Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni'sRed Desert

Abstract

The cinematic landscape provides a rich opportunity to explore cultural representations of place, space and nature. This essay focuses on the depiction of landscape in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964). Previous approaches to the critical interpretation of landscape in the cinema of Antonioni have been characterized by three principal weaknesses: a narrow emphasis on formalist and auterist lines of influence between different branches of the visual arts; an attachment to exceptionalist characterizations of the Italian cinematic landscape; and a transhistorical interpretation of existential themes such as alienation. In this essay we shall consider two neglected themes: the significance of the technological sublime for the aesthetic experience of industrial landscapes; and the impact of abstract expressionism on Antonioni's cinematic vision. We will counter simplistic categorizations of Antonioni's work by considering the complexity of the relationship between the cinematic landscape and wider developments in twentieth-century modernism. The essay concludes by locating Red Desert at a unique juncture in the development of modernist conceptions of nature and landscape. key words landscape cinema modernity Italy Michelangelo Antonioni

Media Geographies: Uncovering the Spatial Politics of Images

“…Hall 1997). Gandy (2003) recently implies this with the caveat, ‘Though our focus is on the representation of space in film, it is important to recognize that film encodes its own spatialities of production and consumption . .…”

“…Our intellectual task can be likened to the ‘appropriation of geography in history’ through an interdisciplinary and intertextual exploration of the relationship between cinematic topographies and the evolution of visual cultures. (Gandy 2003, 219)…”

“…Likewise, Gandy has recently utilized the notion of landscape as text in his study of the complex and ambivalent modernization and industrialization of Italian society through filmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni's, Red Desert . Through Red Desert Antonioni effectively captures and represents what he sees as Italy's somewhat Faustian negotiations with modernity: ‘The eerie landscape, where there is scarcely a sound of bird song, is a necessary exchange for the technological dynamism and prosperity of modern Italy’ (Gandy 2003, 222).…”

Unintentional landscapes

“…Ugly as it was, it had something compelling about it -a strange, fallen beauty that held one's gaze in spite of one 's horror. (p. 185) For these spent landscapes, there is a distinctive chromatic dimension that is reflected in cinematic encounters such as the industrial wastelands of Ravenna in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) or the outskirts of Tallinn in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1978) (see Gandy, 2003). The aesthetics of toxicity range from iridescent puddles of oily water and vivid fragments of plastic to clumps of rust-coloured vegetation that can withstand high levels of soil contamination.…”

Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema

“…In geography, Denis Cosgrove's (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape , which had a narrow focus on class relations, inspired subsequent work on visual culture from postcolonial and feminist perspectives as well as distinct geographical approaches to cinematic landscapes. For work specifically on landscape and cinema, see for example Aitken and Zonn (), Caprotti (), Gandy (), Harper and Rayner (), Lefebvre (), Lukinbeal (), Pidduck () and Rose (), as well as interdisciplinary spatial approaches to cinema such as Corbin (), Doel and Clarke (), Olund (), Rhodes and Gorfinkel (), Shiel () and Andersson and Webb ().…”