“Nature had such beautiful colors and there was no noise.”

—Michelangelo Antonioni, Red Desert

If the purpose of a film is to absorb more than the frames that move before us, directors must offer both tangibility and equivocality to their audience. In other words, something rooted in the literal reality of the visual and sonic experience, but also something transcendent of that which we can grasp onto historically, culturally, or personally. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Red Desert achieves this to great effect, harmonizing its sound design to the tune of the broader intended message. More specifically, by referring to the ‘equivocality’ of noise in his work, I do not mean an ambiguity, but rather a coherency in its ambivalence because Antonioni intentionally constructs the concept in such a way that we can derive multiple interpretations that are still all interconnected. This article discusses the way in which I absorbed Red Desert.

Red Desert takes place in postwar Ravenna, Italy, an environment of rubble, dirt, and austerity where something as mundane as a sandwich is shown to be a great luxury. Straight away, noise permeates the film. Heavy, screeching machinery cuts across the high-pitched notes of a woman singing during the opening credits. Fumes burst visually, sonically, but also methodically, as they mirror the march of soldiers. The constant non-diegetic electronic score, incredibly unsettling in its distortion, adds to the bizarre atmosphere. In essence, Antonioni composes an overlapping rhythm where the machines become the inhabitants and the inhabitants become the machines. It is from this blending of noise that the foundations of his commentary are set in stone; industrial capitalism is not only a major economic development of the particular epoch, but also a phenomenon with implications on social relations.

The film’s protagonist, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), recently home from a mental institution, enters wearing a green coat that rebels against the bleached, industrial wasteland. As she traverses through the borderline apocalyptic space with her young son, the harsh conditions hammer home to the audience that this is no place to raise a healthy family. Moreover, technology and noise are deeply ingrained in the setting, even invading the domestic sphere which we would otherwise assume to be a place of refuge. A dishevelled Giuliana is restless and disturbed at night by the noise of her child’s toy robot moving repeatedly against a wall, but even when she switches it off, noise persists. Symbolically, it is a noise of social alienation and loneliness that Giuliana tries to remedy throughout the film, but is ultimately unable to.

 Giuliana is stuck in a detached marriage with her husband, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), who is more concerned with climbing up the economic ladder than tending to his wife. Therefore, it is the third character,  Corrado (Richard Harris), who allows us to diagnose and disentangle Giuliana’s issues. In her video essay, ‘THE SOUND OF LONELINESS,’ Iva Gavrilovic pinpoints a specific scene where Ugo and Corrado marvel at a dangerous gas storm which Gavrilovic argues to also be an abstraction of Giuliana’s troubled and clouded mental state. I believe we can go even further with this metaphor. On a tangible level, Ugo and Corrado are observing and trying to rationally explain something foggy that clouds over them. Yet, beyond that, it also comes to foreshadow Corrado’s flawed attempt to dissipate Giuliana’s mental fog through seduction. Indeed, Antonioni dismisses the traditionalist notion of male chivalric healing: that a woman can be ‘saved’ through intimacy. The result is a mature depiction of mental illness as a genuinely serious issue that cannot simply be solved by a ‘knight in shining armor’. Even when she is with company, Giuliana remains focused on finding the noise which seems to be her only raison d’être, or reason for existence.

Whilst the birds at the end of the film have together learnt how to avoid the malignant fumes of human behavior, Giuliana’s wings have been irreversibly clipped by the alienating and toxic environment she is immersed in. 

In a world where her cold husband neglects her, her son lies about being paralysed, and a friend who seemed to be the only one to understand her physically takes advantage of her, Giuliana is left betrayed and helpless. Within this self-centred milieu where individuals seek monetary or personal gain, separate bodies have separate feelings; “If you prick me, you don’t suffer.”

In maneuvering audiences through the sensory experience of cinema, Antonioni’s powerful sound design is richly multidimensional and becomes more than merely noise. It is the sound of a hellish arena of ruthless industrial capitalism. It is the sound of a wife’s ghoulish solitude in an unfulfilling marriage. It is the sound of a world slowly signing its own death warrant. Simply put, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert is the genius of an auteur who knows how to convey intricate yet clear-cut commentary through film as an art form. Listen, and you just might hear something.