonder if it looked something like this Untitled (Green on blue):4

Or this one:5

Rothko himself would not have given the painting a title, so would not have expected viewers to find any irony in the name Blue, Green being attached to an image that appears predominantly grey. However, Williams’s attempt to reconcile the title with the painting creates an interesting dynamic in this first verse of her song. It adds an extra resonance to the phrase ‘painted underneath the sheets of ashy snow’: the blue and green suggest emotions that are buried under a seemingly cold or cremated exterior, but we also get the impression that the very act of painting has taken place ‘underneath the sheets,’ in a vulnerable and private space. In this way, the image expresses a melancholy truth about how we conceal our emotions, but also about how we fail to engage with people on their terms or to look closely enough at what they are showing us.

The next verse contrasts the colour that ‘speaks so full’ with an inexpressive, Corrado-like figure. The ‘you’ being addressed here may be the same Rothko painting the speaker was admiring before:

Your behaviour is so male,

It’s like you can’t explain yourself to me,

I think I’ll ask Renoir to tea.

For his flowers are as real as they are, all the time,

And the sunlight sets the furniture aglow.

It’s a pleasant time as far as people go – how far do they go?

Well his roses are perfect and his words have no wings.

I know what he can give me and I like to know these things.

Rationalising the shift towards ‘other paintings’ at the end of the first verse, the speaker explains why they suddenly feel frustrated by abstract expressionism and its refusal (or inability) to ‘explain itself.’ Now the game of comparisons draws a connection between the spectator-artwork relationship and the inter-personal relationship. The speaker would prefer to socialise with Renoir than with Rothko. The phrases ‘ask to tea’ and ‘pleasant time’ connote a conventional, archaic form of social relation, as dull and twee as it is perfect and predictable. We have left behind the game of comparisons and now things are as real as they are – and they are so ‘all the time,’ relentlessly, monotonously. Words have no wings and cannot go flying off to mean something else, as they threatened to do in the first verse. Then again, ‘what things are’ is not easy to determine. How real are the flowers? How far do people go? Does the speaker really know what people (or paintings, or roses, or words) can give them, or do they just ‘like to know these things’? That last word recalls the earlier phrase, ‘too much things.’ It is preferable to know and quantify the ‘things’ that pass between us and the people or objects we relate to. We like to know these things, and to know that there are not too much of them, even if this means they do not speak so full.

In the third verse, we find ourselves at an unnamed artist’s funeral (perhaps Rothko’s), hearing what people have to say about him. If the first and second verses presented competing voices in the speaker’s head, now there is a cacophony of voices engaged in that same effort to articulate a coherent response to something overwhelmingly complex. These voices mingle with the speaker’s, much as the opinions of others tend to blur into our own as we internalise them. Notice how the pronouns progress from ‘I’ at the start of this verse to ‘we’ at the end:

I met her at the funeral,

She said, ‘I don’t know what he meant to me,

I just know he affected me.

An effect not unlike his art, I believe.’

The service starts and we are in the know.

He had so much to say and more to show, and ain’t that true of life?

So we weep for a person who lived at great cost,

Yet we barely knew his powers till we sensed what we had lost.

We have already experienced a confusion between artworks and people, and now we encounter a person (‘her’) who is unnamed and abstract, whose connection to the speaker is not clear, and who conflates the deceased person with his art (and confesses to not understanding either). For as long as the commemorative service lasts, ‘we are in the know.’ The individual might say, as the woman at the funeral does, ‘I don’t know, I just know, I believe,’ but collectively ‘we are in the know.’ Like people trying to sound intelligent in a museum, we join forces to pretend that we understand who this person was. But our supposed appreciation of art and artist is a self-consuming paradox. He had more to ‘show’ than could be expressed or explained. We weep for him ‘yet’ we barely knew him. We ‘sense’ what we have lost, but we have also lost it and so cannot sense it, cannot ‘feel it anymore’ as Anna said to Sandro in L’avventura. Does the phrase ‘ain’t that true of life’ convey a plain-spoken truth or an empty, comfortable truism? Are these mourners more or less sincere than the squirming aesthete in the first verse?

The final verse returns to a museum setting, to a room with a single wall devoted to Mark Rothko:

A friend and I in a museum room.

She says, ‘Look at Mark Rothko’s side.

Did you know about his suicide?

Some folks were born with a foot in the grave – but not me, of course.’

And she smiles as if to say we’re in the know.

Then she names a coffee place where we can go, uptown.

Now the painting is desperate but the crowds wash away,

In a world of kind pedestrians who’ve seen enough today.

The scene-setting in the first line is refreshingly clear after the confusions of the first three verses. The speaker is in a museum with their friend, so we at least have a general sense of where we are and who is there with us. However, there is a stark contrast between this and the first verse. Instead of an individual having an emotional response to a painting and then distancing themselves from it, we have the friend asking the speaker to ‘look at’ the Rothkos (or rather, at the ‘side’ belonging to Rothko, the wall adorned by his works) but then immediately retreating from the paintings themselves, to focus on a biographical detail about the artist. This in turn prompts another folksy philosophical truism (‘Some folks were born with a foot in the grave’), and one that seems designed to contain and diminish the potentially disturbing nature of Rothko’s art. There is nothing too terrible here; some folks are just born to be depressed and suicidal; some folks, like Giuliana in Red Desert, are not equipped to deal with the world they are born into; we can smile philosophically about it.

This, however, does not do justice to the ambiguity of the friend’s comments. What does she mean when she adds, ‘but not me, of course’? Do we take this at face value, as an affirmation of her own strength and wellbeing? When she ‘smiles as if to say we’re in the know,’ is she inviting the speaker to share in this sense of wellbeing? ‘But of course I’m not like that, and neither are you.’ The phrase ‘of course’ underlines the normalising tone of this comment, but it also hints at another way of reading it. The friend may be speaking ironically: ‘Some folks are born with a foot in the grave, but of course I’m not talking about myself.’ Her knowing smile may be a kind of wink to the speaker, who is expected to pick up on this irony. The phrase ‘not me of course’ is sung to the same melody as the word ‘sometimes’ in the first verse (‘And there’s a green like the peace in your heart, sometimes’). Both phrases are sung with a kind of dying fall, and with a beat of ‘dead time’ between them and the next line. The peace in your heart is only there ‘sometimes,’ but you can only admit this in a small, furtive voice. You have to distance yourself from this suicidal artist, but you use the same small, furtive voice to do so (perhaps because you only feel distant from him ‘sometimes’).

This painting expresses something terrible about the human condition, but this thing cannot be spoken out loud. ‘Of course’ no one can admit to having seen it. Even the act of expressing it through this painting – the kind of painting that ‘can’t explain itself’ to the viewer – is made to seem like a prelude to or cause of the artist’s suicide. The friend looking at the painting cannot share her reaction to it, except through an ambiguous gesture. The speaker cannot even share their reaction with us, except through the ambiguous language and melody of their song. Albert Camus’s vision of art bringing the lonely esprit out of itself and into contact with other lonely souls (see Part 49) does not seem to apply here, any more than it does in Red Desert. The friend’s comment about what people are ‘born with’ shares something with Giuliana’s comment that ‘everything that happens to me is my life,’ including the ‘oh well’ undertone of Giuliana’s concluding, ‘that’s all [ecco].’ One’s dismal lot in life is to be accepted with a shrug – one should not talk (or even think) about it too much.

The friends abandon the museum for a ‘coffee place uptown,’ echoing the tea the speaker proposed to have with Renoir. Again, even while looking at the Rothko painting, the spectator is thinking of the less disturbing place they will soon retreat to. The friend ‘names’ the coffee place, identifying it and making it knowable. It is a place ‘where we can go.’ But the final lines of the song do not let us go, they keep us in the museum. ‘Now the painting is desperate.’ Williams sings the first syllable of ‘painting’ with a pained, lingering quiver, and the word ‘desperate’ with a breathless intensity. This painting cannot explain itself and those who look at it cannot communicate with each other, but the pain is there, desperate to be seen and acknowledged. Nonetheless, ‘the crowds wash away,’ the word ‘wash’ suggesting a cleansing but also obliterating action, the desperate painting sponged into blankness. The ‘world of kind pedestrians’ is also, by a play on words (and continuing the watery metaphor), a ‘whirl’, not unlike the congregation of mourners in the previous verse whose collective action normalised the artist’s torment into a set of easy platitudes. Like the adulatory eulogies that flatten out a person’s life once they are dead, the pedestrians have paid attention to this painting out of kindness, perhaps out of pity, but now they have ‘seen enough’ and they ‘wash away’ what they have seen (as well as themselves).

The idea that the painting itself is ‘desperate’ recalls Camus’s notion that a work of art can exceed its creator and follow through ‘to the bitter end’ what no human being can accomplish.6 This painting retains the desperation of the deceased painter, expressing what he could not express in his own person, or expressing it more vividly and intensely, and keeping that emotion alive on the wall of the museum. The speaker, their friend, and the other kind pedestrians feel this desperation as well, to one degree or another. It is the pain of someone who has been left behind, just as Giuliana has been left behind in the world of Red Desert. It is that part of myself that I leave in the dark (while smiling and saying, ‘not me, of course,’ although I know it is me), but that I cannot bear to look at for very long. Giuliana leaves the film and we are left staring at the factories, but her desperation and ours are still there in the image and in the soundtrack. We may have ‘seen enough today,’ but that word ‘today’ implies a tomorrow when these anxieties will return, and that word ‘enough’ implies that there is more than enough – that there is more to see, perhaps too much.

Mark Rothko’s son, Christopher, expresses mixed feelings about ‘Mark Rothko Song’. He sees it as symptomatic of a problem that has dogged his father’s posthumous reputation:

[T]hrough the suicide, he [created] an interference pattern through which most must pass to view his work and through which his fame will always be regarded. Has he indeed achieved fame or merely notoriety? Will songs laud him for the power of his paintings, or will they instead render art and artist a footnote to the sensation of his suicide?

In the case of Dar Williams’s song, I would suggest the answer must be both. For, as I have noted, the suicide would not generate ongoing fascination were it not for the appeal of Rothko’s artwork. And yet it is unlikely that my father would have featured in this song were it not for the suicide, despite the fact that the first stanza contains a very sensitive description of the emotive vocabulary of his work. […] Over the course of the song, Williams uses Rothko’s suicide as a gateway to looking at human personality and psychological defense, but those are subjects at best peripheral to the language of my father’s paintings. She equates the saturation of color in Rothko’s canvases with his own emotional saturation, a depth and excess of feeling that ends, consequentially, in suicide. This is quite a sophisticated undertaking in a four-stanza song, but we are still closer to the life than we are to the work, and once again, the tail has wagged the dog: the suicide is the causative factor, working retroactively to color the content of Rothko’ s artwork.7

It should go without saying that Christopher Rothko, who was six at the time of his father’s suicide, has every reason to feel frustrated (or indeed furious) with the discourse around this topic, which he has had to listen to for decades. If this frustration makes him unwilling to fully engage with a song that invokes his father’s suicide, that is fair enough.

But what he presents here is, I think, a mis-reading of ‘Mark Rothko Song’, and a very telling one in the context of his comments about Antonioni, which I will discuss later. He only quotes the first few lines of Williams’s final verse (from ‘A friend and I’ to ‘not me of course’), and does not engage with the fact that the reference to Mark Rothko’s suicide is made by the friend, not by the song’s primary speaker. To refer to the latter as ‘she’ and ascribe her comments to the author is also problematic, because this speaker may or may not be Dar Williams; if the third verse is indeed set at Rothko’s funeral, in 1970, it is worth noting that Williams was only three years old at that time. Her songs often function as character sketches – sometimes without specifying the speaker’s gender – and in this case the technique is integral to what the song is about. The voices that equate art and artist, that say he ‘lived at great cost,’ or that gossip about his suicide, are not to be taken at face value. But this is how Christopher Rothko takes them: to his mind, the song argues that his father felt ‘too much things,’ that he was like one of his own paintings, that he therefore ‘lived at great cost,’ and that the ultimate cost was suicide.

We are preoccupied with suicide, he suggests, because

it frightens us to our very core. So foreign and so close to home. Something we cannot imagine and which we can imagine too readily. The object so repulsive we cannot resist looking at it. […] [P]reoccupation with that which most disturbs us is reflected in the seemingly limitless tide of horror and violence in the majority of popular films made today. Treatment of even the most gentle themes is apparently incomplete without it. Somehow we feel compelled to watch all manner of horrific things we would never want any part of ourselves. […] [S]uicide touches our psyches in a truly profound place, but we turn it into theater.8

Those who read Mark Rothko’s art in terms of his suicide are seen, here, not so much as ‘kind pedestrians’ but as rubbernecking gawkers in search of a transgressive thrill, and again it is more than understandable that Christopher Rothko would see them in this way. No doubt this is what many (or even most) of them are. But he does not allow for the possibility of a spectator who is, or has been, suicidally depressed themselves, and who connects with Mark Rothko as a suicidal artist for this reason. He asks why we consider suicide to be so revealing:

Indeed, what other factor could be so obscuring? No one has firsthand knowledge of suicide – is there ultimately anything that can remain for us less knowable? And therein lies, I would venture, much of its fascination.9

No one has firsthand knowledge of death, but the same is not true of suicidal ideation or attempted suicide, and it is surely these experiences (and the feelings associated with them) that people are – sincerely and/or pruriently – fascinated by. Nor, to recall the terms of the previously quoted passage, is suicide entirely a matter of ‘imagination’ and ‘theatre’ for those who are or have been suicidal. Nor can it simply be called a ‘horrific thing we would never want any part of ourselves,’ because it is already a part of us and therefore something we need, and even want, to acknowledge, at least sometimes. Rothko raises legitimate concerns about the media’s aestheticisation of suicide, but the media artefacts under discussion here are (in my opinion, and in my experience) the kind that prompt greater openness, dialogue, reflection, and even help-seeking behaviours, all the more so because they foster an understanding of and empathy with despair. To put it more simply, I do not think I would be alive today without Red Desert and ‘Mark Rothko Song’.

Rather than saying that ‘it is unlikely that Mark Rothko would have featured in this song were it not for his suicide,’ it would be more accurate to say that Dar Williams would not have written the song at all were it not for her own then-recent experience of suicidal depression. It was this experience, in her early twenties, that prompted her to meditate on the ways in which that ‘desperate’ part of ourselves can go unseen, or can be obscured by the norms and clichés through which we tend to define ourselves:

I think that my depression, my suicidal ideation, was possibly the anger of my soul saying, ‘I’m here and you are doing everything you can to not pay attention to me.’ And it made me a very self-destructive person. […] There’s this thing that knows something in here, I’m not just what anybody wants me to be. And that saved my life.10

Far from suggesting that Mark Rothko’s over-saturated excess of feeling caused his suicide, Williams situates her own suicidal ideation within a culture of emotional repression, from which art (including Rothko’s) is a life-saving escape. Her song engages with but rejects the idea that ‘nothing can be less knowable’ than suicide. That repeated phrase, ‘we are in the know,’ is poised on a knife-edge between alienation and connection – between the sense that suicide is hopelessly distant from our understanding and the sense that it is something familiar that we can talk to each other about. The ‘friend and I in a museum room’ are so close to having that conversation, and they only fail to have it because they walk away from the painting. The painting’s desperation is also the speaker’s, and perhaps the friend’s. Crucially, it is an unresolved, unredeemed feeling we are left with as the song fades out. The loneliness of this feeling is not inflicted on us by the song: it is a loneliness we discover in the song, and/or that the song discovers in us. The result may seem like a paradox, and it is not an easy effect to describe in words, but the loneliness is assuaged (not cured) by virtue of being acknowledged. For a moment, we are the seer as well as the seen, and the mystery of this existential terror feels slightly less mysterious. Giuliana said, ‘There is something terrible in reality, and I don’t know what it is - no one will tell me.’ Now we can say, ‘There is something terrible in reality, and I think I understand it - I think someone else does too.’

Antonioni is said to have told Mark Rothko, ‘Your paintings are like my films – about nothing, with precision.’11 Christopher Rothko cites an alternate version of this comment (reported by Robert Motherwell), and then problematises it:

‘I film nothing, you paint nothing,’ [Antonioni] remarked. […] One can certainly understand what he meant – the open spaces, the unadorned abstraction, the aching search for meaning that marks both of their work. There is a phenotypic similarity in their best-known pieces that presents the viewer with an emptiness that must somehow be filled (Antonioni’s masterpiece The Red Desert embodies this sensibility most powerfully). But here the comparison breaks down, for while Antonioni (and I make no pretense of being a film scholar) presents us with a modernist crisis, a man-made world as vacuous as it is artificial, Rothko’s paintings, for all their reduction in means, are bursting with energy and alive with human spirit. The void they present is only a void of referents to the outside world, and this precisely because my father sought to remove the distractions and preoccupations of the physical realm. He wanted to shift our focus, and draw our attention to the inner world – the world of ideas and, most critically, the world of emotion. Rothko sought to speak as directly as possible to our inner selves, be it in a flood or a whisper – passion dampened by as few mediators as possible. He wanted to communicate with our most core human elements; to those aspects as common to our hunter-gatherer ancestors as they will be to our successors millennia from now.12

To say that Antonioni’s films are ‘about nothing’ in the sense that they present ‘a man-made world as vacuous as it is artificial’ makes him sound like a satirist and a moralist, as though Red Desert were La dolce vita. For Christopher Rothko, Antonioni exemplifies a tendency to focus too much on the topical, on ‘referents to the outside world,’ the ‘distractions and preoccupations of the physical realm.’ Such art could never be ‘bursting with energy and alive with human spirit’ as Mark Rothko’s was; to be that, art must ‘speak directly to our inner selves’ (not portray the outer world we live in) and ‘communicate with our most core human elements.’ Throughout his book, Christopher Rothko (drawing on his father’s ideas) frequently invokes the ‘universal’, the ‘essential’, and the ‘timeless’ as the proper concerns of great art. Some of the qualities he ascribes to his father’s work – a concern with the emotions of the inner self, a desire to engage directly with the viewer’s emotions through imagery – could equally be ascribed to Antonioni’s, but a concern with the empirically observable modern world is indeed something they do not share.

Here is a case in point. Christopher Rothko takes issue with the many critics who describe his father’s painted rectangles as ‘stacked’, and insists that they should instead be thought of as ‘floating’.13 By contrast, the barrels of nitric acid in the final shot of Red Desert are both ‘floating’ (as we see them through the telephoto lens) and ‘stacked’ (as we then see them through the wide-angle lens), constituting both a landscape of the mind and a very literal, tangible set of objects in 1963 Ravenna. And then, of course, we could swap them around: in retrospect we understand the blurs as representing stacks of barrels, but the blurs have also conditioned us to see the stacks as nebulous, floating entities. Rather than being directed away from the distractions of our physical environment towards our inner humanity, we are asked to see these two spheres of existence as locked in an uneasy, symbiotic relationship.

Antonioni does not, I think, believe in timeless or universal things. Even when he talks about an ‘absolute, mysterious reality,’ he frames it as a reality ‘that nobody will ever see,’ and goes on to imagine that any attempt to find it would result only in ‘the decomposition [scomposizione] of every image, of every reality.’14 Mark Rothko’s verdict on modernist artists, as summarised by his son, seems relevant here:

[They] make compelling visual images and stimulating intellectual arguments, but they forget to communicate on the emotional plane. Modern art […] is cynical in the way it breaks down the world of human experience – it tears apart but does not put back together.15

For me, art that breaks down and tears apart – that portrays the scomposizione that so fascinates Antonioni – is deeply affecting, while art that ‘puts back together’ tends to leave me cold. The breaking down and the tearing apart, and the sense that nothing will be whole again, are human experiences that take place ‘on the emotional plane,’ and they cannot be explored honestly under the pressure of having to transition into a more redemptive mode. We are not creatures with timeless, universal essences, but contingent entities, floating and stacked at the same time, dissolving in an equally contingent (stacked, floating) environment. You may find this worldview off-putting, but it is rooted in sincere feelings, and it is not necessarily ‘cynical’ because it happens not to chime with your own worldview.

In 1962, Richard Gilman wrote about Antonioni’s ‘nothing, with precision’ comment, saying that it was

[a]n alarming remark, calculated to throw the film theoreticians and the significance mongers into a cold sweat. […] Yet there is no reason to be dismayed. Antonioni’s films are indeed about nothing, which is not the same thing as being about nothingness. L’Avventura and La Notte are movies without a traditional subject (we can only think they are ‘about’ the despair of the idle rich or our ill-fated quest for pleasure if we are intent on making old anecdotes out of new essences). They are about nothing we could have known without them, nothing to which we had already attached meanings or surveyed in other ways. […] They are part of that next step in our feelings which art is continually eliciting and recording. […] It might be described as accession through reduction, the coming into truer forms through the cutting away of created encumbrances: all the replicas we have made of ourselves, all the misleading because logical or only psychological narratives, the whole apparatus of reflected wisdom, the clichés, the inherited sensations, the received ideas.16

There is something lacking in Christopher Rothko’s description of Antonioni’s films as portraits of a vacuous, artificial world in a state of modernist crisis, and in Pauline Kael’s critiques of La notte and Red Desert for their focus on vacuous leisured characters (see Part 18). To describe such readings as ‘making old anecdotes out of new essences,’ as Gilman does, is especially resonant given Rothko’s emphasis on what is ‘essential’ in human nature. For Antonioni, human nature is always changing, always engaged in a chaotic dialogue with the world around us, and nothing we consider essential stays that way forever. Yes, this means that the ‘created encumbrances’ (as Gilman calls them) come to seem empty and artificial, but we sense this breaking-down of reflected wisdom and clichés through the emotional states of the characters. When we watch La notte, we are not detached observers of early-60s Milan, judging its vacuousness with a nihilistic cynicism. We recognise ourselves in Lidia, Giovanni, and Valentina, and recognise how their and our inner selves are shaped by these giant edifices and transparent/reflective surfaces. If, for whatever reason, you do not recognise yourself in these people, or do not empathise with their efforts to navigate their rapidly changing reality, La notte will seem cold and glum, devoid of ‘new essences,’ nothing more than an ‘old anecdote.’ To love the film, I think you need to start by connecting with its emotions: the awe and anxiety of the title sequence, Tommaso’s cry of pain on his death-bed, Lidia and Giovanni’s awkwardness when they visit him, and everything that follows.

