Red Desert (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Red Desert came directly after Michelangelo Antonioni's brilliant trilogy L’ Avventura, La' Notte, and L’ Eclisse (many consider Red Desert to be a fourth link in the trilogy in which they all-star his leading lady Monica Vitti) and his reputation has been confirmed as one of the world’s leading international directors. Red Desert was Antonioni's most ambitious and complex works exploring a woman's existence in a vivid world of cultural neurosis, existential doubt and technical modernization. Antonioni presents to us an alienated world in which our world’s advancement in technology is undoubtedly stunning and beautiful, as he hypnotically portrays the fantastic sculptural colors and shapes thrown up by science and industry which involve the girders, pipings and pylons that are part of a vast new network of global communications that seemingly reach high up into the stars. 

Red Desert came out in the year 1964, which was almost twenty years since the end of the war, by which that time Italy had recovered from the devastation that was caused by that catastrophic event, and was on its way towards a modern prosperity; the years stretching from 1954 to 1964 were those of the ‘economic miracle.’ Antonioni’s attitude toward the cultural and economic changes that were affecting the country appeared to be complex and ambivalent, and these expressions are greatly shown in his film Red Desert. And yet he also presents a bleak unstable new world we have created for ourselves, a desolate, poisonous wasteland, a man-made hell of our own creation which ultimately would lead an individual in a psychological state of hysteria and madness.