Red Desert (Il deserto rosso)

Red Desert (Il deserto rosso). Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. Starring Monica Vitti with a score by Giovanni Fusco. Criterion Collection, 2010 (1964). 1 DVD + 39-page booklet. $39.95.

One can only imagine the breathtaking opportunity that the advent of color presented to Michelangelo Antonioni. Considered by many to be a "painterly" director, Antonioni proclaimed that, for the filmmaker, "seeing" was a "necessity."1 By the time of his first color film, Il deserto rosso (Red Desert [1964]), he was already renowned for the still-photography- like quality of his compositions and frames. The anticipation surrounding the release of Red Desert was quickly satisfied in the film's opening credits. It is not "color," exactly, that is revealed in these initial sequences of an industrial wasteland in Ravenna, shot in blurred deep focus and accompanied by the haunting rattle of an electronic score. Antonioni instead leavens the sepia and gray with hues and tints of red, blue, and pink. One feels as though the director were aware of entering some new visual terrain, one that had to be adjusted to gradually. The cautious chromatic textures make us conscious of color as a phenomenon consisting of wavelengths of light.

With the Criterion Collection's publication of Antonioni's Red Desert, cinephiles now have access to a newly restored high-definition transfer and digitally remastered soundtrack of what was for years a difficult-toobtain and expensive DVD. In addition to the film, the Criterion DVD includes audio commentary on Red Desert by David Forgacs; interviews with Antonioni, including a reprint of one with Jean-Luc Godard; two early documentaries by Antonioni, La gente del Po (People of the Po [1943-47]) and N.U. (Department of Sanitation [1948]); and an essay on Red Desert by Marc Le Fanu. Together, the elements of the DVD point to the landmark status of the film, both for Antonioni's career and for the diffusion of color in European auteur cinema. Yet, surprisingly enough, the film has, since its original release, become relatively obscure outside of specialist circles. This has occurred in part because the film's abstract, palette-driven articulation can make it difficult for audiences to follow its plotline and grasp its aesthetics-though the ascent of color over content was far from Antonioni's intent. "I never thought of color per se," he insisted in...