Nonetheless, it would be obtuse of me to claim that La notte is an easy film to engage with on an emotional level. It is not surprising that some viewers find in it a surface-fixated study of modern vacuity and artifice. In some ways, Red Desert is even less accessible, and may seem even more cold-blooded on an initial viewing. Throughout this series, I have discussed the tension between the film’s empathy for Giuliana and its tendency to regard her from a distance. We are often made to identify with her but we also have the option of seeing her through the eyes of the robots, so to speak. Closely related to this is the tension between Antonioni’s fear of progress and his sense that progress should be embraced. The industrialised world Giuliana clashes with is, in his eyes, an inevitable stage in human development, and while this is terrifying it can also be beautiful. Some, like Giuliana (and probably like us), will be left behind by this new world order, but others will thrive. The final two shots of Red Desert reiterate this tension, by showing us first the Giuliana’s-eye view of the world (blurry, constricted, confused, frightening) and then the robot’s-eye view (clear, panoramic, ordered, impressive).

But when I hear those robotic cries echoing over the final cut to black, I cannot help thinking of the fading, vocalising choir at the end of ‘Mark Rothko Song’, whose repeated ‘aahh’ song also reminds me of the wordless song we have heard twice in Red Desert. Perhaps, contrary to what I argued in Part 51, the factories and the robot-choir are not saying, ‘Get out and don’t come back,’ but rather, ‘Don’t go – not just yet.’ The film is desperate, like Giuliana. The image and the soundtrack are desperate. The real-world industrial complex we are looking at is desperate. They all want us to keep looking, keep listening, keep engaging. The ‘kind pedestrians’ are literally pedestrians in the sense that they walk away – we walk out of the cinema – but are also ‘pedestrian’ in the pejorative sense. We have been ‘kind’ in paying attention to this tormented work of art, but we are also ‘kind’ in the sense that we are true to the more pragmatic aspects of our nature, true to the ‘world of kind pedestrians.’ In this world, when we are faced with suicidal depression like Rothko’s or Giuliana’s, the done thing is to look at it for a moment, offer a few well-meaning platitudes, and then make ourselves scarce. We live in a world that progresses, moves on, and washes away. But Dar Williams is saying that there is something vital in the painting and something terrible in the way we leave it behind. Likewise, there is something vital in Giuliana’s way of seeing the world and in the images and sounds this film has given us, but we (kind and pedestrian as we are) have a limited capacity to perceive this something or to understand it.

For me, the best thing about Red Desert is that it embraces the perspective of Giuliana. It offers no final consolation, no prospect of a cure, no specific reason to be confident about the future. The film is what Dar Williams would call an ‘honesty room’ – the title of the album on which ‘Mark Rothko Song’ appears – a safe space, and a brave space, in which we can explore the darkest and most seemingly inaccessible aspects of human experience. Having spaces like Red Desert in my life has helped me overcome the desire to end that life, and helped me come to terms with the depression that seems an inescapable component of that life. It gives me hope and makes me feel less alone because it says that hopelessness and loneliness can be expressed and understood. In ‘Mark Rothko Song’, the painting is desperate because it represents something important and needs to be seen. Everything that happens in Red Desert is Giuliana’s life, and that life – a fiction, but a reflection of something real – is important, and needs to be seen. The despair that remains isolated and unconsoled is a feeling we need to be able to empathise with, or at least acknowledge. If it is a feeling we know from personal experience, we also need to see it portrayed honestly in works of art, as we do in the final seconds of Red Desert. Even when Giuliana has left the frame and we have stopped ‘seeing’ her, some invisible, inaudible thing is still there, still desperate to be seen and heard. But the image is abruptly replaced with a black void, the robot-song is cut off in the middle of its ghostly, echoing cry, and we are alone again.

Thank you for reading.

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The final scene of Red Desert revolves around two similar moments, in which Valerio detaches from his mother, explores his environment, and asks a question about it. In the first instance, Giuliana finds Valerio playing with a pressure valve in the ground. The ground beneath their feet emits bursts of steam at irregular intervals, and one of these bursts stops Giuliana in her tracks. She stares at the ground and takes her right hand out of her pocket – her other is holding her purse – which gives her a lost, uncertain look that we have seen many times before.

The camera is now positioned at a low angle, close to the ground. We are close to the thing that menaces Giuliana, and the low angle also means that we see something of the scale of the industrial complex around her. In L’Atalante, when Juliette is wandering the streets looking for work, we see her from pavement-level, from the gutter that seems to be drawing her towards it. The environment she walks through appears huge and forbidding (unlike the claustrophobic but cosy barge in which she previously lived).

In Giuliana’s case, the ground is the thing she is afraid of losing, or of sinking into, and the bursts of steam remind her (and us) that she is still not walking on solid ground – that the earth could evaporate into air at any moment.

Valerio wants to know why the steam keeps erupting from the ground, but Giuliana cannot tell him. She takes his hand and leads him away; he looks back over his shoulder as he hears the next burst of steam.

Unlike his mother, he does not stare at this phenomenon in terror with his arms dangling at his sides. He steps on the pipes, plays with the valve, and seeks to understand how and why they operate in the way they do. Moments later, he detaches from Giuliana again to explore another phenomenon. We see the two walking behind a wire-mesh fence, then Valerio drops his mother’s hand and runs ahead through an open gate. Giuliana looks around anxiously, reaching out as though to pull Valerio back, but we then see him in a close-up, staring fiercely at something in the distance. He has his own independent interests and refuses to be held back by Giuliana’s fears.

A wide shot reveals the enclosed courtyard in which these two are standing, but we are conscious of not being able to see what the characters see: they are looking off-camera at something behind us. This recalls Giuliana’s terror of off-screen phenomena in earlier scenes, and in this case especially we feel a kind of suspense about what these phenomena are. Why is this area closed off by a gate, why has that gate been left open, what does Valerio find so intriguing, and why is Giuliana so afraid of it?

In Stalker, when the three protagonists finally discover the wish-granting Room, they are able to see into it but we are not. Instead, we watch them looking at the Room and arguing about it, and we feel alarm when one of them almost stumbles inside.

Our (and the characters’) anticipation for this Room has been building throughout the film. The sight of it provokes such intense feelings in the people we are watching, and we want to see it for ourselves. The industrial compound in Red Desert does not have the mythological status of the Room, but in a way it has a similar significance. So much of this film is about Giuliana’s relationship with her environment, and especially with the industrial paraphernalia that surround her. In Stalker, the characters do not enter the Room that would grant their wishes; their journey is less about getting to this place than it is about coming to terms with themselves and the reality they live in. Do they know what their innermost desires are? Would they really want those desires to be fulfilled? What might that entail, in the ruined world they inhabit? There is, to paraphrase Giuliana, something terrible in themselves and in their world. To look into the Room – to stare into this abyss – is to become partially aware of that ‘terrible thing,’ and to step inside would bring full awareness.

When Tarkovsky finally places the camera inside the Room and dollies backwards to allow us to see the interior, the experience feels revelatory. There is something in this desolate, crumbling Room, and in the way the light interacts with the dripping and pooling water, that evokes the human condition.

Reversing Camus’s formula – of fictional characters ‘consummating’ what their creator cannot (see Part 49) – Tarkovsky enters the room and takes us with him, leaving his characters to watch from the safety of the threshold. What do we want or expect from a work of art, what parts of ourselves does it expose and/or fulfil, and how are we changed afterwards? This revelation is awe-inspiring, for better and for worse. It amazes us but is also amazingly mundane. It gives us what we want but also feels uncanny and unsafe. If Antonioni had used a similar technique at the end of Red Desert – dollying the camera backwards to show us, from the inside, the industrial compound the characters were looking at – he might have evoked something like this sense of awe, and prompted similar questions about what it means for us to be ‘among’ these phenomena while Giuliana and Valerio keep their distance. And he does in fact achieve some of these effects and prompt some of these questions, but in a way that differs significantly from Tarkovsky’s approach in Stalker.

Valerio points to the sky and asks another question. In a series of alternating close-ups of him and Giuliana, we get the final lines of dialogue in the film:

VALERIO: Why is that smoke yellow?

GIULIANA: Because there is poison in it.

VALERIO: Then, if a little bird [uccellino] flies through it, it will die.

GIULIANA: But now the little birds know that, and they no longer fly through it. Let’s go.

On the close-up of Valerio, we see Giuliana’s hand playing nervously with his, and her answers to his questions are bracketed by pauses. She blinks as she looks up at the yellow smoke. Throughout this sequence, the disconnect between the two characters is more than physical. Giuliana is lost in her own thoughts and feelings, which are quite separate from those of Valerio. Nothing about this exchange gives the impression of a meaningful dialogue between mother and son, or of an emotional bond that has been repaired since the paralysis hoax. Giuliana is still in the strange position of parenting a child who does not need her. If anything, as she told Corrado, she needs Valerio, but this need will of course go un-fulfilled.

Valerio’s second question refers to an uccellino – not just a bird, but a baby bird – and at first we might assume that, as a child, he identifies with this bird and its imperilled condition. But we can tell from the way Giuliana answers the question that she is thinking more of herself than of Valerio. She is the one who feels threatened by her environment and has had to learn to adapt. Indeed, Valerio’s question does not necessarily express concern for the little bird, but may simply be an observation: if the smoke is poisonous, it will kill any little birds that fly through it. So much for little birds. Perhaps Valerio does not want or need to hear the moral (‘Don’t fly through it’) that Giuliana provides; like his father, he is already comfortable navigating these industrial hazards.

The film pays no further attention to Valerio or to his perspective. He does not show relief that the little birds will be okay, or smile at his mother (or look at her at all, though she glances at him several times). As Giuliana leads him away from the compound, the camera stays with her, excluding him from the frame. At first, we see a low-angle shot of Giuliana beginning to walk away, and we glimpse some of the factory buildings (including the yellow smoke) in the far background.

Above the incessant humming of the factories, we hear the electronic robot-song from the title sequence. Then we cut to a very familiar type of composition: the frame is filled with colourful blurs, and the back of Giuliana’s head (when it enters the frame) is the only in-focus object.

She looks at the blurs for a few seconds as she walks slowly towards the open gateway. Then we cut to a panoramic wide shot of the whole compound, at last giving us a fully in-focus view of what the characters have been staring at. Giuliana turns her head quickly and walks towards the camera with Valerio, disappearing out of the bottom-right corner of the frame. The shot of the compound lingers for a few more seconds, then the film ends.

The final lines of the screenplay are as follows:

Giuliana turns and again sees the blotches [di nuovo vede le macchie] – hundreds of barrels lined up in the factory enclosure, like coloured blotches [come macchie colorate] – and hears the humming [ronzio] of the machines becoming sharp [acuto], sibilant. It is just a moment [attimo]. She quickly starts moving again, with her son, and leaves [scompare]. There remains the factory [Resta la fabbrica], with the chimneys, the white smoke, the yellow smoke, the steam, the barrels.1

The phrase di nuovo in the first sentence emphasises that these macchie are like the ones Giuliana has seen before: that is, they are like the phantom stains that spread over the wall and ceiling of Corrado’s hotel room, but also like the colourful blurs that ‘real’ people and objects turn into when Giuliana looks at them. The screenplay draws a connection between her blurred vision and the sharp, sibilant noises she hears. The heaps of barrels become like coloured blotches, the mechanical noises like singing robots. Giuliana’s perception works like Sabeth’s game of comparisons in Homo Faber (see Part 44), according to which nothing is simply itself, but must also be ‘like’ something else. For Walter Faber, this ultimately means that any surface in the world can become like the red desert he crash-landed in. Giuliana too is, in a sense, always in the red desert: at any moment, even if just for a moment (un attimo), that word ‘like [come]’ can transform her world, not distorting or falsifying it, but exposing the very real ‘terrible thing’ that lurks beneath the surface.

In this case, we see the terrible thing before we see the surface. The brief low-angle shot of Giuliana leaving the compound keeps the barrels out of frame, then we see them as Giuliana sees them (as a pink/yellow/blue blur), before the final shot reveals what this blur ‘really is,’ so to speak. The predominant colour is yellow and the blurring of the yellow-painted barrels associates them with the poisonous smoke. In the low-angle shot, we see Giuliana with her red hair blowing in the same direction as that smoke, passing just beneath it and away from it; then we see her facing a world that seems infused with yellow smoke.

As with earlier images of steam, smoke, or fog, we see an amorphous substance pervading reality until there is nothing left but that amorphous substance. There is something poisonous in this world, and it is spreading everywhere, to the point that there are few oases left – fewer places in which the birds can fly safely. In Albert Camus’s The Plague, the pestilence manifests itself not only in literal sickness but also in strange noises that fill the air, like the electronic whines that are a variation on the steam, smoke, and fog of Red Desert:

Out in the street it seemed to Rieux that the night was full of whispers. Somewhere in the black depths above the street-lamps there was a low soughing. […] Try as he might to shut his ears to it, he still was listening to that eerie sound above, the whispering of the plague […] Rieux was listening to the curious buzzing sound that was rising from the streets as if in answer to the soughings of the plague. At that moment he had a preternaturally vivid awareness of the town stretched out below, a victim world secluded and apart, and of the groans of agony stifled in its darkness.2

Rieux’s ‘preternaturally vivid awareness’ is akin to the awareness we attain in these final images of Red Desert, as we become attuned to the forces resonating within this ‘stretched out’ but ‘secluded’ place that Giuliana lives in. The blurred colours are like the whispers and eerie soughings that hint at some ‘agony stifled in darkness,’ and Giuliana possesses something like Rieux’s insight into these repressed realities.

The shot of the colourful blotches comes to rest on a long, light-blue blotch which, in this abstract painting we seem to inhabit for a moment, might be taken to represent the sky. But as we cut to the wide shot, we see that Giuliana’s eyeline is directed at a row of blue-painted surfaces (the sides of the barrels, arranged so as to obscure their yellow-painted ends), a mirage of blue in the sea of yellow.

The actual sky above the factories is as grey as the factories, and the clouds mingle with the smoke billowing from the chimneys. The earth below the yellow barrels seems to be turning yellow or brown, and as at the start of the film, Giuliana’s jacket is the greenest thing we can see. A yellow warning sign on the enclosure states that the barrels contain nitric acid, a substance dangerous enough to require a high level of containment, but also vital enough to be required in massive quantities – it is truly unsettling how much acid is on view in this single image. The camera is positioned facing the corner of the fenced-off enclosure, so that the fencing (and the barrels arranged behind it) seem to come to a point, pointing at us, heading in our direction. In the distance, the factory buildings encircle the other side of the compound, like an army of giants for which the barrels serve as the vanguard. It is both an image of an ‘entire world’ – an environment seen in the round – and an image of something that has expanded out to occupy the world, something that will continue to expand and advance. In Part 50, I noted the stark contrast between the blurred view of the factory towers in the first shot of the title sequence and the in-focus view of the same towers in the first shot of the final scene. The panoramic wide shot of the whole complex contains several other structures we saw in the title sequence: those nebulous, separated shapes from the start of the film are now revealed with a full and overwhelming clarity.

Like a bird fleeing from yellow smoke, Giuliana retreats from this menacing prospect, but we are left to contemplate it.

The word resta in that final line of the screenplay conveys a sense of what remains after the characters have disappeared, which is a very common dynamic in Antonioni’s endings. The story is over, the characters are gone…what are we left with? At the climax of Stalker, we and the characters are left to contemplate the nature of our own desires and our place in the world. If we decide not to enter the Room, what does that say about us, and what are we left with? If we do enter the Room (with the camera), what effect does it have on us – and again, what are we left with? At least one previous visitor to the Room took his own life, presumably because of what he discovered when his desires were granted. Giuliana too has been prompted to attempt suicide by – if we can sum it up like this – the problematic relation between her inner and outer reality. Like the characters in Stalker, she retreats, but her retreat may be futile: she is perhaps running from something inescapable, a Room that will soon swallow the entire world.

The economic boom, rapid technological advances, and rampant industrialisation portrayed in Red Desert are, in a sense, like the granting of wishes people seek out in the Room. The world desires growth and prosperity, and this desire is fulfilled. The question of ‘what remains’ after this – ‘E dopo?’ as Niccolò’s nephew says at the end of Identification of a Woman – can be asked on a number of different levels. If people like Giuliana are discarded while people like Ugo, Corrado, and Valerio thrive, what version of humanity are we left with? As for the world we live in, poisonous effluent has to go somewhere, so what will remain of the air, land, and water?

The Italian word FINE, which shoots towards us from the direction of the yellow barrels, has a special resonance when juxtaposed with refineries, and more broadly with an image that represents the point to which humanity has advanced.

We have refined our capacities and sifted out the parts of ourselves (and the members of our community, like Giuliana) that cannot keep up with these advances, and this is where we end up. Unlike in Stalker, the camera does not enter the space that has been charged with so much meaning by the characters who stare into it and talk about it. The viewer is left to contemplate this space from a distance. Do we see it as Giuliana does, or as Valerio does? Does the sky meld into the factories, then into the barrels, then into the fencing, then into the earth, then into the road, or do we see these as discrete layers that are easily distinguished from each other? Do we see these colours as they ‘really are,’ or do we see an amorphous red desert? Is there something terrible in this reality, or is it safe and mundane? Do we fly away in terror or are we in our element?

The eerie song of the robots seems to pause for a moment after Giuliana’s vision of the coloured blotches. When we cut to the wide shot, the multi-layered roaring and whining of the factories – the sounds that are ‘really there’ – rise in volume. Giuliana and Valerio disappear, and we still cannot hear the robots; they are not really there, so they only sing in Giuliana’s mind, just as the macchie she hallucinates only appear when we see the world through her eyes. The word FINE appears on the screen and stabilises. But then we hear the robot-song one last time, a series of ‘vworp’ sounds getting louder and more piercing, shimmering and echoing over the cut to black, before they are silenced once and for all.

This darkness is the real final image of Red Desert. When Giuliana hears the robots singing, as she looks fearfully at the colourful blotches, they seem to be telling her to get out, just as the yellow colouring in the smoke tells the birds to fly away. Left alone with the red desert, we see and hear as Giuliana did, and we too are chased into the darkness by those final notes of the song. ‘Get out and don’t come back.’

Some critics have interpreted this ending in more redemptive terms. William Arrowsmith reads the steam-vent imagery as indicating that Giuliana’s ‘psychic pressures are under control,’3 while Peter Brunette takes hope from the fact that ‘Giuliana is now actively taking care of her child’; this motherly behaviour indicates that ‘she has begun to overcome her neurosis.’4 The malattia depicted in this film needs to be controlled and moderated. It is a sickness insofar as it prevents Giuliana from performing her social role as a parent, and it can be overcome through balance and active (i.e. willing and enthusiastic) role-performing.

Christine Henderson likewise reads this as a moment of healing and a return to functionality:

Giuliana seems able to maintain a critical distance from her surroundings rather than being overwhelmed by them. She is able to interact in and with her world in a different way: as an individuated subject able to affirm her subjectivity and, to some extent, resist her conditions – that barrage of noises, colours, smells that once wore her down and utterly exhausted her sensory capacities. She maintains her ability to function, to act, to look after both her son and herself in the face of rapid transformations to both her landscape and her everyday life, in the midst of the passing of the old and the arrival of the unknown.5

Notice the ambiguity of Giuliana’s place in this scheme of recovery. She needs to be able to ‘maintain a critical distance from her surroundings,’ but how do you keep your distance from something that surrounds you? She needs to ‘interact in and with her world’: again, the world is both something she is in and something she interacts with; what does it mean to ‘interact in’ this space (i.e. interact with what or with whom)? She finds herself both ‘in the face of’ and ‘in the midst of’ larger forces that overwhelm her, wear her down, and exhaust her senses. They are rapid transformations, ‘the passing of the old and the arrival of the unknown’: significantly, Henderson does not say ‘the new,’ perhaps acknowledging that what arrives at the end of these transformations may be old and even archaic, but in any case ‘unknown’. Like Arrowsmith and Brunette, Henderson looks for a sense of equilibrium and a set of perform-able roles (‘to function, to act, to look after both her son and herself’) in this final tableau of Giuliana and the factories.

