The mental fissures of an unstable mind dominate Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film. But even though the main character Giuliana (Monica Vitti) parallels the film, she is not its student. Red Desert is too unresolved, too contingent, too vague to be reduced to a purely psychological reading rooted in the statutes of Western cinema where expression is clearly and unambiguously a refraction of the mental geometry of the protagonist. The common interpretation that Giuliana is “mentally ill” wrongly clarifies and soothes an instability that the film, intentionally and beautifully, cannot quantify. This erroneous assumption places undue emphasis on the individual, the protagonist, as a “special” or “unique” case study, different from or tangent to the world around him. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayConversely, Antonioni is the great filmmaker of the relationship between the world and the self, especially the impact of the world on oneself, rather than the champion of the solitary individual at odds with the world (American cinema loves the latter). The minds of his protagonists extend expressionistically across the physical exterior of the film, but the space of his films projects a mental consciousness that exists outside of his characters, a consciousness locked in dialectical tension with those characters with no obvious answer as to whether the world or the world. the character is the main agent. Antonioni's worlds do not justify their presence by groveling at the characters' feet; instead, they affirm, they question, they even make demands of the characters. And when the character is not enough, he leaves the frame and the film is too fascinated and intoxicated by the world to refuse to follow the protagonist to his new place; the pacing of resting on physical space negates the audience's desire to treat its individual characters to a film and find catharsis solely in the actions of those characters. Antonioni's film is not a portrait of an arbitrarily dissonant individual but of an impartial world with disaffected individuals who insinuate themselves into this world as their offspring. Antonioni's films are therefore neither argumentative nor conclusive; they interrupt and unfold rather than stitching together details for a solution, a “point.” His films do not operate according to conceptual prescriptions regarding theme and symbol; like a whirlwind and a trance, Red Desert is far too unstable in its structure and blatantly unbalanced in its luxuriously ominous color palette to fit our categories of indexical meaning. A hurricane of motionless inertia, Antonioni evokes something we can only consider, something we can never compartmentalize. Although meditative and languorous, Antonioni never dwells on metaphors connecting the dots in the world. It never addresses unknown covert violence with an emphasis on concepts and themes that can be mapped, mapped, and explained. Rather, Antonioni's films, like those of Malick, Murnau, Tarkovsky and many others, are experiential and lyrically suggestive rather than mathematically structured to achieve a set goal. Red Desert, while a gripping commentary on the apathy of modern boredom, is unpolluted by the obvious, uneclipsed by fixed meaning. Always moving away from us, he asks us not to clarify but to observe, to interact, to float in his mysteries, locking his characters and his audience into patterns of light and movement that ultimately resist a lens or to a structured identity. So,as Vitti stumbles in a state of mental inebriation around an indecipherable mix of hostile dust and distorted modern industry, the overwhelming sensation is distinctly ambivalent. On the surface, the world of the film is trapped in a dialectical tension between an elusive, vast and repressed nature and the resulting disarray of a modernity that encroaches on nature (bloated factories and polluted smoke encroach on the nature).landscape and imbue it with a putrescent green). However, this forced dialectic between the modern and the ancient or the natural is only a chimerical breeding ground for a more metaphysical feeling of imbalance found in the act of traveling the world, of acclimatizing to it, of exploring it , rather than compartmentalizing it according to specific prefigured patterns. the ways of “nature” and “modernity” or “artifice”. Mental categories are not simply analyzed but confounded in the way Carlo Di Palma's lush, searing, fire-and-brimstone cinematography casually plunges between natural deserts and industrial geometry, all photographed as a desert of enormity and d he intimacy, of ravishing beauty and deadly, infected clouds of horror that are, for Antonioni, inseparable from another. The boulders of the rocky social outcroppings overlooking the beaches, the domes of the human head and the Bauhaus industrial corrosion of modern human architecture are all photographed in unison to suggest the overlap of each, to bleed the flesh, the earth/ stone and concrete, to conceptualize each as a world of beauty and malevolence. Certainly, the film links boredom to the changing contours of technological development (a change which, for Antonioni, is more destabilizing than specifically positive or negative) does not correspond to a corollary advancement of mental states which can cope with the fluxional nature and destabilized from progress. But Antonioni's aims are more lyrical than simply privileging the past over the present; the plastic beauty of supersaturated reds, yellows and oranges somehow injects life into this world and only lies about life, erecting a false and overly publicized schema of artificial beauty that eludes something something deeper and more sensual. At the same time, for Antonioni, these artificial constructions and the domain of beauty are not mutually exclusive. Exultation can flourish within the modern world (Antonioni's camera is undeniably fascinated by the bodily energy of physical spaces both built and natural). But the energy is also disfiguring because modernity reshapes the world and forces people to perceive the world in a new way, to keep pace, to acclimatize to new spaces. Fantastic otherworldly wonder and icy alienation swirl in the collective narcosis of contradiction, where the only apparent solution to a world adrift is to wander adrift in a liminal state between waking and sleep. A liminal state that is Giuliana's destiny, her stasis syndrome, even during her temporary escapades with her husband's colleague Corrado (Richard Harris). It wrestles with the rust of modernity and humanity oxidized by existential editing rhythms (shots exist in perpetual crisis as to where they will go next, what to follow, rather than following a presumed narrative path). Red Desert, as in many of Antonioni's fables from the 1960s, exteriorizes destruction not in a diegetic event (a hurricane, a meteor, a giant lizard) but in the venomous paralysis of a formal and visual collapse as the camera clearly refuses or struggles to locate more humanity in the frame. Diverting people's attention while involving the..