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Carlo di Carlo could also be asked, he edited the published script of DESERTO ROSSO at the time, and previously in 1964 a 535 page book on MA, most recently in 2002 'Il Cinema di Michelangelo Antonioni'... Colour memory can be strange thing - just looking at those CC BR framegrabs of KES on Beaver, and thinking no way do I remember it looking like that when I saw it in the 1970s on 16mm, but then Loach & Menges, director and cameraman approved this new transfer...

Particle Zoo wrote:There’s this haunting dream like quality that infuses the film with a beautiful melancholy, ships sail by seen through improbable windows. Corrado and Giuliana try to make a meaningful connection but can’t, (I’ve had that dream, both asleep and wide awake). Ugo and his friends are slowly engulfed by a literal and metaphysical fog. Giuliana says: ‘I can’t look at the sea too long or I lose interest in what’s going on on land.’

While I continue to wrap my head around my first experiences with this (and L'eclisse), I do want to say that I share your enthusiasm for Red Desert and I desperately want to see it again soon. (Identification Of A Woman is up next). I think I dreamed about the Island/girl/story sequence last night, complete with the sweeping camera movements and the crystal clear nature, which shocked in comparison to the claustrophobic fog of the main part of the film. (I marvel again at what Antonioni does with rocks.) And wasn't Blow Up such a very different film just 2 years later?

I just got back from a 35mm screening of Red Desert at the Copenhagen Cinematheque. The copy had Swedish subtitles, and the color scheme was identical to the BFI blu-ray. I noticed that the it shifted from green'ish in some scenes to yellow'ish in others, so it definitely didn't have anything to do with wear. I guess it's up in the air if the somewhat radical scheme changes are what Antonioni intended as opposed to the other, more neutral print that Criterion supposedly used, but judging from this screening I would definitely bet that they were intended as they complement Giuliana's psychological state very much. It didn't look random, for sure. Just my two cents.

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We’ve been doing the film club for a year now, and although we’ve discussed lots of great films, this is the first one that I really love. Along with Dreyer, Antonioni is my favourite director, and this might be his best film (though it's hard to choose one single highlight from his 60s output).


Some questions, in case anyone wants them:

Antonioni originally planned to call this film Celeste e verde [Blue and Green – celeste is pale/light blue, or sky blue], which are the two colours Giuliana plans to use to decorate her ceramics shop. What would have been the significance of this title?

Why is the film called Il deserto rosso instead? What is the desert, and why is it red? Or, if this is too literal-minded, what is the phrase ‘red desert’ supposed to evoke?

Do particular colours have particular meanings or connotations attached to them in this film (e.g. yellow = poisonous; celeste and verde = neutral, non-disturbing), or can they signify different things at different times?

Why are all the objects in the title sequence out of focus? There are many points throughout the film when images become blurred. I don’t think Antonioni used this effect very often in his previous films, so why is it so prevalent here? Does it have something to do with the fact that he’s working in colour for the first time?

Giuliana’s relationship with her son is foregrounded at the beginning and end of the film. Why is it important? What do you make of Valerio’s feigned illness?

Why does Giuliana insist on buying the factory worker’s sandwich, rather than getting one of her own from the nearby café? Why does she need to be alone to eat it?

It’s tempting to try and diagnose Giuliana: what is the nature of her disorder (if that’s even the right word for it), what are its causes, and is it curable?

Modernity (in its mid-20th-century phase) seems to be part of the problem here – the ‘sunless, mechanised world...that is the real cause of her neurosis’, as Peter Goldfarb put it in a contemporary review in Film Quarterly. But what is it about this industrialised landscape that affects Giuliana’s mental health?

Both Ugo and Corrado seem to think that the best way to deal with Giuliana’s panic attacks is to try and have sex with her. Why? What is the film saying about sex in the modern world? Why does Corrado’s hotel room turn pink after he and Giuliana have sex? (It seems pretty clear that this is a rape scene, for all that it is shot and edited in an elliptical and ambivalent way. Men trying to have sex with unwilling women are a common sight in Antonioni's films, although usually the men give up and sulk, like Ugo at the start of Red Desert. There's a lot more to say about this issue, but I felt it was important to flag it up here.)

Does Giuliana’s neurosis stem from something more fundamental than ‘modernity’? Towards the end of the film she says, ‘There is something terrible in reality, but I don’t know what it is. Nobody tells me.’ Does the film tell us? And if it does, is it possible to verbalise or rationalise what it tells us – or is this ‘terrible thing’ communicable only through the juxtaposition of moving images (and sounds)?

What do you think of Monica Vitti’s performance? (I think it’s terrific.)