The ending of Red Desert is undeniably ambiguous, and I can see why people read it in these ways. But I think that Henderson’s portrait of the recovered (or at least convalescent) Giuliana is a vivid delineation of the malattia itself. Being an individuated subject, affirming one’s subjectivity, and resisting one’s conditions are all figured as prerequisites to recovery, but Henderson’s phrasing reminds us again and again that those conditions can only be resisted ‘to some extent,’ and that the distinctions between Giuliana and those conditions are constantly in flux. This is what I take from those two key statements, ‘There is something terrible in reality, and I don’t know what it is,’ and ‘Everything that happens to me is my life.’ Giuliana is alienated from her surroundings but unable to maintain a safe or critical distance from them, unable to prevent herself from being overwhelmed by them, and unable to interact with (or interact with others in) them in the ways that she is expected to. She is, after all, not looking after her son, because he is not in any danger. At this point, I do not even see her as being solicitous about him: she knows better than that since the paralysis hoax.

Henderson figures Giuliana as someone who is braced for ‘the arrival of the unknown’ and will now be able to deal with it, but I think what Giuliana has accepted is that she will very likely not be able to deal with it, and that whatever terrible thing happens to her next must simply be regarded as ‘her life’ – like Meursault’s execution in The Stranger, it might be the end of her life. ‘The future will probably present itself with a ruthlessness [ferocia] we can’t yet imagine,’ said Antonioni in Wim Wenders’ Room 666, and although he went on to say that ‘[m]y sense is: it won’t be all that hard to turn us [trasformare noi stessi] into new people,’6 there is a contradiction between the unforeseeable ferocia of what is heading our way and the alleged ease with which we will transform ourselves when it reaches us. Despite Antonioni’s pride in his own willingness to adapt to changing circumstances, I think he knows that he is more like Giuliana than he is like Valerio, and that he will not be among those new people ‘we’ will transform ourselves into.

At stake here is the question, to which I have returned many times throughout this series, of how Giuliana is situated in relation to Antonioni, the camera, and the audience. Put simply, is the film on her side or not? Does it ask us to empathise with her or (to use Henderson’s phrase) maintain a critical distance from her?

Millicent Marcus sees Red Desert as a kind of origin story for Antonioni’s artistic practice:

If Giuliana’s abstracting vision is equivalent to Antonioni’s, then her story is an explanation, though in no literal-minded way, of how his own visual style came to be. By grounding his vision in a character who has a tendency to look with wonder and fear at the things around her, Antonioni suggests a prior phase of his own perceptual development. What Giuliana accomplishes in Red Desert by transforming her fear of the world abstractly perceived into an acceptance of it, is a prerequisite to the artist’s own accomplishment, which is to transform that acceptance into a celebration. By the end of the film, Giuliana is not quite at the point where Antonioni is at the beginning – she has learned to fly around the poisonous yellow smoke but has not yet learned to love its yellowness, or its texture or shape. Presumably, this too will come, now that she has abandoned her dreams of escape, be they through suicide, adultery, stowing away, or selling undetermined merchandise in a multicolored shop, and can now concentrate on putting her abstract vision to positive uses.7

Again, Giuliana is said to have accomplished something by the end of the film, by transforming her fear of the world into an acceptance of it. Here, though, the end-goal is not exactly psychological recovery or wellness, but the ‘positive uses’ of art, the celebration of that fearful and wonderful red desert in which we find ourselves. Where Pasolini saw Giuliana’s and Antonioni’s perspectives as being inextricably mingled (see Part 29), Marcus sees Giuliana as representing a ‘prior phase’ in Antonioni’s perceptual development. We are, so to speak, seeing the artwork she will one day create, in which she portrays her journey towards ‘accepting’ the red desert, and thereby goes a step further and ‘celebrates’ it as well. Her act of celebration could not be portrayed in the film, as it is constituted by the making of the film.

Why is transforming fear into acceptance a ‘prerequisite to the artist’s own accomplishment’? Clearly, Antonioni was capable of celebrating the beauty of the industrial landscape that so terrifies Giuliana (see Part 5), but I think Red Desert is also predicated on the idea that the artist must not let go of that fear, must not discard it as a ‘prior phase of perceptual development.’ Arguably, what the film accepts and celebrates is Giuliana’s perspective, for all that it is ‘neurotic’ and for all that she refuses to love that poisonous smoke for its yellowness, texture, or shape. Is this a prior phase of perceptual development, or a present one that has been repressed?

Behind all the above-quoted readings of Red Desert’s ending, I sense an urge to control and moderate the film’s more disturbing implications. To live without equilibrium, to be an unloved and unloving mother, to be at odds with a reality from which we nonetheless cannot escape – the ‘positive use’ of art is to resolve, somehow, these intolerable states of being. Both those words, ‘positive’ and ‘use’, come with a lot of baggage, and I think it is worth putting them to one side and forgetting, for a moment, about what is positive and what is useful. Red Desert expresses those intolerable states of being, whether or not it is positive or useful to do so. Giuliana survives but has not achieved equilibrium. Her relationship with Valerio (and everyone else) is still broken. And when she looks at that yellow smoke, she is not just unable to celebrate it – she does not accept it, she remains at odds with it, and it remains inescapable.

In a scripted but un-filmed scene from This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, when asked ‘What do you see?’, Mantoa was to look into the horizon and say, ‘I see the red dust.’ Lemohang Mosese explains, in his commentary track, that this was a reference to the ‘red dust’ drought in Lesotho in 1933, and that the phrase has come to refer more generally to a time of approaching famine or tribulation.8 In literal terms, Mantoa’s village is about to be drowned and turned into a reservoir, but for her this represents a metaphorical drought, a red-desert-ification of her ancestral home by the forces of modern industry. She has a place in Nazaretha: her friends and family are buried in this ground and she insists on being buried there as well. But her resistance to the future sets her at odds with this place, or rather with the place Nazaretha is becoming. Her home is burnt down, and in the end – like Massimo Girotti in the final scene of Theorem – she strips naked and strides, with her back to the camera, towards annihilation. She cannot overcome the red dust, but she refuses to accept it. In the last shot of the film, a young girl looks into the camera while the narrator says:

Many saw death, but Ke’moralioamang, Daughter of No One, saw a resurrection. It wasn’t for the dead, but for the living.

Mosese’s previous film, Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You, could be seen as picking up where This Is Not a Burial ends, because it is set in the version of Lesotho that Mantoa sees blowing towards her in the red dust, and it is narrated by someone like the Daughter of No One. ‘This is the last time my feet will ever touch this dusty red soil,’ she says to her motherland, Lesotho, vowing to abandon this country for good. Much of the film plays out in a street known locally as ‘the dust’, and A. E. Hunt suggests that Mosese may have chosen this setting ‘because it is a transient space akin to his own sense of displacement.’9 As Mosese said in an interview:

I belong to Lesotho and yet I am not a part of it. I am spaceless. I create better from this formless state because I can see better as an outsider. Creating art from this state of mind is rewarding but it has made me a lost person. I wouldn’t have been able to see my country or Africa as a whole if I was inside it.10

Both these films derive their power from this spaceless, formless state, this sense of being a ‘lost person,’ and from Mosese’s unflinching commitment to expressing this condition. Mother, I Am Suffocating also ends with a child looking into the camera lens. Their head has been wrapped in wool, obscuring and blurring their vision, but now the wool has been unravelled and they stare at us.

The narrator addresses Mother-Lesotho: ‘I’ve been standing here for an hour staring into the mirror. Do you know what I see, mother? I see you.’ To live in Lesotho means being wrapped, imprisoned, and blinded in a fabric woven by others, but to remove that fabric and finally look into the mirror is to see Lesotho staring back at you. So much for being an individuated subject and affirming your own subjectivity, and so much for relating to your environment in a coherent, functional way. Mosese, unlike Giuliana, left his country and re-located to Berlin, but however far he travels it will never be the last time his feet touch that dusty red soil, and he will never make his last film about Lesotho. He belongs to it and yet he is not a part of it; as a ‘lost person,’ he has no self to see in the mirror, only a reflection of the red dust to which he belongs. Paradoxically, it is because he leans into this ‘formless state’ that he is able to ‘see better’ and create such singular, personal works of art.

Red Desert challenges us not to look for a way out, but to stare with wide-open eyes at that final image of the factory complex, and to grasp this ‘terrible thing in reality’ as completely as we can. If, instead of saying that Giuliana finds balance and repairs her relationships and has a place in the world, we say that she is just as spaceless and stateless and ‘without qualities’ as she was at the start of the film, we will see something important. Why is the sight of Mantoa being gunned down ‘not a burial, but a resurrection,’ and in what sense is it ‘for the living’? I think Mosese answers these questions when he says that he can ‘create better’ and ‘see better’ and that he ‘wouldn’t have been able to see’ without that feeling of non-belonging. Connecting with Giuliana’s despair revives something in us, or un-buries and un-represses it; imposing redemption on her is a burial.

Next: Part 52, Seen enough today.

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In the final two minutes of Red Desert, we see Giuliana as we saw her in the first scene: dressed in her green coat, out for a walk with Valerio.

After the intensity of the last few sequences, the film ends on a note of relative calm, but also on a note of cyclical repetition. We are back where we started. In her final conversation with Corrado, Giuliana said that she had ‘reinserted herself in reality,’ as the doctors in the clinic had told her to. She framed this, with rueful irony, as a kind of ‘success’. This tone hangs over the final scene as well. Giuliana has succeeded in a way that feels like defeat, and now the film will end happily in a way that feels tragic.

The dark final image of the harbour sequence, in which Giuliana (and then her shadow) disappeared into the night, is abruptly replaced by a daytime image of factory buildings.

We go from a high-angle shot, looking down on the vanishing Giuliana, to a low-angle shot staring up at these cylindrical towers. As she left the harbour, Giuliana was framed against the ground and against the pools of light and shadow cast upon it, but now the towers are framed against a solid grey sky. The transition here reiterates a common dynamic in Red Desert, between the worm’s-eye-view of the characters and the intimidating structures that dominate the skyline. We look down on Giuliana to see how small she is, then we look up at the monoliths that watch over her.

After the camera has tilted down and panned right to reveal Valerio playing with a steam vent, we cut to a wider shot in which a pair of trees are juxtaposed with the coupled towers on the left-hand side of the image.

This transition recalls the very first shot of the film, in which the camera panned from a cluster of trees to a cluster of factories. That image blurred the objects almost beyond recognition, but now they are as clear as day. Indeed, although these are the same towers we saw in that opening shot, seen from almost the same angle, they look so different that we could not be expected to recognise them.

The setting and tone of this scene have been established: it is daytime, among the factories, and here is Valerio; then we stand back and get a broader view of the space; then we hear Giuliana’s voice calling Valerio, and we are fully oriented as to what is happening. This world appears ordered and unified. The towers are together, the trees are together, and Valerio is about to be reunited with his mother. The imagery connotes harmony, but as with the pink flowers outside Mario’s apartment block (see Part 16), the harmony seems forced and robotic. Valerio, whose attention is focused on the steam vent, notices but resists his mother’s call, and Giuliana herself does not appear until the next shot. As Valerio demonstrated with his chemistry set, one plus one can still equal one – just because his mother is with him does not mean they are together.

The final scene of Time Out makes use of a similarly ambiguous transition. In that film, Vincent, like Giuliana in the harbour, flees to a remote space far from his home, and disappears into the shadows. The moment feels like it could be the end of the story; we wonder for a moment whether Vincent is about to take his own life.

Then there is an abrupt cut to a daytime scene in which Vincent meets his new boss and discusses the responsibilities he is about to take on. We see his expression crumbling, in a way that might be invisible to his boss but is captured vividly by the camera as it dollies towards him.

Jocelyn Pook’s melancholy score reinforces our impression that Vincent’s illness has not been cured. But at the last second, just before the credits roll, he recovers his equanimity and asserts that he is not afraid of the new challenges he will face. The glare of panic in his eyes is still there, but less apparent than it was a moment ago.

We are left to wonder what the future holds for Vincent. Will he burn out again and suffer an even worse breakdown, or will he suppress his anxieties and be a good employee for the rest of his working life? Neither outcome would constitute a happy ending.

Red Desert perhaps reaches a more hopeful conclusion than Time Out. It may be that Giuliana’s hard-won existential wisdom, which she articulated in her speech to the Turkish sailor, will in fact serve her well and enable her to enjoy some measure of contentment. Perhaps, like Amelia at the end of The Babadook, she has learnt to control her illness, at least to the extent of being able to spend quality time with her son. In all three films, though, there is such a stark contrast between where we have just been and where we are now – between the darkness of Amelia’s basement and the lightness of her garden, between Vincent’s long walk into the night and his bright, cheerful induction meeting, between the harbour and the factory complex – that we would be surprised not to hear the low growl of the Babadook, not to see the despair behind Vincent’s eyes, or not to find Giuliana still alienated from her son, in those final moments (see Part 23 for further comparison of these three films).

These endings are truly ambiguous. They evoke the experience of chronic mental illness as a condition that feels insoluble and ‘incurable’. As Dar Williams puts it in her song, ‘After All’:

And when I chose to live,

There was no joy, it’s just a line I crossed.

I wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost,

So I was not lost or found.1

For Giuliana, her apparent recovery does not mean she has found a new type of joy, or even that she has learnt to derive pleasure from simple things like going for a walk with her son. She is not a donna sola, so she cannot simply be ‘lost’ (by taking her own life or leaving the country), but as we see in this final scene, she is not ‘found’ either. She is still suffering from a condition that only she is aware of, and while she seems to have re-inserted herself into reality, it is not clear how much it costs her to have crossed that line.

There is a moment in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi when a woman stands in her office looking out of the window, and the camera is directed at the window interior. We see Min-Min’s reflection in the glass, but she seems to float insubstantially against the dark city outside.

Then her colleagues arrive and turn the lights on, replacing a portion of the city-scape with the pale green surfaces of the office walls and furniture. Min-Min steps away from the window to talk to someone.

As the writer-director Edward Yang says on the commentary track, ‘Another perspective on reality just took shape right in front of our eyes.’2 Min-Min is pictured in one reality, as a ghost amongst the skyscrapers, then she is pictured in another reality, as an office-dweller gradually re-integrating herself amongst her colleagues; and strangely, the former reality felt more real. In the previous scene, we saw (from outside) Min-Min’s husband closing the blinds in their apartment, sealing them off from the world and replacing the transparent window with a dark mirror that reflects only the Alphaville-esque lights of the busy roads.

And in a later scene, we see another character alone in her hotel room, reflected in the window (which we look at from the inside) but rendered all but invisible amongst the interior shadows by the (already dimly lit) exterior.

All three shots juxtapose different planes of reality. These characters occupy one space in a literal sense, but emotionally they are elsewhere – more outside than inside, more like their reflection than they are like their physical self. Elsewhere on the commentary track, Yang notes that these images emerged organically from the film’s urban settings. As in PlayTime, transparent and/or reflective surfaces are ubiquitous features of the modern world. Antonioni uses such imagery too, especially in La notte: in Parts 5 and 14, I discussed the title sequence of that film, in which the camera descends the Pirelli building and finds Milan reflected and transformed in the windows.

Later, there is a highly disorienting shot in which we see Giovanni approaching Valentina. Which of them is reflected in the glass and which is seen through it? Even after many viewings, I have often guessed wrong. It is hard to orient ourselves in relation to such images: where are we, what are we looking at, and how are these characters (or people in general) positioned within this location, amongst these screens?

More commonly, however, Antonioni prompts such questions through a different kind of composition. As Giovanni enters the room and starts up a conversation with Valentina, the camera pans right, he walks out from behind the glass, and we realise that Valentina’s image was the reflected one. Now she is framed between two tree trunks.

If, at the beginning of this shot, there were multiple perspectives on reality, with Valentina flitting between them, by the end of the shot she seems trapped in a narrower, less playful space. Like Giovanni, we look at her and wonder what position she occupies in this mansion, how she sustains herself in a home that seems so oppressive.

In ‘The Dangerous Thread of Things’ – Antonioni’s segment of the portmanteau film Eros – we see a similar transition during the beachfront café scene. At first we look at the café from outside, through the window, and might think that the people in the glass are reflections, until they approach the window and we realise they are behind it.

The wide shot inside the café positions the window-frames so that the beach is largely invisible, and the woman on horseback almost seems to be travelling on water, like the ship that sails through the forest in Red Desert (see Part 18).

But as in that scene, the camera changes position to clarify the spatial relations. Ultimately the couple in ‘Dangerous Thread’ are seen at their table, glumly absorbed in their own feelings. The woman outside has tied her horse to a fence-post. The beach is now expansive and all-encompassing, while the ocean seems distant and ill-defined.

Later, the couple are seen bickering in an arbour: ‘I love this place,’ she says, ‘but with you it feels oppressive.’ Perhaps, when she is alone, the arbour gives her the same feeling of escape as that view from the café window, but with this man it becomes just like the café table, a space in which the oppressive constraints of her life become all too clear. The dappled sunlight inside the arbour, rather than connoting romance or magic, serves to obliterate the characters, merging them into the tangled vegetation.

When we see Giuliana leaving the harbour in Red Desert, there are no reflective surfaces or tricks-of-the-light. Instead, the camera is positioned close to the loading mechanism, so that Giuliana appears trapped within a blurry grey triangular frame, then disappears into the frame itself.

The telephoto lens exacerbates the feeling of claustrophobia, transforming the relatively open, sprawling space of the harbour into a small, constrained one. It is a subtly different effect from the wide-angle shot in La notte that shows Lidia dwarfed by a huge wall, emerging briefly from behind it only to disappear again seconds later.

Lidia is made small by the vastness of the structure that towers over her, whereas Giuliana (who takes up more space in the frame) is made small by the smallness of the space she occupies. We see Lidia from space and Giuliana through a microscope. Some Antonioni characters traverse their environment with ease but feel detached from it; some struggle to exist in (let alone navigate) their environment but feel inextricably attached to or merged with it. Lidia is removed from reality, Giuliana is inserted into it.

Kijū Yoshida, who was deeply influenced by Antonioni, resorts almost compulsively to these reality-reconfiguring compositions. In one pair of shots from Eros + Massacre, we see both kinds of effect discussed above. First, Itsuko walks down a corridor beside a glass pane that both reflects her and makes visible the shadowy room behind it.

Then, Itsuko enters a wide-open and glaringly white space, but is inserted (by the eccentric positioning of the camera) between two stairways leading in opposite directions.

In both shots, Itsuko looks into the camera lens. She is a historical figure in a film that re-enacts true events, but Yoshida also foregrounds the artifice of these recreations. Eiko, the present-day investigator who is trying (in 1969) to unearth this story from 1923, is told to give up her research, to stop trying to reconstruct a past reality she cannot hope to understand. The image in this moment is blurry and distorted, as though the film itself were a decayed relic from a now-irretrievable past.

But Eiko responds by positioning herself against a screen on which photos of the 1923 earthquake are projected. Now they are projected onto her and she is part of them, but she is also a three-dimensional reminder of their two-dimensional artifice. When the pictures run out, she stands against a white background, eyes wide open but looking only at the light that illuminates her.

In the very next scene, one of Eiko’s research subjects – Noe Itō, the one she is most interested in – turns up in 1969, and Eiko frantically tries to interview her before she recedes into obscurity.

In one sense, the film is about the impossibility of knowing or representing reality. Everything that happens is incomprehensible even in the moment when it happens, and becomes still hazier with the passage of time. But Eiko’s project is not completely futile: it is a creative act and she is an artist, engaged in a complex dialogue with reality. That disorienting high-angle shot of Itsuko, who was made small between the mirrored stairways, reflects something of Eiko’s approach to historical fact.

The character we see in that shot is deciding on a course of action, and later we will see three different versions of a famous incident in her life, none privileged over the others, all presented as though they reflect some aspect of reality. The same principle applies to Yoshida’s disorienting compositions. Within a single scene, he will put the camera in drastically different places in order to show the malleability of this world and of the characters’ relations with it. Itsuko and her reflection, Noe and the version of her left to posterity, the real person and the film character, the character and the actor – we are constantly asked to see with a kind of double vision, engaging with both perspectives at once. How Itsuko perceives herself and her actions may differ from how we see her in re-telling (cinematically) her story, or that bizarre composition may capture her feelings more accurately than a conventional shot/reverse-shot of the conversation would have done, or this version of her may bear no resemblance to the real person (who was called Ichiko, and who did not like this film) but still express something meaningful.

Telling a story, whether in writing or through images, means positing a version of reality – ‘What if it were like this?’ – and inserting people into it. To emphasise the ‘what if,’ as Yoshida does, keeps us aware that this is only a version of reality, just as Yang’s play with light and windows reminds us that what we see through transparent glass – whether through a window or a camera lens – is only the reality that has been opened up or closed down by these lights, these blinds, this framing, and this choice of lens. When Antoine, in Nausea, said that his surroundings did not seem real, or that an unreal fog was seeping from them, he was waking up to this same sense of contingency (see Part 49). Looked at from certain angles, the walls we live inside start to look like cardboard, as though they could fall away and leave us stranded in an unknown place.

