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Very helpful thank you. I just watched Blow Up in the cinema, has always been a favourite, but this essay has helped to understand why it has such a power as a work of art.

Thank You! ❤️

Michelangelo Antonioni's sensational break with a more conventional past famously came with L'Avventura in 1960, but here in 1964, with his first colour movie (now re-released for the director's centenary) was where the Antonioni 60s really began. It's not swinging exactly, but has a distinctively experimental, exploratory and even improvisatory feel. Red Desert is a disturbing ambient drama about post-natal anxiety and the malaise of industrial society: a deeply depressed young mother Giuliana (Monica Vitti), whose husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) runs a factory, finds herself drawn to Ugo's handsome associate Corrado (Richard Harris). who arrived to recruit a workforce for a mining adventure in south America. The landscape is a grim, sludgy mass of churned soil and dark satanic mills, belching out smoke and flame: Antonioni boldly counters the picturesque view of sunny, happy Italy. With its long takes and strange, electronic music, it looks eerily like a sci-fi movie, set on an alien world, an interplanetary colonial outpost, where sensitive earthlings have to swallow their distaste for their surroundings and think about the profits: this is a film to set alongside Alphaville or Solaris. When Guiliana in her green coat, with her little boy, wanders listlessly into view, she looks as if she has been colourised in a black-and-white film. She has suffered some kind of breakdown after being hospitalised after a car accident, and the film intuits some of her dislocation and alienation: Red Desert was perhaps an inspiration for Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (2008), though the spark for it can be seen in Antonioni's portmanteau film I Vinti, or The Vanquished (1953) in which a cigarette smuggler suffers a head injury on the run from customs and begins to see things in a woozy way. What a mysterious film it is, with much to perplex and even exasperate, but much to fascinate as well.

Well done.

Antonioni is my main god Hope you do a good job :P

too much stress on environment in this analysis.

This is a fantastic essay on Antonioni, great work!

Well done!

Salve Emily, mi piace molto la tua analisi. Non ho mai veduto questo film, ma è sulla mia lista addesso. Non so se torneró in Italia un giorno, perché la facilità con la quale il tuo paese si è lasciato inganare per la dittatura Covid-1984 mi ha sbalordito. Sono totalmente deluso del popolo italiano che si è lasciato fare, con qualche eccezioni, spero che tu ne sia, visto il contenuto della tua analisi sull’alienazione e l’esclusione. Allora se non ci incontriamo mai per parlare di cinema, ti auguro pace e libertà.

Great analysis. I learnt a lot from just this small presentation. You have a very pleasant sound to your voice which also adds to the enjoyment. 😉🙂👏

non ho mai sentito qualcuno pronunciare l'italiano e l'inglese cosi bene allo stesso tempo.

Very Nice analyse

Grazie Mille! Daje

I didn't quite get the point of the film "Zabriskie Point", but after seeing this review, things seem much clearer. Thanks!

Very well done.

great job!

Do make more videos ❤️

wish you kept going

Nice analysis, thank you for the interesting thoughts on this great artist.

I love this essay but I have a problem with he definition of Art Film. This was never a label in Italy not in Europe arguably. I don't know, do we need this lable? Thank you for your work! There should be more essays like this on Antonioni on CZcams!

I wow. This is a great video essay