Sloper wrote:Why does Giuliana insist on buying the factory worker’s sandwich, rather than getting one of her own from the nearby café?

Well, she's sort of pushed into it by the striking workers who accuse her husband of being a poor father and provider (or something to that effect) over the bullhorn. So she scrambles to overcompensate into "providing" for her son via the most immediate method available to her. It's indicative of her poor capacity for parenting and her impulsiveness

As for the meaning of colors, my students and I recognized that "red" appeared every time Vitti was put into a situation in which she felt a heightened sense of alienation (or to signal that such a feeling was forthcoming). The desert is the most solitary of geographical fixtures and the perfect fit for the strange loneliness of alienation

domino harvey wrote:Well, she's sort of pushed into it by the striking workers who accuse her husband of being a poor father and provider (or something to that effect) over the bullhorn.

Interesting - so when the Union spokesman says to the strike-breaker, 'You are not a director - you are someone who works to feed his family', this resonates with Giuliana because her husband does belong to senior management. The Union leader means that ordinary workers have to worry about providing for the basic needs of their dependants, whereas wealthy directors do not - but for Giuliana, this triggers the reflection that her hyper-sophisticated lifestyle does not satisfy her most basic human needs. I've never fully understood the relevance of the strike sub-plot, but the line you refer to (and specifically the reference to food, left un-translated in both the Criterion and BFI editions) perhaps does suggest a connection here.

domino harvey wrote:So she scrambles to overcompensate into "providing" for her son via the most immediate method available to her. It's indicative of her poor capacity for parenting and her impulsiveness

Not sure I agree with this. She does offer the sandwich to Valerio, but primarily she seems to want it for herself. I think this is about wanting a connection with another person: sharing someone else's sandwich, and trying to share it with her son, rather than just buying a pre-packaged sandwich from the shop down the road.

As for 'poor capacity for parenting'...I guess she does leave her son behind while she runs off to eat the sandwich. Other than that, I don't see much evidence that the film judges her in the way you suggest here. Indeed, what makes the 'feigned illness' sequence so painful is that for a little while it gives Giuliana a space in which to care for and be needed by her son; but then it turns out that he was putting on an act, for reasons of his own that he refuses to share with her. The real problem in this relationship seems to be that Valerio has nothing to learn from his mother. He already has a far healthier and more mature relationship with modernity and technology than she does, and seems to bond easily with his father. Giuliana is left out in the cold in this family, and this is obvious from the first scene. After Valerio refuses the sandwich, he appears to make a conscious decision not to follow his mother. As he watches her walk away, you could interpret his expression as one of concern, pity or contempt - but ultimately, I think the face he pulls is suggestive of indifference. There's no sense that he wants or needs anything from her that she is failing to provide. She simply isn't that important to him.

domino harvey wrote:As for the meaning of colors, my students and I recognized that "red" appeared every time Vitti was put into a situation in which she felt a heightened sense of alienation (or to signal that such a feeling was forthcoming). The desert is the most solitary of geographical fixtures and the perfect fit for the strange loneliness of alienation

I think you're right that red sometimes signifies this: there's the red piece of fabric placed alongside Giuliana when she discusses her time in the clinic in Mario's apartment; the bright red of the radio telescope pylons in Medicina, memorably used as the backdrop to Giuliana's disingenuous claim to be 'very well' when Mario enquires about her health; red is very prominent in the bed-frame in Corrado's room at the end, especially in that chilling shot where Giuliana tries to escape his amorous clutches and the camera does a rapid pan along the metal bar she's clinging to; and it's the dominant colour at the start of the scene where she talks to the Turkish sailor.

But then there are quite a few scenes where a 'heightened sense of alienation' is not accompanied or signalled by this colour. For instance, near the start of the film when Giuliana wakes up in bed and takes her temperature, then writhes about on the landing, the most prominent colour here is a dark blue; and the sequence in the fog, when she almost drives into the water, follows on from the intensity of the 'red room' sequence, but I don't think the alienation here is associated with the colour red as such.

I would probably attach this colour to a sense of 'heightening', but not to 'alienation' in all circumstances. Just as celeste and verde are identified by Giuliana as 'cold' colours that won't disturb the objects in her shop, so rosso is in the opposite category. Antonioni talks about this in an interview (possibly the one with Godard in the Criterion booklet), where he observes that the workers in a factory whose interior had been painted red were at each other's throats within a few weeks, whereas when it was re-painted a pale green they were much calmer and happier. Red is a hot, exciting colour, which is why Max, the creepy lothario, has chosen it for the walls of his orgy chamber. Insofar as it has erotic connotations, there is definitely a link here with the film's larger discussion of alienation, but like all the colours in the film I think its significance is very fluid.