The doctors in the clinic have told Giuliana to reinsert herself in reality, to get over this Sartrean nausea and accept herself and her environment. When she says, ‘Everything that happens to me is my life,’ this represents a kind of reconciliation with reality. It is not a case of ‘What if it were like this?’ but of ‘This is it.’ Again, this is a very characteristic direction of travel for Antonioni. We feel, with a mixture of excitement and terror, that there must be realities beneath this one, deeper layers that could be unveiled, if not to our own eyes then to the camera-eye that has all the resources of every art-form at its disposal. But we tend towards the conclusion that these other realities are not photographable, and that the closest we can get is an image or sequence of images that communicates how limited our perspective is.

There is so little to see in that shot of Giuliana leaving the harbour. So much of the frame is occupied by the frame-within-the-frame, and what is left seems so empty and dark. There are no new perspectives on reality to be opened up here, no playful interaction between truth and fiction, just a benighted, hemmed-in patch of ground.

Coming as it does immediately after Giuliana’s speech, this image sums up the ‘everything’ that is her life, insisting on the reductiveness and bathos of that conclusion. Everything does not amount to much. When Giuliana has vacated this bare space, we cut to the wide shot of the factory towers.

Together, these two images suggest what it means for her to be reinserted in reality. It means accepting the constrained, oppressive perspective of the first shot, the obscure frame around it, and the dark patch of ground she occupies; then it means returning to the wide-open clarity of the second shot. In the title sequence, these factories seemed like metaphors. Blurred into near-oblivion, they were hard to distinguish from the umbrella pines, just as the various layers of the soundtrack were hard to categorise as robot or human voices, as industrial drones or musical notes. There was a promise and an opportunity in those nebulous sounds and images. They seemed to ask, ‘What is reality?’ The first shot of Red Desert’s final scene says, ‘This is reality.’ Focus has been restored, showing us Giuliana’s life and environment as they really are, shutting down that sense of promise and opportunity.

This is, however, not the end of the story, nor is it the only meaning contained in the wide shot of the factories. Angelo Restivo’s analysis of the title sequence reminds us of something important:

we are presented with a visual field completely out of focus, fuzzy shapes and colors whose objects are completely undifferentiated. This, we could say, is the gaze in the process of its emergence; this is Antonioni’s answer to the fundamental problematic of neorealism, the relation of the seen to the unseen, of the object to the subject. For insofar as neorealism grounded itself in the phenomenologists’ battle cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ Lacan’s reply is, ‘Beyond appearance there is not the Thing-in-itself, there is the gaze.’3

We might think again of Europa ’51, and of Irene confronting the ‘things themselves’ – the factories and the physical toll they take on human bodies – whereas Giuliana is absorbed in her own distorting-but-revealing gaze, her way of seeing that remains unseen by others.

As a counterpoint to Restivo’s argument, we could say that the final scene of Red Desert returns us ‘to the things themselves,’ deploying them as a kind of rebuke to that un-focused gaze that dominated the title sequence. In her reading of Giuliana’s final speech, Elena Past makes a case for the importance of the literal reality of industrial Ravenna:

[Giuliana] enunciates a contradiction. Bodies are separate, and her body intersects with that of the sailor, of the rusty ship, of the world at large. This incongruity recognizes both the integrity of the human actor and her entanglement in a nonhuman universe of things. […] Irreducible to her surroundings, Giuliana is yet of these surroundings. Both of her ‘epidermic’ epiphanies are true: ‘Now you are part of me – part of what is around me, that is’; and ‘bodies are separate.’ […] Cinema can offer an ethical alternative to the celebratory or unilateral logic of petrochemical progress, although it must also admit its entanglement with industry. As we watch Red Desert decades after its production, we, too, can see with Giuliana that our bodies are separate, even as we say, with the film, the factories and their toxic emissions, the pine forests, and the eels with petroleum in their bellies, ‘You are part of me.’4

I think the un-focused and focused images of the factories, at the beginning and end of the film, contain something of the ‘part of me’ sentiment that Past describes. Red Desert cannot reject the ‘things themselves’ because its existence, as an industrial product, depends on them. But it is not solely beholden to that worldview that says, ‘This is reality,’ and in its final moments it will return to those fuzzy images and unearthly sounds with which it began. They are part of this world too. Giuliana is reinserted in reality: the frame closes in on her, the surrounding structures reassert themselves. By the same token, she reasserts her place among them, and says, ‘I am part of you.’ Her so-called neurotic gaze, which – the film asks us to concede – makes the ‘things themselves’ appear otherwise than they are, also defies this unilateral logic and says, ‘My life is everything that happens to me.’ Giuliana does not take her own life, nor does she leave on the Turkish ship. She must admit her entanglement with reality, so it must admit its entanglement with her.

Next: Part 51, Our place in the red desert.

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Art is an activity which exalts and denies simultaneously. ‘No artist tolerates reality,’ says Nietzsche. That is true, but no artist can ignore reality. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.2

He defines this as a process of ‘stylisation’ and explains its effect in the context of sculpture, using the same ecstatic tone we saw in The Myth of Sispyhus and The Stranger:

Sculpture does not reject resemblance of which, indeed, it has need. But resemblance is not its first aim. What it is looking for, in its periods of greatness, is the gesture, the expression, or the empty stare [regard] which will sum up all the gestures and all the stares in the world. Its purpose is not to imitate, but to stylize and to imprison, in one significant expression, the fleeting ecstasy [fureur] of the body or the infinite variety of human attitudes. Then, and only then, does it erect, on the pediments of riotous cities, the model, the type, the motionless perfection which will cool, for one moment, the fevered brow of man [qui apaisera, pour un moment, l’incessante fièvre des hommes].3

Art, for Camus, represents ‘stability imposed on incessant change,’ and ‘the reconciliation of the unique with the universal.’4 The sculptor lends to the infinitely variable human face a style, a perfection, and a significance, and the final effect appeases our incessant fever, lessening the torment we feel in the waterless desert. We may recall the importance that Hermann Broch placed on style in The Sleepwalkers, and his association between the modern age’s lack of style and its ‘singleness of purpose’ which gives to everything a defined, discrete identity (see Part 30). In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses the phrase unité de but de l’esprit, rendered in O’Brien’s translation as ‘the mind’s singleness of purpose,’5 but I think he is referring to a desire for ‘unity’ that is slightly different from the ‘singleness’ Broch was condemning. It is through style that an artist conjures unity out of the disorder of reality.

In the above-quoted passage about sculpture, Camus shows an optimistic faith in the power of art to capture something universal, the gaze (‘regard’) that will sum up all the gazes in the world. As we saw in Part 14, Antonioni’s take on sculpture is less optimistic. Lo sguardo di Michelangelo expresses that same desire for ‘stability imposed on incessant change,’ for a ‘reconciliation of the unique with the universal,’ but ultimately finds an instability even in these fixed, imprisoned stone images. The camera roams across the sculptures and cuts back and forth between them and Antonioni’s unstable sguardo, as though searching for an angle or a way of looking that will capture that ‘motionless perfection’ of which Camus speaks. But the camera, and the film, remain in constant motion, and the incessant fever is left unappeased. For Camus, art gives us a sense of what unites us; Antonioni exits the church alone, as he arrived, and leaves the statues in their state of cold isolation.

Camus does not conceive of art as a cure-all for the human condition, but he does see it as facilitating a type of communal cohesion even when it describes the alienating desert of the absurd:

[Art] does not offer an escape [issue] for the intellectual ailment [mal de l’esprit]. Rather, it is one of the symptoms of that ailment which reflects it throughout a man’s whole thought [pensée]. But for the first time it makes the mind [esprit] get outside of itself and places it in opposition to others [en face d’autrui], not for it to get lost but to show it clearly [d’un doigt précis] the blind path [la voie sans issue] that all have entered upon.6

Camus’s mal de l’esprit is like Antonioni’s malattia dei sentimenti, though more focused on thought than on feeling; certainly, in the case of Red Desert, Giuliana’s sickness closely resembles the condition Camus describes. She also finds her condition to be sans issue (literally ‘without end/exit’), and the film does what Camus says art should do, describing this condition precisely and showing how it reverberates through a person’s whole experience of life. But in Camus’s account, this process involves drawing the esprit out of its isolation and into a relation with others. For him, this does not entail a loss of self but a discovery of common ground: it turns out that everyone is on this same inescapable path, so in a sense we are not lost but found. As he argues in The Rebel:

In absurdist experience suffering is individual. But from the moment that a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience – as the experience of everyone. Therefore the first step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that the entire human race suffers from the division between itself and the rest of the world. The unhappiness experienced by a single man becomes collective unhappiness.7

This may remind us (on the one hand) of Irene Girard’s movement from individual grief to ‘collective unhappiness’ in Europa ’51, and (on the other hand) of Giuliana’s failure to bond with the striking workers at the start of Red Desert (see Part 6). Her encounter with that ‘movement of rebellion’ drove her back into solitude, back to the uninhabited slag-heap where she sensed she would end up, alone. Even the condemned protagonist in The Stranger is able to communicate something of his revelation about existence, in his tirade to the well-meaning priest who tries to console him. Giuliana’s equivalent is her quasi-confession to the Turkish sailor, upon whom her words make no impact at all.

When Camus says that art points to a universal malaise d’un doigt précis, this makes me think of Antonioni’s famous comment that Mark Rothko’s paintings are ‘about nothing, with precision.’8 What Antonioni shows us so precisely is not a ‘path that all have entered upon,’ but the one by which Giuliana leaves the harbour. The camera is positioned behind the grey metal loading/unloading structure, which runs diagonally across the right half of the screen. As the camera tilts upwards, another part of the structure appears in the top-left corner.

Like the downwards tilt at the start of the harbour sequence, this camera movement emphasises Giuliana’s smallness in relation to the structures around her, but in this case it also underlines the ‘framing’ effect. With the added diagonal in the top-left corner, Giuliana’s portion of the image becomes almost triangular, an ever-narrowing frame. Pools of light and shadow alternate along the ground. Giuliana walks slowly from light into shadow, her body disappearing behind the grey blur on the right. For a moment her shadow remains visible, but then it too is consumed by the shadow she has just walked into.

The final shot of Corrado was also timed to end on the disappearance of his shadow, as it moved out of frame, and I argued that his ‘journey into the darkness’ reflected his decision not to see or engage with what Giuliana was bringing to light (see Part 44).

When Giuliana leaves the docks, she does not simply walk out of the frame, she becomes part of a shadow. As when she was abandoned by Corrado, or by Ugo, there is a sense that she is left in obscurity, alone and unseen.

To watch Red Desert is not to find one’s esprit taken out of itself and brought into relation with other, similarly afflicted, spirits. Some of us may recognise something of ourselves in Giuliana’s condition, but the film underlines that it is her condition, not a universal experience. If you prick her, you will not feel pain, and everything that happens to her is her life (not to us, not our lives). For Camus, the malady is as inescapable as its universality; we cannot get off the path, but we also cannot help but walk alongside the rest of humanity. For Antonioni, the path is sans issue in the sense that it is inescapably solitary. I cannot leave my path and I cannot join yours. Red Desert is, after all, the story of someone left behind by the rest of the world. If in one sense Giuliana resembles Camus’s heroic rebel, living defiantly on that dizzying precipice, finding a way to survive in the desert and ‘to examine closely [its] odd vegetation,’9 in another sense she is merely the bleeding body left to rot in the sand, with no oases – and therefore no vegetation – in sight.

Camus argued that a ‘true work of art is always on the human scale,’ and that it should not suffer from ‘overloading and pretension to the eternal’; it should be a ‘fecund work because of a whole implied experience, the wealth of which is suspected.’10 A novelist should write

in images rather than in reasoned arguments […] convinced of the uselessness of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptible appearance. […] The novel in question is the instrument of that simultaneously relative and inexhaustible knowledge, so like that of love. Of love, fictional creation has the initial wonder and the fecund rumination. […] I want to liberate my universe of its phantoms and to people it solely with flesh-and-blood truths whose presence I cannot deny.11

Giuliana’s ‘everything that happens’ speech, and her insistence on the incommunicability of her own flesh-and-blood truths, show the extent to which Red Desert meets Camus’s artistic ideal. Our protagonist is not overloaded with symbolic or emblematic significance, but is instead a highly idiosyncratic individual whose experience of life is described – without ever being fully explained – in the course of the film. The film’s imagery is all geared towards capturing this individual’s perceptions and feelings, and if it prompts (in the viewer) thoughts and feelings on larger topics, the effect will be all the richer because the film presents human-scale images rather than reasoned arguments.

The link between artistic creation and love, in the above-quoted passage from Sisyphus, is especially significant in relation to Antonioni, for whom art, existential philosophy, and erotic love go hand in hand. In The Rebel, Camus’s comments on transience and love provide another point of comparison and contrast with Antonioni. Speaking of our desire to give our lives unity and meaning, Camus argues that

everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.12

In L’avventura, Anna’s disappearance causes Sandro and Claudia a certain amount of suffering, but this fades quickly, and it is this dissipation of suffering that disturbs Claudia (all the more so because it does not seem to disturb Sandro). Claudia resists that ‘irrepressible longing to live,’ holding onto her grief, and then onto her guilt when she ceases to grieve. It is the connection with Anna – hers and Sandro’s – that she wants to keep alive. But as Camus says:

The desire for possession is only another form of the desire to endure; it is this that comprises the impotent delirium of love. No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession. On the pitiless earth where lovers are often separated in death and are always born divided, the total possession of another human being and absolute communion throughout an entire lifetime are impossible dreams. […] The shame-faced suffering of the abandoned lover is not so much due to being no longer loved as to knowing that the other partner can and must love again.13

Aldo in Il grido is an example of Camus’s abandoned lover, struggling to come to terms with the moving-on process that operates not only in his relationship with Irma, but in every past, present, and future relationship. Claudia and Sandro, in L’avventura, suffer from the ‘must love again’ imperative: because Sandro moves on from Anna, he will move on from Claudia as well; because she recognises this same emotional transience in herself, Claudia embraces Sandro at the end of the film, but in a tentative way (touching his hair) that emphasises the fragility of the bond between them.

At the root of Camus’s discussion of transience is the idea that ‘lovers are often separated in death and are always born divided.’ In Red Desert, Giuliana tells the sailor that although she is not separated from her husband, their bodies are separate. Suffering does not endure and neither does love; the desire to endure and to possess a loved one are the same thing; when Anna disappears, her loved ones will love again; if you prick Giuliana, you won’t suffer. The transience of love and suffering are inextricable from the ‘separateness’ Giuliana refers to: the bodies are separate because they are transient.

Camus relates this problem back to the absence of unity and style that art is supposed to remedy:

Life, from this point of view, is without style. It is only an impulse which endlessly pursues its form without ever finding it. Man, tortured by this, tries in vain to find the form which will impose certain limits between which he can be king. […] As in those pathetic and miserable relationships which sometimes survive for a very long time because one of the partners is waiting to find the right word, action, gesture, or situation which will bring his adventure [aventure] to an end on exactly the right note, so everyone proposes and creates for himself the final word. […] This passion which lifts the mind above the commonplaces of a dispersed world, from which it nevertheless detaches itself [dont il ne peut cependant se déprendre, which I think means ‘from which it cannot, however, detach itself’], is the passion for unity. It does not result in mediocre efforts to escape, however, but in the most obstinate demands.14

This image of humanity, tortured by an impulse to seek out ‘form’ and ‘style’ that will give unity to existence, recalls Antonioni’s Cannes statement, in which he pictures humanity as suffering from the outdated moral codes (or forms) of the modern age, following confused erotic impulses that make it unhappy.15 Lidia and Giovanni, in La notte, are stuck in the kind of ‘pathetic and miserable relationship’ that Camus describes: Lidia attempts to end the marriage but offers no ‘final word’ that will lend it a sense of unity, and Giovanni refuses to accept what she is telling him. Lidia does not seem to have that passion that would lift her ‘above the commonplaces of a dispersed world.’ Perhaps she is engaged in what Camus would call a ‘mediocre effort to escape,’ but this is precisely the kind of un-edifying and futile experience that Antonioni focuses on, and that he does not dismiss as mediocre.

The passion Camus describes results, he says, not only in ‘obstinate demands,’ but in true works of art:

unity in art appears at the limit of the transformation which the artist imposes on reality. It cannot dispense with either. This correction which the artist imposes by his language and by a redistribution of elements derived from reality, is called style and gives the recreated universe its unity and its boundaries. It attempts, in the work of every rebel, and succeeds in the case of a few geniuses, to impose its laws on the world. ‘Poets’, said Shelley, ‘are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’16

Antonioni, filming in real locations but re-painting and re-distributing their elements, transforms reality in the way that Camus describes. But what laws does he thereby impose on the world, and what unity appears as a result of this transformation? A great novelist, in Camus’s eyes, creates characters who ‘pursue their destinies to the bitter end’ and ‘complete things which we can never consummate’; the writer’s stylisation of reality conjures a sense of unity through ‘the ideal delineation of faultless prose.’17 Camus uses the example of Mme de La Fayette, writing La princesse de Clèves as an idealised portrayal of her own emotional agonies, one that she herself could not experience:

The difference is that Mme de La Fayette did not go into a convent and that no one around her died of despair. No doubt she knew moments, at least, of agony in her unrivalled passion. But there was no dénouement.18

Art, Camus says, produces ‘tentative trembling symbols of human unity,’ challenging the discord of creation by presenting itself ‘as an entirety, as a closed and unified world.’19 But what sort of consummation does Giuliana experience at the end of Red Desert? Antonioni is known as a meticulous artist, but are his films intended to be faultless, ideal, closed and unified entireties? Does Red Desert contain any symbols of human unity, even tentative and trembling ones?

I have previously argued that Antonioni may identify with Corrado, whose philosophy echoes comments the director made in interviews (see Part 21), and who embodies a kind of blindly functional inexpressiveness that Antonioni tends to associate with his own gender (see Part 39). Women, he argued, are subtler filters of reality and better at expressing emotions.20 In this sense, Giuliana is the kind of protagonist Camus looks for in a great novel, completing and consummating an emotional journey that the artist himself cannot follow through to the bitter end. Corrado’s departure, just before the shipyard sequence, mirrors the author’s own retreat from the dizzying precipice that Giuliana is about to peer over. But there is perhaps another kind of retreat in the idealised consummation that Camus refers to. In his concluding remarks about Sisyphus – the mythological figure condemned forever to push a rock up a mountain only for it to roll back down again – Camus strikes an optimistic note:

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate [cette suite d’actions sans lien qui devient son destin], created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. […] Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must [Il faut] imagine Sisyphus happy.21

Why must one imagine Sisyphus happy? What if the events of a person’s life are not created by them, combined by their memory, or sealed (and thereby granted unity and meaning) by their death? What if Meursault in The Stranger did not open his heart to the benign indifference of the universe, did not find any solace in remembering the details of his life, and indeed were not about to be executed? What if he were facing many more years of the same actions sans lien, events without any connective links between them, relation-less relationships with the other strangers in his life?

For Meursault, those seemingly link-less events ‘become his destiny,’ and are pictured as a breeze that has been blowing towards him since he was born, as if there were some cosmic (or at least meteorological) order to his fate (see Part 48). For Giuliana, it is a question of ‘everything that happens to me [tutto quello che mi capita],’ the Italian verb capitare connoting the same sense of random chance as the English word ‘happen’. And all these things that happen to her do not become her destiny, they simply are her life. In place of the Stranger’s blissed-out Sisyphean happiness, we have Giuliana’s ecco and her awkward shuffling away from the Turkish sailor. Ecco: there it is, that’s all.

This is the precipice we are afraid to peer over. It was Mme de La Fayette, not the Princesse de Clèves, who experienced to the bitter end what the ‘ideal delineation of faultless prose’ could never capture. It is Giuliana, more than Meursault, who delineates – in an appropriately non-ideal, bathetic, and deeply unsatisfying way – the sensation of chronic estrangement. Red Desert is not a closed and unified world, but a compromised work of art that spills into and merges with the real world, its locations resisting the artist’s attempts to impose laws upon them, the machines and structures and non-professional actors remaining defiantly themselves. Antonioni follows Camus’s principle about the artist’s revolt against reality, but unlike Camus he lets reality win. There is something terrible in reality, and we don’t know what it is, and no one will tell us, and its senseless chaos will always triumph in the end.

Antoine, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, experiences symptoms that are strikingly similar to Giuliana’s in Red Desert, and that are often figured in terms of encroaching smoke or swirling colours. In the context of the present discussion, what is most interesting is Antoine’s commentary on ‘reality’, for instance in the following passages where he distinguishes the real from the unreal and feels menaced by the latter:

I looked around me for a support, for a defence against my thoughts. There was none: little by little the fog had broken up, but something disquieting still lingered in the street. Perhaps not a real menace: it was pale, transparent. But it was precisely that which ended up by frightening me. […] The fog had invaded the room: not a real fog, which had gone a long time before, but the other fog, the one the streets were still full of, which was coming out of the walls and pavements. A sort of unsubstantiality of things. […] Nothing looked real; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could suddenly be removed.22

This is how Giuliana feels when she looks at her blurred environment or at a street painted grey. Both those effects are products of an ‘art’ that, to use Camus’s phrase, ‘rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.’23 Such images represent a demand for unity and coherence, but a perversely artificial one. Behind them, we sense a pale, transparent menace, an unsubstantiality of things that seeps from every surface, and we feel – like Clara among the deconstructed sets in La signora senza camelie – surrounded by structures that have been put there deliberately and could just as easily be taken away.

