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Sometimes the Desert is Red is Maria Finn’s remediation of Antonioni’s film classic from 1964, Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert). That is to say that Finn has retranslated the film into pictorial art media. In so doing, she reverses a number of the film’s original ideas and aspects.
By sending her own revised picture, through her own ”stills” of the film back to the public, Finn thus makes the point that Antonioni is presenting about his work not coming into being until it is viewed, in a far-reaching way.
The film
Originally, the film Il Deserto Rosso was a story about Giuliana, played by Monica Vitti, who suffers from a nervous disorder. Giuliana has been in hospital where she has been treated for shock following a car accident and who now spends her vegetative life style with a factory engineer who does not understand her and with her young son for whom she cannot care properly. She is driven into the arms of a businessman, Corrado Zeller, who seems to be the only one who can see that the car accident was in actual fact a camouflaged attempt of suicide. The whole story takes place in the industrial areas around Ravenna.
Il Deserto Rosso portrays the late 50’s and early 60’s new wave of European films, where several conventions from the dominant American films dealing with the story line, characters and scenography were reversed. These new wave films not only had a limited plot but to a very large extent were womanfilms. That is to say they were designed as female portraits or were often stories told through women. Another difference from Hollywood films was that one started producing films on location rather than in the studio. Whereas before the setting in American films had served theatrically as background for people’s psychological development and the story line, film locations became characters in themselves.
Locations
The surroundings in which the new films took place were not just timely and broad markers in a narrative logic. On many occasions they took the leading part in them. In many films – and here Il Deserto Rosso is no exception – the point of the story simply seems to be that those environments that man has created – whether these happen to be town plans, parks, spaceships or industrial areas which at one time were supposed to guarantee that people had total control over nature, had ended up controlling man instead.
The interest for real film locations did not mean that one gave up scenography altogether. Existing locations still had to be prepared aesthetically in order to create the correct alienation effect. In Il Deserto Rosso Antonioni manipulated the film’s landscapes – the grey, geometrical industrial areas around Ravenna – by means of his famous use of colours. In the first scene’s foggy, smoggy landscapes you first of all meet the factory workers who, ”grey in grey”, are in harmony with the road, the sky and the industrial plants. Antonioni had created this uniform grey colour by painting grey directly on his sets. Giuliana is seen walking in this landscape wearing a bright green coat, holding her little son by the hand. It seems stange to see her in such a colourful coat and the distance this creates from her surroundings is, to a certain degree, an expression of her personal problems. However, the effect of a few highlighted sections in bright colours against the endless grey colour and a plain background, from the stifling yellow smog to a red outfit, continue throughout the whole film. It was Antonioni’s main intention to separate the screen into various coloured sections as if in a modern painting, so that the characters could be isolated on a constant basis in a two dimensional reality and, in this way, become more of a frame around their lives rather than a background.
The Women
Even though the landscape in many respects coordinates the characters in the film, there is no doubt whatsoever that Guiliana plays the leading role. New wave films were, as already mentioned, also ”girly films” even though they cannot be said to have been driven by any female political agitation. On the contrary, the women in these films - inveterate actresses such as Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina, not to mention Monica Vitti - were rather passive characters, at least in their outward appearance. The nature of their perfect elegance allowed a growing synthesis of nervous disorders and mental sensitivities - and they were content to be trapped in petty-bourgeois marriages to dynamic, insensitive husbands, who supported their wives but had no idea how to cope with their deeper longings and feelings. As time went by, feministic film critics felt compelled to accept that even though the European producers may have been important, epoch-making, female producers, these films continued to maintain ”a conventional male perspective on the female subject which identifies feminism with hysteria.” That is what Birgitta Steene, the feminist wrote about Ingmar Bergman and his closet play in 1979.
Even though the tendency to focus on stereotypes about female sensitivity and passivity in new film productions did not have any obvious political intent, the films were nevertheless meant to be critical. The current dialogues were an expression of the clash between the producers of new wave films and Hollywood producers. In Hollywood films the centre of focus was always those efficient, callous men who understood how to create a melodrama and seduce the public. Such films were edited in such a way as to maintain the story’s continuity and logic, a so-called seamless editing. Nothing should divert the attention of the public from the story. The film had to be a complete piece of architecture able to completely engross the public. Those female-based European more ”neuroaesthetic” films did quite the reverse. They were non-linear, outdistanced themselves and were extremely conscious of their structure. Almost static. The content was created by the structure. One was not concerned so much about luring the public into the story as by alienating them away from it. In the editing process one jumped in both time and space, made abrupt cuts; jump cuts, etc., with the result that the observer was forced to focus his attention on the film media and his perception of such.
Nerves
In other words, the seemingly weak women in new wave films possessed a metaphorical potential of extensive criticial and artistic dimensions. The women could be seen as an expression for a new film aesthetic and thus as the instructor’s ”alter ego”. At the same time they could also be seen as a symbol of the actual modern tradition that these films had sprung from. A modernism that had grown with the age of industrialisation and which was beginning to disappear in the 60’s. Antonioni’s beautiful neurotic Giuliana in those industrial landscapes was to a large degree a picture of that relationship. A close connecion between modern technique, nervous disorders and artistic practice was prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Artists and theorists from Baudelaire to Benjamin had described modern experiences as a neurological complex based on shock. Modern art practice was closely connected with the concept of shock – The Shock of the New. In his alienation theories, Marx described how the the factory system was harmful to human senses and paralysed the factory worker’s imaginative ability. In the 1800’s neurology was at long last recognised as a field of medicine.. Whereas neurology was trying to develop ”an-aesthetic” cures to remedy the overtaxed nervous system of modern man, sectors of the artistic society were trying to convert this new nervousness into aesthetic expressions.
Remediation
In Maria Finn’s remediation of ”The Red Desert” the film’s many critical ideas and meanings are rotated once again. She translates the work from film to pictorial art media, she removes the film aesthetically from a modernistic to a current frame and artistically from a male to a female perspective. At the same time the leading psychological motive is completely removed from the plot. Whereas Antonioni’s film takes place in a correlation between the film’s characters and their surroundings, the relationship between background and characters becomes further radicalized by Finn. People are no longer connected characters on a blurred background but simply empty figures in a detailed landscape.
Cecilie Høgsbro
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