This feeling in turn transitions into an anguished sense of being both trapped and lost in the present:

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Light and solid pieces of furniture, encrusted in their present, a table, a bed, a wardrobe with a mirror – and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was that which exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Neither in things nor even in my thoughts. True, I had realized a long time before that my past had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. […] Now I knew. Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them … there is nothing.24

Cardboard scenery is what it appears to be and nothing more. A film image is insubstantial in the same way. Behind them there is nothing, as Clara sees when she looks at the film-image of herself.

Such insubstantial things are embodiments of the ‘presentness’ that Antoine experiences. The unity and coherence that are imposed on reality (by art) are merely contingent surfaces that are here now, in the present, but were not here in the past and will not be here in the future. Anticipating Giuliana’s scratching of one hand with another when she says, ‘If you prick me, you don’t suffer,’ Antoine describes his nightmare of existence with reference to this same gesture:

I feel my hand. It is me, those two animals moving about at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of another paw.25

Humanity itself has become one of those arbitrarily imposed meanings: Antoine and his limbs might as well be called animals, his hands paws. He could also be describing Giuliana’s crisis in the harbour when he says:

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in … but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.26

Or when he arrives at a kind of resignation regarding his illness:

I have achieved my aim: I know what I wanted to know; I have understood everything that has happened to me since January. The Nausea hasn’t left me and I don’t believe it will leave me for quite a while; but I am no longer putting up with it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is me.27

To return to Camus’s formulation, this is like saying, ‘I am Mme de La Fayette, not the Princesse de Clèves.’ Antoine cannot situate himself inside a structured narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He cannot see himself as a coherent human being with a meaningful identity who will, like Sisyphus returning to his rock, feel happy about the string of events that constitute his existence. To exist, for Antoine, means sensing those ‘animals’ – his own hands – scratching at one another, and acknowledging that this sickeningly alienated experience is ‘me’. If you scratched him, you would not suffer, and this impossibility of a relation between you and him is like the impossibility of relating his experiences to one another in the form of a narrative.

Antoine’s ex-lover, Anny, describes her own strategy for coping with existence:

‘I live in the past. I recall everything that has happened to me and I arrange it. From a distance, like that, it doesn’t do any harm, it might almost take you in. Our story is all quite beautiful. I add a few touches here and there and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and I try to imagine that I’m still living in it.’28

Anny’s reverie is a way of rejecting the present-ness that would otherwise torment her. Just as she closes her eyes to the here-and-now – to the cardboard walls and the unreal fog – so she pretends that she is not here now, but rather that she is inhabiting that string of perfect moments. Giuliana’s ‘everything that happens’ is a little like that string, in that it gathers all the events and happenings together. But it also insists on the inescapability of the present: everything that happens to me is my life. Giuliana cannot close her eyes to this, and insofar as she is attempting to clutch at a string-of-moments, this attempt quickly falters when she shrugs and says ecco and stumbles away.

At the end of Nausea, Antoine hopes to apply art to reality and achieve something like the consolation of Camus’s Sisyphus. He proposes to write down his story, to turn it into the very novel we are just about to finish reading:

A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a tedious, tiring job, it wouldn’t prevent me from existing or from feeling that I exist. But a time would have to come when the book would be written, would be behind me, and I think that a little of its light would fall over my past. Then, through it, I might be able to recall my life without repugnance. Perhaps one day, thinking about this very moment, about this dismal moment at which I am waiting, round-shouldered, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I might feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: ‘It was on that day, at that moment that it all started.’ And I might succeed – in the past, simply in the past – in accepting myself.29

The act of artistic creation, in itself, is part of the Nausea, because it always takes place in the present. What Antoine looks forward to is the moment when the string will have formed in its entirety and he can look back on it as a completed narrative. Now he ‘waits for it to be time to get on the train’: he is in one present moment, waiting for (and nauseated by the prospect of) another present moment when it will be time to get on the train. One day, he will recall this moment and see it instead as the start of an adventure, himself as the hero of a novel, like Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain saying, ‘This is where I started.’

But there is one more paragraph at the end of Nausea:

Night is falling. On the first floor of the Hôtel Printania two windows have just lighted up. The yard of the New Station smells strongly of damp wood: tomorrow it will rain over Bouville.30

Antoine exists in the present, nothing but the present. Just as there will come a moment when it is ‘time to get on the train,’ so in this moment when night falls it is time to switch on the lights, like the street-lamps flickering on at the end of L’eclisse.

There might be room for a cause-and-effect narrative in the atmospheric conditions: today it rained and so the yard smells of damp wood; tomorrow it will rain again and the smell will persist or intensify. But Antoine rejects this opportunity. Even though he uses a colon to link the damp smell and the rain, he does so in a way that subverts cause and effect. The wood does not smell damp because it will rain tomorrow, nor will tomorrow’s rain be caused by the damp-smelling wood. There is the present damp smell now: tomorrow there will be rain. These are just things that happen, and they are Antoine’s life.

There is something like this triumph of dreary mundanity in the moment after Giuliana finishes her speech. Rather than making a dignified exit, she has to edge awkwardly past the harbour machinery and retreat from the sailor and his baffled protests.

This is another thing that happens to her, and this is her life. ‘I don’t understand,’ says the sailor repeatedly, in a language Giuliana cannot understand. The bodies are separate, so are the lines of dialogue exchanged between her and the sailor – separate, present utterances that are not integrated into a conversation – and so are the events that happen to her.

Next: Part 50, Re-inserted in reality.

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In her final words to the Turkish sailor, Giuliana describes the mindset she intends to adopt from now on:

I have been ill, yes. But I shouldn’t think about it [non devo pensarci]. That is, I should think that everything that happens to me [tutto quello che mi capita] is my life. There it is [Ecco].

The idea of ‘not thinking about’ a problem recalls her final conversation with Corrado, in which he advised her, ‘You shouldn’t think these things [Non devi pensare queste cose],’ and she replied sarcastically, ‘Sure, just don’t think about it [basta non pensarci]. Beautiful conclusion [Bella conclusione].’ When she says non devo pensarci to the sailor, Giuliana has not simply internalised Corrado’s advice: she reiterates it but then amends it, specifying in positive terms what she ought to think. The idea Giuliana is now required to internalise is about the external forces that impact her. It is not a question of ‘not thinking about’ her illness, but of re-framing it as something that happens to her and that she defines as ‘her life.’

Albert Camus, one of Antonioni’s favourite writers, outlined a philosophy similar to the one Giuliana adopts. The philosophy is rooted in a conception of the absurd, defined in terms of contradiction in Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus:

‘It’s absurd’ means ‘It’s impossible’ but also ‘It’s contradictory.’ If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine-guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently dictated. […] [T]he feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, […] it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.1

When Corrado asked Giuliana what she planned to do next (dimmi che intenzioni hai) and she replied, ‘Nothing,’ he responded, ‘But that’s absurd!’ in a tone of near-outrage. This woman is in such a state of crisis, she is in so much danger, and yet she proposes to do nothing. To use Camus’s terms, there is a disproportion between her apathetic intention and the high-stakes reality she is facing, or between the verdict dictated by the facts (‘get help’) and the one she arrives at (‘do nothing’). The confrontation Camus describes was visualised in the profile shot of Corrado looking at an empty space on the right-hand side of the frame. Giuliana was (absurdly) replaced with the ‘nothing’ she spoke of.

Throughout the film, Giuliana’s problem has been defined in terms of contradiction. She feels both connected to and alienated from the world she lives in; she both desires and fears the merging or unification of reality; she wants ‘everything’ but also longs for annihilation. For Camus, the feeling of absurdity can also be defined as the ‘divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting,’2 or as the confrontation between the irrationality of the world and ‘the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.’3 Camus’s deliberately (confrontationally) absurd declaration, ‘I want everything to be explained to me or nothing,’4 may have been in Antonioni’s mind when he framed Giuliana as a person who ‘wants everything’ and ‘wants nothing’ at the same time. Camus describes ‘the essential passion of man torn between his urge toward unity and the clear vision he may have of the walls enclosing him,’5 and here we may think of Giuliana’s wish to have her loved ones enclosing her like a wall – a dream of unity but also a claustrophobic nightmare.

These contradictions, as Camus says, strand us in ‘those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines,’6 and whose effects can be fatal:

To say that that climate is deadly scarcely amounts to playing on words. Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay. The important thing is to find out how people get away in the first case and why people stay in the second case. This is how I define the problem of suicide and the possible interest in the conclusions of existential philosophy.7

Many writers, Camus says, have evoked these stifling deserts:

but how eager they were to get out of them! […] The real effort is to stay there […] and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions.8

In a sense, Giuliana follows Camus’s advice, rejecting suicide in favour of existential philosophy, choosing to live in the red desert that is killing her, the ‘desert that we must not leave behind.’9 There is something in that ‘must not’ that chimes with Giuliana’s (non) devo statements, a sense of needing to make the correct choice – not that, but this – and specifically of needing to think the correct things. As we will see, however, Giuliana’s philosophy (like Antonioni’s film) lacks the sublime tone of Camus’s imperative. She has little sense of being engaged in a significant or heroic endeavour.

For Camus, the ‘unceasing struggle’ of remaining in the waterless desert of the absurd is also, paradoxically, a way of rejecting and rebelling against it:

that struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements (and, to begin with, consent which overthrows divorce) ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.10

Camus also defines the absurd as

that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe, and the contradiction that binds them together.11

There is a divorce but also a binding-together; a rejection of something one does not renounce; a hopelessness that does not fall into despair and suicide. Suicide would be a kind of acceptance: ‘suicide settles the absurd,’ Camus says, whereas ‘Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it.’12 To know the ‘logic and integrity’ of the absurd means refusing to take the final, suicidal leap, but living in the ‘subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest – that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.’13

Giuliana attempts suicide and she attempts to flee her home, but ultimately does not complete either ‘leap’. She remains on the crest, staring down into the void that she can neither accept nor renounce. Her conclusion, ‘Everything that happens to me is my life,’ recalls Camus’s invocation of phenomenology (and Edmund Husserl’s theory of ‘intentionality’) as a way of understanding the spirit of the absurd:

phenomenology declines to explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion that there is no truth, but merely truths. From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention, and, to borrow a Bergsonian image, it resembles the projector that suddenly focuses on an image. The difference is that there is no scenario, but a successive and incoherent illustration. In that magic lantern all the pictures are privileged. […] It aims to enumerate what it cannot transcend. It affirms solely that without any unifying principle thought can still take delight in describing and understanding every aspect of experience.14

There is a connection between this metaphor (of the projector focusing on an image but also somehow privileging all images) and the telephoto-lens shots in Red Desert, especially those that isolate Giuliana’s head in the foreground as she looks out at her blurry surroundings, or those that blur all the images in front of the lens (de-privileging them all, so to speak).

The psychological attitude ‘by which reality is drained instead of being explained,’15 in which there is no single truth but merely truths, is like Giuliana’s refusal to love one thing at a time, her insistence on loving all things at once, and (what may be) her ultimate stance of loving nothing.

There is perhaps an allusion to Husserl’s ‘intentionality’, and to Camus’s alignment of intentionality with the absurd, when Corrado asks about Giuliana’s intenzioni and calls her passivity assurdo. It is indeed in the spirit of the absurd for Giuliana to be aware of the ‘terrible thing in reality,’ aware of her own inability to find out what it is, and yet persistently engaged in living with it. As Camus says:

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me – that is what I understand.16

Giuliana complains that the doctors mi parlano di me, that they explain her ‘self’ to her, but it is when she is alone (sola) that she finds herself in danger. She too might protest, ‘What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me?’ But there is a telling distinction between the transcendent unity and meaning that Camus cannot find in the world, and the ‘terrible thing’ that Giuliana cannot identify in reality. Whereas he burns with an unquenchable nostalgia for some kind of absolute meaning, her desire transitions quickly into horror, and her contact with tangible things does not prompt a feeling of comprehension (‘that is what I understand’) but is instead a nightmare that assails her from all angles (‘streets, factories, colours, people, everything!’).

Camus goes on to describe the spirit of the absurd in terms of a prisoner awaiting execution:

I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned man’s last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death.17

The condemned man’s sensitivity to objects in his environment is, in some way, contingent on his imminent demise. Noticing the shoelace is his way of saying, ‘Everything that happens to me is my life,’ of acknowledging that his life is about to reach its extreme limit, but rejecting death through that one last-minute experience. Everything, even the shoelace he catches sight of, is his life.

Meursault, the protagonist of Camus’s L’étranger (sometimes translated as The Outsider but referred to here as The Stranger), experiences something similar in prison while awaiting execution. He remembers his bedroom and, in his mind’s eye, ‘notices’ every object and every detail in that remembered environment, finally concluding that ‘even after a single day’s experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison.’18 He exemplifies the simultaneous awareness and rejection of death that Camus describes in Sisyphus. As Meursault says towards the end of the novel:

I was sure of myself, sure about everything […] sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into – just as it had got its teeth into me.19

In his final hours, he formulates his own version of ‘Everything that happens to me is my life’:

From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. […] I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.20

There is a sense of triumphant liberation in this ending, a consummation of that longing for unity that Camus himself described as unattainable. The universe is indifferent but benign, and laying one’s heart open to it seems like a way of transcending into that slow, persistent cosmic breeze.

It is clear that Camus sees Meursault – this ostensibly despised, destroyed figure – as a heroic embodiment of the absurd. As he argues in Sisyphus:

The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance.21

Reality is there to be drained and depleted, not explained. It is in this ‘indifference to the future and desire to use up everything that is given’ that one can find liberation; one substitutes ‘the quantity of experiences for the quality,’ and concludes that ‘what counts is not the best living but the most living.’22 If life is simply ‘everything that happens,’ the absurd ideal is to notice as many shoelaces as possible (so to speak) on the way to the guillotine. The parallels with Giuliana are as obvious as the contrasts: she lacks Meursault’s certainty in the present life and approaching death; her universe is indifferent but not benign; and though there is a certain defiance in her draining of reality and self-depletion, there is little of Camus’s triumphant ‘revolt’ in her apologetic retreat at the end of Red Desert.

Once again, we can turn to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities for a closer analogue to Giuliana. In the following passage, we hear Ulrich’s musings on the mingled sense of anxiety and empowerment that attends the proliferation of ‘experiences’ in the modern world:

In the country, [Ulrich] thought […] [a] man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.

But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this abstraction extended a man’s powers a thousandfold. […] And in one of those apparently random and abstract thoughts that so often assumed importance in his life, it struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one’s life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order [ordine narrativo], the simple order that enables one to say: ‘First this happened and then that happened….’ It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated ‘thread of the story,’ [quel famoso filo del racconto] which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say ‘when,’ ‘before,’ and ‘after’! Terrible things may have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as contented as if the sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried-and-true ‘foreshortening of the mind’s perspective [accorciamento prospettico dell’intelligenza]’ were not already part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. [Nella relazione fondamentale con se stessi, quasi tutti gli uomini sono dei narratori.] They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional ‘because’ or ‘in order that’ gets knotted into the thread of life, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impression that their life has a ‘course’ is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought [quell’epica primitiva] to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread [filo], but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.23

That ‘fundamental relationship with the self’ is supposed to operate through story-telling, as is the relationship between our intelligenza and the world we engage with. The tried-and-true foreshortening of the mind’s perspective is like the conventional grammar of cinema: the wide shot establishes a clear, coherent setting, then the long-lens shot singles out the main character and frames them beautifully against a world that seems a little vague compared to them. Both the protagonist and the viewer are in safe hands, and we feel a ‘cozy glow’ as we watch the story unfold.

But Red Desert’s narrative does not unfold so reassuringly, and Giuliana, like Ulrich, has little sense of the ‘thread’ of her life. Antonioni came up with this docklands sequence when (in the absence of Richard Harris) the originally scripted ending became impossible to film.24 That unforeseeable misfortune broke the thread of Red Desert, but perhaps Antonioni preferred this revised sequence because it captured so well that loss of what Musil’s Italian translator called the epica primitiva. Nothing could be less epic or less like a hero’s journey than the life of Giuliana, which is simply constituted by ‘everything that happens.’ In the way she is filmed, in the way she is situated in her environment, and in the arrangement of events that befall her, Giuliana is differentiated from the story-hero (imagined by Ulrich) braving rough weather but bound towards a redemptive or at least cathartic finale. Ulrich is a man without qualities in part because his life is without ordine narrativo. As with Giuliana’s dissolving environment, this creates a sense of prevailing abstraction, but in some strange way this abstraction also ‘extends his powers a thousandfold.’

The phrase ordine narrativo makes me think of Identification of a Woman, in which Ida leaves Niccolò for the man she describes as her ordine, and Niccolò at last returns to the work of developing his film – a film that seems incapable of finding its own ordine, its narrative structure. Antonioni tends to eschew the famoso filo del racconto in favour of the filo pericoloso delle cose, the ‘dangerous thread of things.’ In a story with that title, Antonioni reflects on the process by which his nebulous ideas gestate into films:

What I don’t know when I’m asked how a film is born is precisely how the birth itself – the delivery, the ‘big bang,’ the first three minutes – takes place. And whether the images of those first three minutes have an inner life of their own. In other words, whether a film originates as a response to an inner need of its author or whether the question asked by those images is destined to be nothing more than a question [destinata a non essere niente di piú], to have value – ontologically – for what it is.25

If the opening images propose a question, this implies that what follows will respond to that question, but if that question is destined to be niente di più (not even ‘nothing more than a question’), perhaps it ceases to be a question. It leads to no answer, no follow-up, it just hangs there in defiant isolation.

Later in the story, Antonioni takes those initial images and the question they seem to ask, and tries to string them into a coherent thread:

[T]he unconsciousness with which the film was coming into being would never amount to anything unless I impose limits. In other words, the moment’s come to organise the ideas, […] [t]o think of the subject in terms of articulating the scenes, of beginning, development, and end, in short, of structure. […] Roland Barthes says that a work’s meaning can’t be created on its own [non può farsi da solo], that the author can produce only conjectures of meaning, of forms if you like, and it’s the world that fills them.

But how can Barthes rely on so uncertain [malsicura] an entity as the world?26

This passage challenges the opening paragraph: of course a film has to originate from the inner life of the author, and of course that same author has to give it structure and meaning. When Barthes says the artwork cannot have meaning da sola, he means that the artist cannot craft something with a definitive, intended, self-contained meaning; the artwork’s senso will be supplied by the world that receives it. But, Antonioni asks, how can an artist rely on the world to provide that meaning? He cannot help trying to organise his ideas into something meaningful because he fears that otherwise they will ‘amount to nothing.’

And yet the story’s final paragraph undercuts this insistence on authorial control:

The odd thing is that this subject, born years ago, is ideally situated after another written later. […] All of which implies that, if it’s only cause and effect [la casualità] that set this event after the other in my mind, then it’s necessary to acknowledge in mental events [avventure mentali] the same movements and mechanisms that coordinate (or disconnect [scardinano]) the real events [avventure reali] of our lives.27

The word casualità connotes something less orderly than the ‘cause and effect’ of Arrowsmith’s translation. We are in the realm of avventure, like the inexplicable events of L’avventura that do not necessarily constitute an ordine narrativo. Perhaps the film-maker’s job – or at least this film-maker’s job – is not to recount an epica primitiva that reassures the audience, in which even the first three minutes accomplish that accorciamento prospettico dell’intelligenza that Ulrich referred to: the ‘prospective shortening of the understanding,’ the sense we have at the beginning of a story that we know how it will end. The narrator of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea also describes this longed-for foreshortening:

[F]or the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must – and this is all that is necessary – start recounting it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. […] When you are living, nothing happens. The settings change, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are never any beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless, monotonous addition. […] That’s living. But when you tell about life, everything changes. […] The [opening sentence of the story] is tossed off casually, it seems superfluous; but we refuse to be taken in and we put it aside: it is a piece of information whose value we shall understand later on. And we have the impression that the hero lived all the details of that night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to everything that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents, a night which offered him its monotonous riches pell-mell, and he made no choice.28

When Antonioni wonders whether the opening moments of his film have a life of their own, whether the question proposed by an image has an inherent value even if it is never answered, and whether the world can be trusted to fill in that absent meaning, he is pitting the famoso filo del racconto against the filo pericoloso delle cose. Is there really a story here? Is this really an adventure? Or are we just trapped in the habit of seeing ‘everything that happens’ through story-coloured, adventure-shaped glasses? Is life just a heap of ‘monotonous riches’ to which we ascribe structure and meaning? Do we invest in the tried-and-true narrative order, or do we face the danger – the ‘something terrible’ – in the thread that connects one thing to another?

Giuliana, in the shipyard, is ‘walking in a darkness devoid of portents,’ and she ‘makes no choice.’ ‘It’s not that I have decided,’ she tells the sailor. ‘I cannot decide because I am not a donna sola.’ Like the work of art that is subject to the world’s impositions, she has no fixed meaning or qualities in herself. Her life, such as it is, consists of the things that happen to her. She acknowledges her subjection to that casualità that Antonioni describes as ‘coordinating or disconnecting’ the avventure of our life. The verb he uses for ‘disconnect’ is scardinare, literally ‘to unhinge’: the randomness of existence can seem to join things together or rip those joints apart, and whether it does one or the other may depend on how we interpret it. As we will see, it becomes even clearer in Camus’s The Rebel that he is far more invested in the connective force of casualità and absurdity – and in the sense of community they can engender between people – than Antonioni, who challenges us to see that sense of community as an artificial hinge that can easily be dismantled. Accepting this challenge entails something more complex than nihilistic despair. Ulrich felt that his powers were multiplied by the onset of abstraction, as though the unsettling realisation that ‘the bodies are separated’ might also be liberating in some ways. For Giuliana, too, the refusal of a redemptive or tragic ending may lend her a kind of power not often wielded by fictional characters.

Next: Part 49, The artist and reality.

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As if the stranger could understand her, she runs for cover to minimise the significance of her question. […] The penetrating gaze [sguardo penetrante] of the Turk, trying to catch the meaning of her words or lip-movements, suddenly scares her. She steps back.1

She has asked whether the ship takes passengers, and is afraid the sailor may actually have understood this question. This is also why his sguardo penetrante frightens her: it is specifically his attempt to decipher her meaning that makes her turn away. Strangers in Antonioni films often seem to pose a vague threat that is never fulfilled. Think of Rosina encountering the patients from the mental hospital in Il grido, Claudia surrounded by the ogling men in L’avventura, or Lidia’s encounter with the violent street gang in La notte.

The shipyard scene in Red Desert takes place in the middle of the night, and when the sailor follows Giuliana down the gangway, there is a slight hint of danger.

But as the screenplay indicates, this fear is more about ‘being seen’ than being physically attacked. In all three of the examples just cited, or in the encounter with the fruit vendor earlier in Red Desert, or indeed in Lo sguardo di Michelangelo (discussed in Part 14), we get a powerful sense of that sguardo penetrante that reveals something extraordinary and terrifying, that penetrates in the sense of accessing another’s interior life, but that is by the same token invasive and alienating.

Giuliana flees from the danger of being understood, the sailor reciprocates by saying that he does not understand, and a distance opens up between them. In two successive shots, she walks past a large metal structure that blurrily dominates the foreground of the long-lens images.

The screenplay specifies that this machinery contains ‘the motors for loading and unloading ships,’2 appropriately enough for this moment that hinges on Giuliana’s decision whether to join the rest of the cargo or stay on land. She now stands on the other side of this contraption, positioning herself firmly on land and away from the transitional space of the gangway. She spends a few seconds finding the right position from which to speak, distancing herself from the sailor’s gaze and perhaps also from what he represents (a peripatetic life, un-moored from land, home, human connections, and native language).

Just as she was afraid of looking at the ocean because she felt it would dissolve her connection to the land (see Part 22), so she seems afraid of the dissolution she would experience if the sailor continued to stare back at her as he has been doing. It is significant that there are no reverse-shots of his reaction during Giuliana’s speech, as there were none of Mario in the encounter at Medicina (see Part 17), and for similar reasons. In a sense, Giuliana is not talking to this sailor and does not want him to hear or understand her. In protecting herself from him, she also isolates herself, and the speech she now gives will expand on this lonely condition.

The idea that her question (‘Does this ship take people?’) may have been understood is embarrassing to Giuliana, in part because it reflects her desire to leave her family. She begins her speech by referring to these family ties, and by trying to clarify what kind of separation is at stake here:

I cannot decide, because I am not a single woman [donna sola]. However [Per quanto], at times, it’s as if…separated [è come…separata]. No, not from my husband, no. The bodies are…separated. If you prick me, you don’t suffer, eh?

The phrase donna sola (as in Pavese’s Tra donne sole) can mean ‘single woman’, ‘woman alone’, ‘woman only’, and ‘lonely woman’, and this part of Giuliana’s speech is infused with a sense of how these meanings co-exist. She begins with a denial of agency: it is not simply that she cannot board the ship, but that she cannot make a decision at all. The decision has been made for her, because she is not sola, she is connected to other people. It is not so much a question of her familial responsibilities as of her lack of autonomy. In the previous scene, she complained that the doctors mi parlano di me, or ‘talk to me about myself,’ but then her problems would afflict her when she was sola. Who Giuliana is, and what she does, is dictated by other people, by the surrounding structures over which she has no control. The result is that she has no power to act of her own accord.

On the other hand (per quanto) she is alone in the sense of being disconnected. The phrase è come separata removes any reference to herself: she does not say, ‘I feel separated’ or ‘It’s like being separated.’ It is as if she were describing another person or thing, not herself. In the clinic, she was required to regard herself as another person, to whom she had to explain who ‘she’ was. There is a continuity between that predicament and the present speech, in which Giuliana cannot function or make decisions da sola (by herself) and describes a feeling of profound and un-specified separateness, from her ‘self’ as well as from others.

The non-specific phrasing of è come separata prompts Giuliana to clarify what she does not mean: she is not saying, ‘It’s as if I were divorced from my husband.’ Her near-escape on the ship is not specifically an attempt to leave Ugo, but a more symbolic gesture that expresses her alienation from everyone. In explaining this, Giuliana focuses on the concept of bodies, and provides an illustrative example. The line, ‘If you prick me, you don’t suffer,’ alludes ironically to Shylock’s protest, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’,3 which invoked a universal bodily experience. What Giuliana describes is just as universal, but closer to Edgar Allan Poe’s grim meditation at the start of ‘The Premature Burial’: ‘That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass – for this let us thank a merciful God!’4 True empathy, in other words, is not encoded in the human body, as it is not literally possible to share feelings. As T. S. Eliot said in The Waste Land, ‘We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.’5

Until she says ‘If you prick me,’ we have been watching Giuliana give her speech in a medium close-up with no clear view of her surroundings, but now we cut to a wide shot and see the shadowy docklands behind her.

Suspended on a metal rack are two long red pipes and, below them, one corrugated grey pipe that is half their length. Like the shapes in that abstract painting in Corrado’s hotel room, the pipes are parallel to each other but not touching, suspended in a state of separation that defies their purpose.

These pipes, in their detached and/or shortened states, are incapable of transmitting or even containing the liquids or gases they were designed for. To the right, a flight of metal stairs appears to lead nowhere (but presumably gives access to the loading equipment), and in the deep background there is an empty-looking hangar and a pitch-black void. Like the white wall Giuliana stood in front of when she talked about reinserting herself into reality, this backdrop is powerfully evocative of the emotional state she is describing. There she seemed alone and isolated in a nebulous void, here she seems alone and isolated among dis-connected objects.

Giuliana points at the sailor when she says ‘If you prick me,’ then scratches one of her hands with the fingers of the other hand.

Earlier, I argued that she is not really talking to the sailor here, and that she does not really want him to understand her, but these gestures would seem to belie this argument. Giuliana goes out of her way to engage the sailor, to act out her words so as to overcome the language barrier, and to rhetorically invite his agreement with her ‘Eh?’ at the end of the sentence.

But of course, he cannot possibly know what she is saying. This very communication failure proves her point. If he pricked her, he would not suffer, and whatever idea she has in her head cannot be transferred into his. This is why she is saying these things to this specific person. Giuliana is sharing her revelation with someone who cannot share it, because this is precisely the kind of insurmountable separation she is trying to describe.

The cut to a wide shot reflects Giuliana’s shift into an explanatory mode, where she stands back from her own thoughts, gains some perspective on them, and considers how to lend them more clarity. This is like standing outside herself to explain who ‘she’ is, so naturally Giuliana experiences a moment of disorientation. After illustrating her point with the hand-scratching gesture, she asks, ‘What was I saying?’, and there is an uncomfortably long pause.

She has put herself at a distance from her own speech, losing the thread, and providing yet another illustration of her point. If he pricks her, he won’t suffer; if she has an idea in her head, he cannot share it; if she tries to see things from his point of view, she loses track of her own. When she remembers what she was about to say (‘Ah yes…’), we cut back to the medium close-up.

That fleeting sense of perspective, that potential for connecting with the world around her, is lost again – the world around her is visibly incapable of being connected with – and we return to a focus on Giuliana alone. Now we may notice the dark gap between the two sections of piping behind her, not visible in the wide shot. The sections have been brought close enough together to create that small shadowy chasm, without actually being joined up.

If Giuliana is hurt and suffering, this experience is confined to her own mind and body, and within these confines she will have to find a resolution to her problems. When she finishes speaking, we will cut back to the ‘If you prick me’ wide shot, but only to see her apologetically shuffle out of frame.

The conclusion she arrives at will be simple and self-centred, a credo that by definition can only be meaningful to her, while to anyone else it will appear empty and tautological. At the end of this scene she will appear lost, directionless, stumbling away from the sailor as he says, ‘Lady, if you don’t feel well, let me help you. Why don’t you go home? It’s very cold out here. I don’t understand, I don’t understand.’ Giuliana is aware of how stupid or crazy she might appear to this stranger, and somewhat ashamed of this as she haltingly exits the scene. But from our privileged perspective, we may be able to appreciate the significance of her statement, ‘Everything that happens to me is my life.’

William Arrowsmith, citing the ‘think of the key’ passage from The Waste Land, relates it to the specific kinds of ‘sick Eros’ that Antonioni portrays:

The individual is driven violently toward transcendence by the need to obliterate all barriers in compulsive or serial intimacy. […] The danger […] is that the individual may lose himself in a solitude or solipsism like Ugolino’s prison as described by T.S. Eliot. […] Antonioni’s characters believe that the prison can be obliterated through erotic transference. On the one side, loneliness and self-incarceration; on the other, deliberate, obsessive immersion (another incarceration), in the destructive element of another’s being, in the self-extinction of an Eros that aims at self-extinction, or that confuses self-extinction with otherness. The dangers of this destructive element are very real, especially for Antonioni’s women; Red Desert is transparently an effort to deal with the neurosis, even pathology, of this Eros.6

This formulation emphasises agency: the individual pursues sexual encounters with a transcendent goal in mind, but either makes herself lonely through promiscuity or annihilates herself through over-immersion in a single other. Thus Giuliana, in the wake of the hotel room scene, could be read as grappling with the loneliness attendant on becoming an ‘unfaithful wife’ and/or with the sense of self-annihilation she experienced when her body mingled with Corrado’s and the entire room turned pink. One way or another, she is afflicted with some form of erotic pathology which has made her go astray, and she must try to ‘deal with this neurosis.’

Later, Arrowsmith says of the ‘bodies are separate’ speech:

Here, stated with the compelling slowness of conscious realization and pained understanding, is the adult recognition of separateness and loneliness, which divides child from woman, neurotic from healthy.7

There is a moralistic element to this reading, and a certainty about the realities to be ‘realised, understood, and recognised,’ that are alien to what I find in Red Desert. Giuliana’s speech to the sailor is demonstrably concerned with what she ‘should’ do and think, but these prescriptions are shot through with uncertainty. If Dante’s Ugolino is cruelly imprisoned as a result of his own treachery, Eliot’s re-working of the prison motif suggests a more universal condition, and one that we may not have inflicted on ourselves. Someone has locked us in this cell: thinking of the key ‘confirms a prison,’ it does not create that prison; our fantasy of openness and connection is like an outline drawn around our closed and alienated self. Giuliana does not make communication impossible between herself and the sailor, it simply is impossible, and she describes their relationship in such a way as to confirm that impossibility. This is why it is so important to acknowledge what she says about her lack of agency. Paradoxically, it is her insight into this lack of agency that accounts for the richness and profundity of what she says in this scene.

In the end-notes to The Waste Land, Eliot links the ‘think of the key’ passage not only to Dante but also to this passage from F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality:

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it…. In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.8

The phrasing here reminds me of Secrets of a Soul and its recreations of external reality in the white-bordered interior world revealed by psychoanalysis (see Part 36). It is not only the thoughts and emotions that remain incommunicable, but even the physical sensations: how it feels to touch, or to be pricked. Bradley’s phrase, ‘the whole world for each,’ is something like what Giuliana refers to when she says, ‘Everything that happens to me is my life,’ but there is another source-text for this line that is more radically unsettling and Antonioni-esque.

A note in the Antonioni Archive (made during the filming of Red Desert) highlights a specific passage in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, volume 2, page 270 onwards.9 In the Italian translation from 1958, on those pages, we find the following passage (spoken by Ulrich to his sister):

When I remember as far back as I can, I’d say that there was hardly any separation between inside and outside. When I crawled toward something, it came on wings to meet me; when something important happened, the excitement was not just in us, but the things themselves came to a boil. I won’t claim that we were happier then than we were later on. After all, we hadn’t yet taken charge of ourselves [non possedevamo ancora noi stessi]. In fact, we didn’t really yet exist; our personal condition was not yet separated from the world’s. It sounds strange, but it’s true: our feelings [i nostri sentimenti], our desires [le nostre volizioni], our very selves [il nostro io], were not yet quite inside ourselves. What’s even stranger is that I might as easily say: they were not yet quite taken away from us. If you should sometime happen to ask yourself today, when you think you’re entirely in possession of yourself, who you really are, you will discover that you always see yourself from the outside, as an object. […] No matter how intensely you try to look at yourself, you may at most find out something about the outside, but you’ll never get inside yourself [riescirai tutt’al piú a scoprirti, mai però a entrarti dentro]. Whatever you do, you remain outside yourself. […] It’s true that as adults we’ve made up for this by being able to think at any time that ‘I am [Io sono]’ – if you think that’s fun. You see a car, and somehow in a shadowy way you also see: ‘I am seeing a car.’ You’re in love, or sad, and see that it’s you. But neither the car, nor your sadness, nor your love, nor even yourself, is quite fully there. Nothing is as completely there as it once was in childhood; everything you touch [tutto quello che tocchi], including your inmost self, is more or less congealed [assiderato] from the moment you have achieved your ‘personality,’ and what’s left is a ghostly hanging thread [una nebbia spettrale] of self-awareness and murky self-regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence. What’s gone wrong? There’s a feeling that something might still be salvaged. Surely you can’t claim that a child’s experience is all that different from a man’s? I don’t know any real answer, even if there may be this or that idea about it [chi pensa questo e chi pensa quello]. But for a long time I’ve responded by having lost my love for this kind of ‘being myself’ and for this kind of world [ogni amore per questa specie di Io e per questa specie di mondo].10

The description of childhood as a time when one felt a sense of connection to one’s surroundings recalls Musil’s contemporary, Hermann Broch, who saw childhood in similar terms in The Sleepwalkers (see Part 32). Here too, connectedness is associated both with a kind of (lost) happiness and with a sense of solitude. Becoming an adult, one learns to say Io sono, but in the process one conjures a specie di Io that is separate from oneself. This self is il nostro io, but as soon as Ulrich speaks of this io being installed inside the person, he has to contradict himself by describing it as being separated from the person, along with that person’s sentimenti and volizioni. The latter term is more evocative of volition and agency than the English translation’s ‘desires’. Our will, the feelings that drive it, and the self to which will and feelings are ascribed, are all detached from us. Our sense (in childhood) of a unity between our feelings and those of the world around us becomes (in adulthood) a sense that everything we touch, including our self, is assiderato, frozen, like Ugolino in his lake of ice.

Ulrich’s phrase, tutto quello che tocchi, anticipates Giuliana’s tutto quello che mi capita (‘everything that happens to me’): he takes this positive action, the hand reaching out to touch something, and turns it into a revelation of helpless passivity; we think of the ice melting and thereby confirm the ice-prison. When you look in the mirror you can only scoprirti (‘discover yourself’), not entrarti dentro (‘enter yourself’), and likewise with all the other people and things around you. ‘Every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it,’ said Bradley, but for Musil each sphere is opaque even to itself, drifting helplessly beside this thing called io and its volizioni. Giuliana’s tutto quello che mi capita speaks to a similar kind of passivity. Like Ulrich, she has fallen out of love with the kind of io and the kind of mondo that she is supposed to feel invested in. Be oneself and love another, say the doctors; know who ‘you’ are and interact accordingly with the world ‘you’ inhabit; acquire that understanding which, Arrowsmith says, divides the neurotic from the healthy. But this division is not clear-cut in Antonioni’s world. Clara in La signora senza camelie would find herself compulsively repeating, ‘Sono io, io!’ There she was on the cinema screen, herself but also a personnage, a character; there she was married to Gianni, herself but also the wife he imagined her to be; not just io but io, io. In the end, neither self is really hers.

Both Clara and Giuliana also share Ulrich’s sense of uncertainty. Just as Musil’s novel refuses to end, Ulrich refuses to arrive at a conclusion, chi pensa questo e chi pensa quello. People can think this or think that, but he is a man without qualities. He is nothing, and thinks nothing, with any consistency. Corrado and the doctors have told Giuliana what she should (and should not) think, and now she will tell herself what she should and should not think, but this seemingly positive action – pensare – also seems to be something she discovers herself doing, watches herself doing, rather than a stable conclusion she arrives at. This passivity is frightening but strangely powerful, because it keeps us on the precipice, like Karin at the summit of the volcano in Stromboli, never knowing what will happen next and embracing that uncertainty. Resolved narratives, well-articulated beliefs, neuroses that have been dealt with, men with qualities, all seem to melt into one great nebbia spettrale by comparison.

Next: Part 48, Absurdity and the desert.

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At this point in Red Desert, Giuliana is torn between two kinds of fear: fear of the thing she is escaping from and fear of the thing she is heading towards. This is the tension she will try to resolve in the final part of the harbour sequence, and it stems from a conflict we have seen developing throughout the film. The ties that bind Giuliana to her world are oppressive, even annihilating at times; yet she also feels hopelessly cut off from that world and longs for a firmer connection to it. The shipyard is a liminal space that both connects Ravenna to the rest of the world and facilitates an escape from Ravenna. This port is a defining feature of the industrialised city in which Giuliana lives, it has enabled Ravenna to become what it is – but its only inhabitant (in this scene) cannot speak Italian, is only here temporarily, and has an attachment to a different part of the world. This is the place where Giuliana’s paradoxical desire for attachment and escape will be resolved, in a suitably ambiguous manner.

As Giuliana approaches the ship, she is alarmed by a loud bang, and looks over her shoulder to see where the noise came from.

She seems afraid of being pursued: the world she is escaping from may try to drag her back home. But she is also afraid of what she will find on this ship. She tentatively climbs a wooden ramp and pauses at the top where this ramp meets the metal stairs attached to the hull. She is alarmed again, this time by a clanking noise from above, and she grabs a nearby rope with her free hand to brace herself for whatever may descend the steps to meet her.

The noise was caused by a sailor removing the chain barrier at the top of the stairs. The down-to-earth ordinariness of this sailor, with his blue-striped cap, earnest expression, and slightly patronising tone of voice, disrupts the existential tone of Giuliana’s night-time odyssey.

She has traversed an alien-seeming landscape that resounds with strange noises. Now we see her framed against the dark (almost black) blue of the ship and the dark (almost black) shimmering water below her. Visually, her ascent of the gangway is also a descent into oblivion; there is something poetic about this gesture. But there is nothing poetic about the sailor. This is not because he is working-class: the shadowy river-dwelling figures in Gente del Po, the invisible spazzini in N.U., Aldo in Il grido, and Corrado’s recruits in Red Desert are all, to varying degrees, portrayed as inhabiting the poetically alienated plane of reality that Giuliana is locked into here. Like Ugo, or like the factory-worker who gave Giuliana a sandwich, the sailor is just a man going about his daily tasks, and is not at all conducive to her project in this moment. Just as she wilted in the face of Ugo’s common-sense suggestions and protests, and just as she walked sheepishly away from the factory worker, so she will end up retreating from the Turkish sailor, back into the poetic darkness.

First, however, she attempts to communicate. The sailor’s initial greeting – a simple ‘Good evening to you,’ if we understand Turkish – is spoken in the flat, unaffected style of a non-professional actor, like the tour guides in Journey to Italy. Giuliana stutters out a few incomprehensible sounds, which the screenplay renders more clearly as ‘Io… non può… io…,’1 recalling how her speech (and sense of self) disintegrated in the face of the hotel receptionist’s questions a few minutes earlier (see Part 36).

David Forgacs comments on Monica Vitti’s vocal performance here:

Vitti’s distinctive voice […] could be heard in its full expressive range when recorded through a studio microphone, more than when she performed on stage. […] In Il deserto rosso, for instance, when Giuliana tells her son Valerio the story of the girl on the island of pink sand, Vitti’s voice is almost hypnotic in its gentleness, whereas when she delivers her monologue to the Turkish sailor at the docks it is nervous and the speech is broken.2

The dialogue before the monologue is, in a way, the most impressive piece of acting in this scene. Vitti, speaking into the studio microphone in post-production, makes it sound as though she both does and does not understand the sailor, and as though she were both speaking and not-speaking to him. His words are just noises to her, yet she receives them as words. Her words disintegrate into noises, trying to meet his words half-way. She is not just mumbling incoherently: her utterances seem full of meanings that cannot quite be conveyed by the Italian language. Even during the tale of the pink beach, we heard her voice disintegrating towards this point, as her sentences became more disjointed and the imagery accompanying them became more abstract and, finally, blurred beyond recognition. Encountering someone who does not speak her language, Giuliana is prompted to peel back the veil of that language and to express something of what lies beneath it.

We see the sailor looking intently at Giuliana, trying to understand her, then we cut to a shot in which he is obscured behind the metal steps he has just descended, and she is isolated against the darkness on the right-hand side of the frame.

The image captures something about the failure of communication in this moment: Giuliana does not quite see the sailor, who is broken up by and conflated with the inanimate structures around him; the sailor sees her as a strange, out-of-place figure (de-inserted from reality) who does not belong here and cannot make herself understood.

As the camera frames them like this, Giuliana manages to get out a few words: ‘Excuse me, can you tell me…’ She seems aware that she is asking the impossible – he cannot tell her anything – and apologetic about this, but still cannot help but try.

As the screenplay says, ‘Giuliana does not understand, but needs to respond, to speak.’3 The sailor moves his face closer to hers and widens his eyes, attempting to speak clearly and convey his meaning in spite of the language barrier.

Whether we literally understand him or not (he is saying, in Turkish, ‘Are you looking for someone? Do you need something?’), it is clear that he is asking why she is here and that he is trying to be helpful rather than rebuking or threatening her. Giuliana continues to improvise, replying as though she understood his question, but also as though he had misunderstood her intent: ‘I didn’t want…’

After his next question (‘Do you want a coffee?’), she will respond with a similar denial, ‘No, it’s not that I have already decided,’ trying to exercise some control over the assumptions being made about her. This sailor cannot possibly be asking the right questions, because he cannot possibly understand what Giuliana wants, and yet Giuliana cannot give up on the attempt to convey her meaning. As the dialogue goes on, she nods encouragingly at the sailor, perhaps hoping that a mutual will to communicate will carry them through this exchange.

Her one coherent question, which literally translates as ‘Can people also travel on this ship?’ seems especially resonant given how de-populated this sequence has been until this moment, and in the context of Giuliana’s bedtime story to Valerio about an un-manned vessel (the vero veliero that on closer inspection became mysterious and unreal). She is asking whether the ship will take passengers as well as cargo, but her wording carries a more philosophical connotation: is it possible for a human being to exist here, or is this a space exclusively designed for inanimate objects? Is this an autonomous vehicle operated by robots or a possible avenue of escape for a living entity like Giuliana? Again, we should remember her reflections upon seeing Corrado’s map: she wondered whether there might be a place in the world where people go to get better. ‘Perhaps not,’ she concluded then, and here too she seems to realise that she is looking for a cure in the wrong place, or that there is no cure in any place.

This encounter with a mysterious stranger has several analogues in Antonioni’s work. Perhaps the most obvious and direct overlap is with The Passenger, in which David Locke repeatedly tries to communicate with people in spite of language barriers or more subtle cultural or circumstantial barriers that prevent understanding. At home, he feels out of place and unable to communicate except through inexplicable, disruptive gestures like lighting a bonfire in the garden.

His investigations as a journalist take him to places where he does not understand either the native language or the political context, and where he finds the scrutinising lens being uncomfortably turned back in his direction.

He assumes Robertson’s identity and then finds himself engaged in conversations where, although there is a common language, he has to guess at what his interlocutors want, and at how he should respond. Talking to the men who are buying his (i.e. Robertson’s) guns, Locke’s face has the unmistakable look of someone who cannot even begin to find the right words; his improvisations are painfully lacking in conviction.

Like Giuliana in the shipyard, he throws himself into situations that are, in various senses, foreign, seemingly in the hope of discovering a new kind of meaning, of escaping from the incomprehensibility of his home life. Like Giuliana, he abandons each escape attempt with a sense of jaded disillusionment.

A less obvious, but I think more telling, parallel may be drawn with the old man on Lisca Bianca in L’avventura. He lives in a tiny shack embedded in the earth, in which the characters take refuge during their initial search for Anna. The old man is Italian but has recently returned from a 30-year stay in Australia, which he clearly considers his true home. Speaking English, he introduces his family members, represented by photographs on the wall.

According to Ian Cameron, this old man was an actual inhabitant of Lisca Bianca.4 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith says he lived in nearby Panarea, and that he insisted on speaking English so that his Australian relatives would understand his dialogue when they saw the film.5 Like the Turkish sailor in Red Desert, this old man is defiantly un-symbolic, a reminder that this setting is a real place where people live and work, however much it may appear to us as a landscape of the mind whose rocks and vegetation embody the loneliness of existence. As Seymour Chatman puts it:

None of [the information provided by the old man] has anything to do with Anna’s disappearance or, indeed, with anything else in the movie. The effect is realistic precisely because the information is gratuitous; the old man is not there to advance the plot. He is simply there, as one more of Antonioni’s stubborn ‘found objects.’ His Australian experience and the other details seem to be true because they have no reason not to be.6

And yet, in both L’avventura and Red Desert the down-to-earth stranger also serves to embody that existential loneliness. The old man on Lisca Bianca has returned to his native country and language but is now alienated from both. His attachments are far away, and the solitariness of this hut on this barren island is indeed reflective of his internal condition. He is a ‘found object’ like the island itself, a piece of reality whose very real-ness starkly exposes our broken relationship with the world and with each other.

Lisca Bianca is the place where Anna finally resolves her own sense of conflict between a longing for connection and a desire to flee her attachments. The old man may well have been the agent of her escape – it may be his boat we see in the distance just after Anna’s final appearance – suggesting that she was able to take that final step from which Giuliana retreats.

The old man does (albeit obliquely) convey some vital information about this place, and about Anna. He mentions that one of his lambs fell off a cliff recently, prompting Claudia to run out into the rain and scream for Anna, desperate for some sign that she has not fallen to her death.

Later, Sandro will angrily interrogate the old man as though he suspects him of having murdered Anna.

But both Claudia and Sandro are in denial. This lonely, dis-placed stranger is telling them something more disturbing about their vanished friend.

As ‘real’ and down-to-earth as these locations and these peripheral characters may be, they can prompt someone to become entirely dislocated from reality. For Anna, this was the place that enabled her to dissolve that reality – her identity, her personal connections, her possessions – and go in search of a new one. For Claudia and Sandro, encountering Lisca Bianca and the old man from Australia will call into question their own sense of the reality they inhabit. If Giuliana had boarded the ship and sailed away, her friends and relatives would search the docks and interrogate the Turkish sailor when he next stopped in Ravenna. They would not find a precise answer to their questions, but they might still find themselves disturbed by the atmosphere of this setting, and by the difficulty of communicating with this stranger who helped their loved one escape. Would these disturbed feelings bring them any closer to understanding Giuliana’s motives?

But of course, Giuliana does not board the ship. No one witnesses her abortive escape attempt except the sailor, who does not understand it. Then she returns home. In L’avventura, we stay with the characters who are groping their way towards understanding Anna’s crisis; her disappearance is a provocative and expressive act that somehow transforms the world that Claudia and Sandro inhabit. In Red Desert, we stay with a version of Anna who never literally vanishes, whose attempts at self-expression are ignored, but who is given a chance to explain her point of view – to us, and to no one else.

This stage in Giuliana’s odyssey also re-works the ending of Rossellini’s Stromboli, terra di Dio, in which Karin (played by Ingrid Bergman) finds herself living in an intolerable environment and ultimately tries to escape from it. The island of Stromboli is not far from Lisca Bianca, and both these Aeolian islands – though more atavistic and ‘trapped in the past’ than 1960s Ravenna – are comparable to Giuliana’s deserto rosso in their alienating effects.

Karin’s conflict with her husband and his traditionalist neighbours (many of whom have returned to the island after long stays in Australia or America) is a battle to retain her dignity and agency in the face of endless material, tangible hardships. But this material conflict transitions, in Stromboli’s final scenes, into a more symbolic conflict with the island itself, as Karin flees upwards towards the volcano’s constantly erupting summit. Overwhelmed by poisonous smoke, she abandons her belongings and is reduced to her self alone.

The higher she ascends, the darker the volcanic desert around her becomes. As she looks beyond her immediate surroundings, there seems to be nothing but billowing smoke above and below.

She is no longer climbing a volcano, but struggling to cling to a single patch of black earth that is always on the verge of tipping her into oblivion.

The ground repeatedly gives way beneath her, until at last she stares into the fiery abyss and cries, ‘Enough, enough, enough! I’ll finish it… I’ll finish it… But I haven’t the courage! I’m afraid, I’m afraid!’ In the Italian version, instead of ‘I’ll finish it,’ she says, ‘It would be better to die.’ Karin contemplates surrendering to the void and flinging herself into the volcano, just to bring her torment to an end.

But the dark earth itself – the terra di Dio referred to in the film’s title – and the starry sky above seem to lull her to sleep, and she wakes up the next morning to discover a different kind of overwhelming prospect. Light speckles in the ground mirror the stars she gazed at the night before, as if she were now among those stars, while the sky has been cleared and cleansed by sunlight.

‘What mystery, what beauty,’ she says. She vows not to return to her husband’s village, but we do not see the next phase in her journey. As far as we are concerned, Karin’s story ends in the desert. She gazes into the (now smoke-free) sky, and at the birds flying overhead, and calls on God to give her strength, understanding, and courage.

This biblical desert becomes a kind of testing-ground that activates both Karin’s self-sufficiency and her dependence on a higher power. Having suffered under the oppressive authority of her husband and the patriarchal norms of his village, she now frees herself from them; and having rebelled against that authority and those norms, she now subjects herself to the ‘merciful God’ who must redeem her. The film cannot show Karin accepting her life on Stromboli, nor can it show her escaping and gaining full independence. This insoluble tension drives the film’s intense but ambiguous ending.

To draw another comparison with L’avventura, this time we follow Anna’s escape from Sandro, but still never find out what happens to her. Rossellini is deeply invested in the transcendent emotion that Karin accesses, in her sense of contact with the divine, and in the idea that this religious experience comes from the earth of the volcano, moving through Karin and connecting her with the heavens. But what strikes me about this ending is its emphasis on renunciation: Karin seems to reject other people, her self, and the world, without having anything to replace them with.

Although she asks God for strength, understanding, and courage, her frantic cries of ‘God! God! God!’ in the final seconds of the film, as the frame is taken over by the sky and the birds, sound like death and dissolution. Karin is unable to tolerate the day-to-day miseries of her husband’s village; then she is unable to tolerate the Sisyphean labour of crossing the volcano; and finally, though she does not take her own life, she abandons herself to the state of limbo that remains her only choice, given the intolerable realities she must otherwise choose between.

If Karin’s journey takes her from the mundane to the transcendent, Giuliana finds it hard to escape the former and access the latter. Karin’s prayers are not interrupted by a bemused shepherd offering her a snack. If they were, she might feel very differently about the elements of earth and sky she is trying to commune with. Antonioni locates his characters’ crises in a deep existential malattia rather than in the complex social conditions that interest Rossellini, but he also throws the terror of that malattia into greater relief by depriving his characters of redemptive or tragic endings. Edmund hurls himself to his death in Germany Year Zero, and even this act of despair represents something hopeful about the nation’s future; Aldo waves at Irma then stumbles off the refinery tower in Il grido, and this tragi-comic act means nothing. Katherine and Alex are joyfully reunited at the end of Journey to Italy; Claudia resignedly strokes Sandro’s hair and says nothing at the end of L’avventura. Irene attains saint-like status in Europa ’51 and Karin finds God in Stromboli, both after renouncing their homes and husbands; Giuliana finds a Turkish sailor for whom her crisis has no meaning.

The pointed mundanity of this encounter, though comical on one level, accentuates the loneliness of Giuliana’s condition. Like Karin, she is on that patch of sloping, cascading desert-earth, torn between climbing onwards and slipping into the flames, but unlike Karin she has to be reminded that the desert is all in her head, and that her ‘reality’ is just an empty shipyard. Reality is just as intolerable for Giuliana as it is for Karin, but somehow, in this case, there is no more screaming to be done about it, no god to pray to, and nowhere to go but (for want of a better word) home.

Next: Part 47, Giuliana’s explanation.

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Towards the end of filming, Red Desert was thrown into crisis by the sudden departure of Richard Harris. Antonioni describes how he dealt with this problem:

The ending was supposed to be all three of them – the wife, the husband, and the third man. So I didn’t know how to finish the film. I didn’t stop working during the day, but at night I would walk around the harbor thinking until I finally came up with the idea for the ending I have now. Which I think was better than the previous one – fortunately.1

The result is a sequence in which Giuliana herself, thrown into crisis by her recent interactions with Valerio and Corrado, wanders around the port of Ravenna looking for the right ending to her story. What happens when she finds herself alone, without any source of help or comfort, forced to fall back on her own resources? The film-maker’s creative impasse blurs into Giuliana’s existential breakdown. Like many of the best sequences in Antonioni’s films, this one is born out of the material circumstances in which it was shot, while also transforming a real-life location into a landscape of the mind. It is the strangest climactic scene in Antonioni’s filmography – more like an interlude than a climax – but its tone of muted lassitude is appropriate to the hauntingly inadequate conclusions Giuliana will arrive at. The violence of the un-filmed paint-flinging confrontation between Giuliana, Ugo, and Corrado (discussed in Part 42) might have been more dramatic, but what we have instead gains its unique power from its sense of bathos.

The first part of this sequence is structured around a familiar pattern: disorienting long-lens shots followed by wide-angle shots that give us a clearer impression of the setting. First, we cut from the grey segment of the Via Alighieri (which has just been vacated by Corrado) to a red surface that fills the frame and seems (thanks to the telephoto lens) much closer to us.

We see red metal squares joined together to form a wall. Set against this red wall are lines patterned in threes: three vertical objects (two ropes and a metal bar) extend downwards close to the wall; each of the ropes appears tripled because of the two shadows it casts; in the foreground, so out of focus they look like shadows, are three wavy lines. Some of these lines seem to blur into each other, or to be on the verge of aligning with or complementing each other. It is like an eye-test that requires us to bring a set of objects into alignment and into focus – but an eye-test that we are failing. As usual with the establishing shots in Red Desert, we cannot immediately be sure of where we are, and in this case the blurring and tripling of objects within the frame compounds our disorientation.

The camera tilts down, following the vertical lines. The rope on the left is multiplied again by a pulley mechanism, then comes to a stop at the cleat to which it is fastened, while the other rope continues to extend below the frame.

The three wavy lines straighten out and run in parallel with each other, crossing the right-hand side of the image at an angle. The metal bar at the centre leans slightly to the right, but is almost perpendicular to the upper and lower boundaries of the image. This bar is like a standard to which the three lines on the right are trying, but failing, to conform. However, the disorder of the initial image is mitigated. The lines that break up the space are guiding our eyes downwards and becoming simpler as they do so.

This one camera-tilt serves to ‘explain’ the setting, even before we cut to the more legible wide shot. When we see the cleat, we realise that the ropes are attached to a ship; when the camera comes to a stop, we see an upturned lifeboat on the left-hand side of the frame; and the three out-of-focus lines connect with an object at the bottom of the frame that extends to the left. The lifeboat and the obscure object in the foreground let us know that we are now ‘grounded’ on the docks, looking from an eye-level perspective, and we have a long moment in which to register this before Giuliana enters the frame.

The screenplay describes Giuliana’s journey through the shipyard in the following terms:

By the way she walks, it is clear that Giuliana (despite the terror which the huge shadows of the hulks arouse in her) still pursues her intention. She proceeds cautiously, with the amazement of discovering at first-hand a world not previously explored. She is afraid, but the state of crisis in which she finds herself gives her the courage to carry on.2

The terror described at the start of this passage is evoked by the opening shot of the sequence, which begins by looking upwards and then tilts down to measure the scale of the ship’s hull. When Giuliana does appear, she seems noticeably small and vulnerable in this setting.

This too is a familiar pattern by now. In the film’s opening sequence, outside the factory, the camera began at an impossible height with the fire-spewing flare-stack, then travelled down to human level through a series of cuts and pans.

We first saw the SAROM island from a great distance, then came in closer to find Giuliana exploring the intricacies of this metal structure planted in the ocean.

Just before the hotel room sequence, we saw Giuliana walking against a grey wall, then we pulled back to find her dwarfed not only by the wall but also by the cluster of industrial orbs behind it.

In the harbour, more than ever before, we sense that Giuliana has travelled into the depths of a menacing alien environment. A feeling of depth is created by that initial downwards tilt: the hulk towers above us, filling up so much space that we cannot see it all in one go, and we are down here in the lower depths, among the clutter and detritus. When Giuliana arrives, we cannot see the ground she walks on, so she seems to be wading through this detritus. The towering hulk itself is overwhelmingly red, for reasons I will come back to later, but in the context of Giuliana’s state of crisis it strikes a tone of alarm and danger.

After the silence that followed Corrado’s disappearing footsteps in the previous shot, a noise breaks into the soundtrack as we cut to the docklands: a jarring, high-pitched metallic echo. We seem to have arrived in the middle of this echo. Beneath it is an oscillating shimmer, like sheet metal rippling as it falls to the ground. These are the songs of the machines, of hulks swaying slowly in the water and scraping against each other, communicating in their specialised language, or perhaps just expressing themselves – the sounds are not unlike cries of anguish. We are in a world that consists entirely of rusty, clanging mechanical structures, and for a long time we see no sign of human life at all. Whereas the SAROM rig, despite its isolated position, was visibly designed to be traversed and operated by human engineers, the harbour is a much less human-friendly place, an all-metal world that is accessible only to metallic entities.

Giuliana’s entrance is typically anxious. As soon as she finds her way into the shot, she glances behind her, something she will do several more times in this sequence, as though she worries that someone or something is following her.

She walks carefully, stumbling a little, the camera panning right to follow her, until she stops short when her way is blocked by a red trailer. She edges around it, glancing down with alarm when she steps on something that makes a noise.

Later, we will see oil spots on the back of her beige coat, and throughout this sequence there is a constant tension as to the physical effect this environment might have on her, strewn as it is with sharp, rusty objects. As the screenplay indicates, Giuliana seems torn between fearing this place and wanting to delve deeper into it. Giuliana is facing her fears, seeking out that ‘terrible thing in reality’ that Corrado refused to acknowledge. In place of his silence we now hear unearthly noise, and in place of his grey stability we see volatile reds and chaotic shapes. This scene is the culmination of Red-Desert-as-horror-film, with Giuliana left alone to face the monster one last time.

As she manoeuvres around the trailer, we cut to a wide shot and see the setting much more clearly.

The object in the foreground remains out of focus and (for me) unidentifiable, but we can see that it is a rusted network of pipes that must at one time have supported the internal workings of a ship. The shipyard is also a makeshift scrapyard where machines go to die, like the blackened slag-heap outside Ugo’s factory or the grey leftovers in the Via Alighieri. We see mechanical innards torn out and discarded and hear a renewed chorus of robotic roaring, as though the local (unseen) beasts were watching Giuliana intrude on their territory. As she disappears momentarily behind the red trailer, we feel again how dangerous it is for her to be here, how easily she could lose herself.

The way she is framed by the metal pipes in the foreground, as she approaches the red trailer, recalls the framing effect of the metallic structure on the SAROM rig. In Part 25, I drew a comparison with Vittoria’s ‘re-framing’ gestures at the start of L’eclisse, and noted that whereas she treats the world like a work of art, the world of Red Desert treats Giuliana like a piece of equipment to be contained and manipulated. Antonioni’s cold-eyed camera, in turn, makes art out of that process.

This time, the framing object is rusty and decayed, and we feel (as Giuliana did when she stared at the slag-heap) the danger of becoming a discarded object, left behind with the rest of the scrap.

The noises on the soundtrack seem more and more like the howls of the damned, a robotic variation on ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth.’ Roberto Calabretto points out the complex layering of diegetic and non-diegetic sound here:

[Vittorio] Gelmetti’s music is blended with port sounds – metallic clangs, sirens and deep rumbles redolent of caves. Thus we have a contrast between what these noises evoke – a working environment – and the nocturnal stillness which blankets the scene. At a certain point, hearing a loud metallic noise, Giuliana turns, seeking its source, only to find that the noise was a product of her angst.3

Elsewhere, Calabretto quotes Gelmetti’s description of his Red Desert score as ‘electronic compositions with the continuous sound presence of machine noises,’4 and in the present scene (unlike in the title sequence) I think these two categories of sound become truly indistinguishable. The ‘working environment’ is not only contrasted with the ‘nocturnal stillness,’ the two are inseparable. Even at night, when almost no one is working in the harbour, the absence of work is expressed through the echoes of work; this is how industry sounds when it sleeps. Interpreted in this way, the soundscape represents a kind of nemesis to Giuliana, as it has done in many earlier scenes. She seeks a place of calm and quiet, but the machine-roars continue to plague her. Alternatively, rather than seeing Giuliana as being in a purely antagonistic relationship with the industrial world, we might see her as being uniquely sensitive to it, attuned to these echoing manifestations of robotic emotion that go unheard by other people. In the harbour, we feel more keenly than ever the agonies of the machine-world, and perhaps detect a kinship between Giuliana and this neglected dimension of industrial Ravenna.

This kinship is suggested not only by her ‘framing’ within that rusty mechanism, but also by the persistence with which she travels through this forbidding landscape, and by the direction she seems to be taking. In the next sequence of shots, we see Giuliana pass beyond the red-painted hull into a darker environment.

The red background is replaced by sections of black-white-and-brown metal that show stratified layers of erosion. Later, when we see the ship from a distance, we see that it has been re-painted (in red) up to a clearly demarcated point.

It is an extraordinary image of a vast machine that is being restored but also transformed. Its old, traumatised self is being painted over and thereby erased, but a section of that old self still remains. The screenplay specifies that the repaired part of the hull is the colour of minium, or red lead, an oxide used in anti-fouling paints that helps to prevent corrosion on ships’ hulls.5 As well as being a colour associated with danger and alarm, red is therefore (in this case) indicative of strength and resilience. However, the progression in these images is from the resilient minium-red towards the darker, more decayed part of the hull. As the image darkens, we become more aware of this as a night-time scene, but also of Giuliana as someone who is deliberately seeking out this marginal, nocturnal realm.

Indeed, one thing that sets this scene apart from the rest of the film is the degree of agency shown by Giuliana. Most of the time we see her reacting to things, tagging along on other people’s journeys, and then sometimes trying to escape from them. This time, she has chosen not to go home or to any other safe, familiar location, but to travel into the almost-deserted docklands alone, at night. She apparently has a specific purpose in mind. After walking a little farther, she pauses and looks down into the water.

It is a gruesome sight, even worse than the polluted pond at the fishing-spot. The water is opaque with a toxic green colour, and there is a thick conglomeration of sludge floating at the edge, light gleaming off it in a silvery shimmer as the water ripples. The glistening sludge almost seems to blend into the stone bulwark that marks the boundary between land and water, as if the one were disintegrating and flowing into the other.

Giuliana’s determination in reaching this point might make us wonder whether she intends to take her own life. Will this be like Mae’s attempted suicide in The Docks of New York, which we see obliquely through an image of her reflection in the water, then of the absence of that reflection after she jumps, then of the ripples caused by her off-screen plunge?

But this is not Giuliana’s intention. The image of the swampy dock-water is not a harbinger of suicide, but a reiteration of a visual motif that runs all the way through this film. If Antonioni and his characters are frequently drawn towards desert spaces, seemingly in the hope of finding solace or connection, Giuliana finds herself drawn towards deserted spaces, towards the slag-heaps, polluted pools, and sludge-filled ports of her world. This is not only the desert where there are few oases left, it is the red desert, full of the still-bleeding flesh of those who died building it, or who live on to keep it intact (see Part 6). In the black sludge that floats on the water, there are two small pieces of wood, recalling the scrap of wood that floats in the water-barrel in the final scenes of L’eclisse. In that case, like the discarded match-book that floats beside it, the piece of wood becomes a weirdly poignant aspect of the ‘eclipse’ mosaic that comes together at the end of that film. The very insignificance of these objects, and the insignificance of the barrel they float in (which leaks out into the ground without anyone noticing), is what lends them such profundity.

The people we see in that sequence do not ‘matter’ either: they are marginal to the film, irrelevant strangers who should not be there; the main characters, who should be there, are pushed out of the film entirely and rendered even more irrelevant. What does the eclipse consist in, what is being eclipsed, and what does it mean to be eclipsed? What does it mean to find oneself in the darkness that lies outside that annihilating light in the final shot, or in the darkness that replaces it when it fades out?

The red desert is a variation on that eclipse, as is the blown-up image in Blow-Up – the object that no longer means anything and that no one cares about, but that also somehow contains a terrible significance.

In Antonioni’s story ‘The event horizon’, a man inspects the wreckage of a crashed plane that had been carrying six wealthy passengers. The sight of this high-class debris triggers a memory:

Once a street-cleaner [spazzino] explained to him how to distinguish the garbage [spazzatura] of poor neighbourhoods from that of the residential quarters. Silver paper on boxes of chocolate, pineapple parings, wilted gardenias, labels from bottles of San Gemini water and French cognac, cabbage leaves… Nothing of all this in the garbage of the poor. The poor eat the cabbage leaves.6

The Italian words for ‘street-cleaner’ and ‘garbage’ are both derived from the verb spazzare, ‘to sweep’. The spazzino is related to the spazzatura as the sweeper is to the sweepings. Like the immigrants in Soleil Ô, who are rigorously taught the French word balai (broom), these are people defined by their attachment to marginal, discarded objects.

The have-nots are defined by an absence (‘nothing of all this’), or by the cabbage leaves they retain and internalise, while the haves are defined by what they throw away, by what appears on the margins of their lives. The poignant implication, in ‘The event horizon’, is that even the rich end up as garbage, their fragmented corpses strewn among their prized possessions on the hill their plane crashed into.

A similar sense of irony informs Antonioni’s documentary N.U., which, as Sam Rohdie says, draws attention to

[the] unreality, almost non-existence of the streetcleaners. The cleaners have no presence for the passers-by in the streets. No one looks at them. No one talks to them. They silently sweep the street, empty dustbins in bare dawn landscapes as if they are more objects than persons, inanimate shades. […] There are scenes of a sweeper looking at his own reflection in a shop window before which he pauses. The reflection looks back at him; both are cut through by another movement and other figures as if sweeper and reflection were not there.7

As we watch this film, however, our attention is almost entirely focused on those unseen ‘inanimate shades,’ while the passers-by who ignore them are left in the margins. Karl Schoonover argues that

[N.U.] focuses on trash and its collectors as a means of retraining our vision along these lines: to see this foreignness in the everyday, to look beyond what we have assumed are the direct forces guiding our lives. What is at stake is the visibility of waste management. This doesn’t just mean showing the garbage itself. It also means exposing our visual, ideological relationship to the world.8

Garbage thus becomes more than just ‘waste to be managed’ – i.e. managed out of sight and out of mind, out of the controlled and regulated spaces of modern life. It comes to represent the foreign, the un-regulated, the un-controlled. The spazzini and the spazzatura they collect are everyday components of our world, and yet – the documentary tells us – we act as though they did not exist. What does that say about our ideological relationship to the world? N.U. does not seem intended to make our hearts bleed for these disenfranchised persons. Rather, like Tanino in the Via Alighieri, it wants to unsettle us. The problem is not that the way we see the world is unethical, but that it is deluded: we are ignoring something in reality.

Giuliana’s urge – which has previously expressed itself through two suicide attempts – to remove herself from the picture, to de-insert herself from reality, is part of what drives her in the present sequence. When she looks into the polluted water, she is like the street-sweeper looking in the shop window, regarding the nebulousness of that reflection and the way in which it is obliterated by competing bodies.

The bits of wood in the sludge are both unimportant and important, in the same way that Giuliana herself is both unimportant and important. In the background of certain shots, we see rippling reflections from the water cast against the ships’ hulls.

Like the watery undulations of the desert in which Walter Faber refused to see any deeper significance, or the floating sludge that looks both pitch-black and luminously silver, this visual disturbance in the fabric of reality is completely trivial but also integral to Giuliana’s state of crisis. Do not look at the ships, this scene tells us: look at the signs of erosion and the reflected light on their hulls, at the waste-products in the water they are swimming in, and at the other kinds of garbage – the innards of old ships, like body-parts left by a plane crash – strewn over the surrounding area. Giuliana’s ‘problem’ is that she has retrained her vision and become attuned to these things, so that she now inhabits a very different space from the one most people would see.

It is interesting that the screenplay attributes her determination to her ‘state of crisis,’ that is, to the very thing that has seemed to incapacitate her for most of the film. These images of Giuliana gingerly traversing the shipyard are evocative of both the crisis and her proactive attempt to address it. She is surrounded by trauma, decay, and damage, and frequently has to grab hold of ropes, pulleys, and other objects as she makes her way through this inaccessible landscape. These moments underline her vulnerability, but also her facility in navigating the environment.

Giuliana continues to be wary of her surroundings, of the squeaking rusted objects she steps on and the unnerving sounds in the distance, but she persists in engaging with them, in coming to terms with them.

A groaning call draws her attention away from the dock-water and she follows the call with a look of urgency in her face.

As it turns out, her intent is to board a ship, and thereby to remove herself from her present reality – her ambiente storico, as Corrado might say. Contrary to what she told Corrado earlier, she takes no possessions with her, not even a suitcase. She will not follow through on this drastic impulse, but her momentary urge to reject the world she lives in is a crucial element in the conclusion of Red Desert. What we see here is Giuliana embracing her identity as a broken, non-functional thing, as a discarded fragment in the red desert. She goes to the place where such fragments end up, to a ship that looks like it has seen better days. Unlike the first ship, this one is clearly not in the process of being restored.

In Corrado’s hotel room, looking at his map, Giuliana wondered if there might be a place, somewhere in the world, where she would ‘get better [stare meglio].’ Perhaps she goes to the docks and considers boarding the Turkish ship in the hope of relocating to a world where she would be defined as something more than a waste-product. Like her rejection of Corrado, this (intended) rejection of ‘reality’ is a powerful gesture.

Next: Part 46, Does this ship take people?

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‘Even you haven’t helped me,’ says Giuliana to Corrado, having stepped out of her alcove and walked towards him (and the camera).

The screenplay makes a distinction between Giuliana’s intent and Corrado’s interpretation: ‘She says this sweetly [con dolcezza], but for Corrado it is like an accusation.’1 The dolcezza is not particularly evident in the finished film. Monica Vitti delivers her line sadly, with a subtle break in her voice, and a few seconds later when she watches Corrado walk away, her expression conveys resignation and disappointment, not affection.

The phrase neanche tu (‘not even you’) might imply a number of things: that Corrado has come closest to helping her (but not quite succeeded), that he has tried harder than anyone else (but it was a futile effort), or that he had the capacity to help (but chose to take advantage of her instead). The first two meanings might carry a tone of dolcezza, a degree of tenderness and even gratitude for this would-be friend who has done the best he could. But the third meaning, the accusation, is the one that makes sense in the context of what we have seen in the last few minutes. If anything has set Corrado apart from other people, it is his talent for comprehension. ‘If Ugo had looked at me as you do,’ Giuliana said on the SAROM rig, ‘he would have understood many things.’ Now, Corrado can be trusted to understand Giuliana’s statements about the ‘terrible thing in reality,’ about her ‘success in becoming an unfaithful wife,’ and about his own failure to help her. He can also be expected to flee from this understanding into a state of denial and absence.

Corrado’s reaction shot shows his face, completely in focus, occupying almost the whole frame – we see him more clearly and completely than in the rest of this scene – but his expression is not legible as that of a man who feels ‘accused.’

There is a hint of sadness in his eyes, but since Richard Harris’s resting expression is one of seething gloom, we cannot infer anything from this shot about his specific reaction to Giuliana’s comments. His expression does not change as he picks up his coat, puts it on, and walks out into the dark street. The telephoto lens captures the movements of his head in a huge, uncomfortable, out-of-focus close-up while he ascends the steps to reach the door.

As when a news camera follows a disgraced politician to their car, it feels as though we are intrusively trying to capture Corrado’s reactions, to read his emotions, and he is refusing to show any.

His inscrutability is similar to that of Walter Faber, the narrator-protagonist of Max Frisch’s novel Homo Faber, which lay on Corrado’s bedside table in his hotel room.

Faber’s worldview, which he reiterates frequently throughout the novel, can perhaps be summed up as ‘there is nothing terrible in reality.’ As he looks back at the tragic events of his life, he insists that they are merely a series of extraordinary accidents with no larger significance:

I don’t deny that it was more than a coincidence which made things turn out as they did, it was a whole train of coincidences. But what has providence to do with it? I don’t need any mystical explanation for the occurrence of the improbable; mathematics explains it adequately, as far as I’m concerned.2

Near the start of the novel, when Faber finds himself marooned in what he calls ‘the red desert’ (il deserto rosso in the Italian translation Corrado is reading)3 following an emergency plane-landing, he meditates on the contrast between his own emotions and those of a fellow passenger:

I admitted that landscapes didn’t mean much to me, and certainly not a desert.

‘You don’t mean that!’ he said. He thought it experience. […]

I’ve often wondered what people mean when they talk about an experience. I’m a technologist and accustomed to seeing things as they are. I see everything they are talking about very clearly; after all, I’m not blind. […] I see the jagged rocks, standing out black against the moonlight; perhaps they do look like the jagged backs of prehistoric monsters, but I know they are rocks, stone, probably volcanic, one would have to examine them to be sure of this. Why should I feel afraid? […] I see what I see – the usual shapes due to erosion and also my long shadow on the sand, but no ghosts. Why get womanish? I don’t see any Flood either, but sand lit up by the moon and made undulating, like water, by the wind, which doesn’t surprise me; I don’t find it fantastic, but perfectly explicable.4

His initial rejection of the idea of providence turns out to be something deeper, a rejection of any kind of meaning (beyond the mathematical) in events or objects. The examples he gives in the passage just quoted are especially resonant in the context of Red Desert. Where the cove-dwelling girl in Giuliana’s story sees human figures and hears ghostly voices in the flesh-like rocks surrounding her, Faber would insist they are simply rocks. Where Giuliana often finds reality disintegrating and liquefying around her, Faber would insist that the desert sand is simply ‘like water’ due to the effect of the wind. To go beyond this down-to-earth comparison, to feel any sense of awe or existential terror in the face of these uncanny resemblances, is ‘womanish.’

Like Corrado, Faber works in industry, and is busy setting up a new project in South America. He is frequently preoccupied with thoughts of turbines in Venezuela, but finds himself distracted by his fraught emotional ties to a former girlfriend, and to a young woman who turns out to be his daughter by that girlfriend. Although the specifics of the plot differ from those of Red Desert, the overall pattern – of a pragmatic engineer involved in a disturbing relationship with a woman – is strikingly similar. Faber’s no-nonsense attitude towards ‘womanish’ fears anticipates Corrado’s tendency to dismiss and downplay Giuliana’s illness, but in both cases this pragmatism is framed as a symptom of emotional repression. Corrado, spacing out during the briefing for his Patagonian project, is clearly shaken by his encounter with Giuliana, but seems unable to express this feeling to her or to himself.

Faber is similarly confused by his own absorption with a long-lost relationship:

I should have landed in Caracas a week ago and today (at the latest) I ought to have been back in New York. Instead of that I was stuck here – for the sake of saying hello to a friend of my youth, who had married the girlfriend of my youth. What for?5

He often asks questions like this, or professes not to understand his own feelings and motivations. The philosophy that makes him see only sand and rocks in the desert also makes him blind to emotional or psychological states, to anything internal. His ignorance of his own reasons for looking into the fate of Hanna, the girlfriend of his youth, dovetails with his ignorance about why that relationship failed:

I made up my mind to marry Hanna, if ever her residence permit were withdrawn. […] I had made up my mind, as I have said, but I never got round to it. I don’t really know why. Hanna was always very sensitive and moody, an unpredictable temperament – manic-depressive, as Joachim said. […] I called her a sentimentalist and arty crafty. She called me Homo Faber. […] [She had a] tendency to mysticism, or to put it less kindly, hysteria. Now, I am a man who has both feet on the ground.6

His stated motives for marrying Hanna are purely pragmatic and rooted in concrete needs (the withdrawal of her residence permit) and we might infer that their separation was caused by his inability to engage with her ‘manic-depression,’ or ‘sentimentality,’ or ‘hysteria,’ or with whatever aspects of her character Walter is trying to smooth over with these terms.

Walter assumes that Hanna had an abortion after their separation, but years later he finds himself in a tentative affair with the daughter he never knew he had:

I wasn’t in love with the girl with the reddish pony-tail, she attracted my attention, that was all, I couldn’t have suspected she was my own daughter, I didn’t even know I was a father.7

The daughter, Sabeth, dies following an accidental fall. In a series of disjointed and repetitive notes, Walter recounts Hanna’s philosophical take on this series of events. The notes serve as a commentary on Walter’s rejection of ‘experience’ in the red desert, as well as recalling Hermann Broch’s commentary on the ‘singleness of purpose’ that (according to Broch) makes the modern world so alienated:

Discussion with Hanna – about technology (according to Hanna) as the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it. The technologist’s mania for putting the Creation to a use, because he can’t tolerate it as a partner, can’t do anything with it. […] (I don’t know what Hanna means by this.) The technologist’s worldliness. (I don’t know what Hanna means by this.) Hanna utters no reproaches, Hanna doesn’t find the way I behaved towards Sabeth incomprehensible; in Hanna’s opinion I experienced a kind of relationship I was unfamiliar with and therefore misinterpreted, persuading myself I was in love. It was no chance mistake, but a mistake that is part of me (?), like my profession, like the rest of my life.8

Again, Walter repeatedly comments on his own ignorance, his inability to understand the ‘meaning’ of Hanna’s statements, or of the events of his life, or of the objects around him. Hanna’s perspective is defined by comprehension and understanding but we hear it only through the filter of Walter’s partial comprehension. His confusion and his questions (reduced, finally, to a bracketed question mark) do not point us in the direction of the truth; the reader cannot smugly infer that truth and thus distinguish themselves from this unreliable narrator. Rather, Walter’s comments leave us confused and questioning, like him. No wonder he cannot tolerate ‘the Creation’ as a partner, no wonder he tries to avoid experiencing it, when such experiences are as painful and confusing as the ones he describes. From his original stance, which I characterised as ‘there is nothing terrible in reality,’ Walter seems to have transitioned into ‘there is something terrible in reality, and I don’t know what it is.’ Now, he is not so sure of the boundaries between states, or of the stability of his environment:

Since my forced landing in Tamaulipas I have always sat so that I can see the undercarriage when they lower it, anxious to observe whether the runway at the last minute, when the wheels touch it, does not after all change into a desert.9

His visit to the red desert was an ‘experience’ after all. That place was not simply a desert, it meant something, and that meaning resonated through his subsequent coincidence-filled encounters with Sabeth and Hanna. The red desert, he now realises, can be anywhere and everywhere – you never know when you will find yourself stranded in it.

Walter’s comment on the red desert, near the start of the novel, occurs in the context of a series of colourful comparisons he makes while staring out of the window of the plane, just before its forced landing:

[T]he swamps were green in some places and in others red, the red of a lipstick, something I couldn’t understand, they were really not swamps but lagoons, and where they reflected the sun they glittered like tinsel or tinfoil, anyhow with a metallic glint, then again they were sky-blue and watery (like Ivy’s eyes). […] In the distance the blue mountains. Sierra Madre Oriental. Below us the red desert.10

This passage lays the groundwork for Walter’s insistence that similes are just similes, that objects are coloured in certain ways, or resemble other objects, for empirically verifiable reasons, and that it is ‘womanish’ to read anything into these resemblances. But these protests themselves turn out to have an underlying emotional significance, as we learn during Walter’s account of his affair with his unrecognised daughter. Sabeth initiates a ‘game of comparisons’ in which the players compete to compare things to other things. For instance:

[A] few small morning clouds hung overhead – like tassels sprinkled with pink powder, thought Sabeth; I couldn’t think of anything and lost another point.11

After his daughter’s death, Walter is still haunted by her superior talent at this game:

The crevasses – as green as bottle-glass. Sabeth would have said: as emerald! Our twenty-one points game again. The rocks in the evening light – like gold. I think: like amber, because lustreless and almost transparent, or like bone, because pale and brittle.12

The tassels sprinkled with pink powder make me think of the powdery pinkness covering Corrado’s hotel room.

The rocks that turn into lustreless, almost transparent amber, then into pale and brittle bones, are like the surfaces in Giuliana’s tale of the pink beach, transitioning from transparent water, to sand, to rocks that look like bodies, to one last rock that resembles a skull, before the image dissolves altogether (catching, as it does so, a golden/amber glow in the reflection of a rock in the water).

Sabeth’s habit of blurring the boundaries between objects and the things they resemble seems to have been internalised by Walter since her death and before he begins his narration, hence his comparisons when describing the landscape outside the plane (‘red of a lipstick…like tinsel or tinfoil…like Ivy’s eyes’). Although, at the start of the novel, he tries to downplay the significance of these comparisons, by the end, having told the story through, he has embraced the multiplicity of his surroundings – now he would perform better in Sabeth’s game.

In a similar way, Corrado begins to see the world as Giuliana does, especially in the briefing sequence when his eyes wander across the blurred faces and weirdly fascinating shapes in the warehouse. But unlike Walter, Corrado ultimately rejects this way of seeing and retreats into the mindset of the technologist who arranges the world so as not to experience it. ‘You shouldn’t think about such things’ is his final line in the film, and his final verdict on Giuliana’s troubles. The phrase she then uses to describe the ‘something terrible’ in reality – qualcosa di terribile – invokes something like Sabeth’s comparison game, which finds ‘something of’ one thing in another. As Paul Youngman says, Faber begins the novel believing that ‘his sense perception […] reveals the essence of objects to him,’ that these objects are easily categorised, and that ‘there can be no fruitful interplay between them.’13 This is, perhaps, the flipside to Corrado’s ‘understanding’ gaze that initially makes him a good listener to Giuliana: he also has Walter Faber’s need to make every object explicable, every problem solvable, and with this Faber’s tendency to respond to inexplicable or inescapably problematic relationships by looking away from them. ‘His constant criss-crossing of continents is merely the outward indication of a personal rootlessness,’14 says Michael Butler, with reference to Faber, but the statement is obviously applicable to Corrado as well. In Frisch’s novel, this state of denial is replaced by one of tragic awareness, but Corrado rejects this awareness and continues on his travels.

We watch Corrado through the open doorway of Giuliana’s shop, initially in a medium close-up – a continuation of that intrusive telephoto-lens shot that followed his progress to the door.

Corrado goes out into the darkness of the Via Alighieri. He pauses for a moment and looks up, as Giuliana did at the walls of her shop earlier in this scene. Like her, he seems to take a moment to register the failure of this relationship. He looks down despondently, and we cut on this action to a wide shot of the cobbled street.