Just popping my head in to say I'll have this on netflix over the weekend and will be jumping in. Surely there are more with things to add!

Sloper wrote:We’ve been doing the film club for a year now, and although we’ve discussed lots of great films, this is the first one that I really love. Along with Dreyer, Antonioni is my favourite director, and this might be his best film (though it's hard to choose one single highlight from his 60s output).


Some questions, in case anyone wants them:

Antonioni originally planned to call this film Celeste e verde [Blue and Green – celeste is pale/light blue, or sky blue], which are the two colours Giuliana plans to use to decorate her ceramics shop. What would have been the significance of this title?

Why is the film called Il deserto rosso instead? What is the desert, and why is it red? Or, if this is too literal-minded, what is the phrase ‘red desert’ supposed to evoke?

Do particular colours have particular meanings or connotations attached to them in this film (e.g. yellow = poisonous; celeste and verde = neutral, non-disturbing), or can they signify different things at different times?

There's a scene early on, when she's first setting up her will-be shop, that Corrado asks her about the colors, and she mentions that they cannot clash. Red's complimentary color is green (which according to my artist/art-teacher wife means they do indeed "clash" which I didn't realize). To me, why is there a desert of red? While biologically I may be incorrect, I think it's fair to view desert's as dead and vacant. Green is the color of the earth and of life. So if the green is destroyed and overcome by industrialization and modernization, that leaves red with no compliment. Red, the color of fire and burning and scorched heat, is free to roam without being kept in check by the green. This has important implications for Giuliana, as the story she tells her son nears the end illustrates her association of earth, less disturbed by humans and certainly undisturbed by industrialization, is something (presumably) she misses. (The presumption being the link between the girl in the story and her).

Why are all the objects in the title sequence out of focus? There are many points throughout the film when images become blurred. I don’t think Antonioni used this effect very often in his previous films, so why is it so prevalent here? Does it have something to do with the fact that he’s working in colour for the first time?

Giuliana’s relationship with her son is foregrounded at the beginning and end of the film. Why is it important? What do you make of Valerio’s feigned illness?

To me these both have to do with the foundation of her world crumbling against her power. There is an uneasy dizziness to many of the scenes of the film. Point of views shift, and a scene which clearly features three characters comes to feature two. There are many with Giuliana, Corrado, and Ugo which do this. The scene in the house on the water seems to do this, too. Giuliana dizzingly moves between two men. Other women do it, too. Other men do it. Who is one loyal to in this situation? The overall issue is the instability of the world, exemplified by Corrado who continues to move around. Like the other Anotnioni films, there is certainly a resolution at the end of the film, but does it fix the fundamental issues that bring up the conflict? It seems that Giuliana is doing more of the same: moving around and adding things to her plate. More items. More work to do. More people to interact with. That seems to be her means of dealing with her issues she feels when alone. Unfortunately, there is no going back to the peace she felt before the machines and the streets and the industry came.

It’s tempting to try and diagnose Giuliana: what is the nature of her disorder (if that’s even the right word for it), what are its causes, and is it curable?

Modernity (in its mid-20th-century phase) seems to be part of the problem here – the ‘sunless, mechanised world...that is the real cause of her neurosis’, as Peter Goldfarb put it in a contemporary review in Film Quarterly. But what is it about this industrialised landscape that affects Giuliana’s mental health?

Both Ugo and Corrado seem to think that the best way to deal with Giuliana’s panic attacks is to try and have sex with her. Why? What is the film saying about sex in the modern world? Why does Corrado’s hotel room turn pink after he and Giuliana have sex? (It seems pretty clear that this is a rape scene, for all that it is shot and edited in an elliptical and ambivalent way. Men trying to have sex with unwilling women are a common sight in Antonioni's films, although usually the men give up and sulk, like Ugo at the start of Red Desert. There's a lot more to say about this issue, but I felt it was important to flag it up here.)

Does Giuliana’s neurosis stem from something more fundamental than ‘modernity’? Towards the end of the film she says, ‘There is something terrible in reality, but I don’t know what it is. Nobody tells me.’ Does the film tell us? And if it does, is it possible to verbalise or rationalise what it tells us – or is this ‘terrible thing’ communicable only through the juxtaposition of moving images (and sounds)?

What do you think of Monica Vitti’s performance? (I think it’s terrific.)

The film benefits a great deal from what is a pretty direct (and certainly prophetic) backdrop. Certainly the "alienation" theme that is always present inspired and foretold a great deal of conflict in the late 1960s across Western countries, but for him to use a slightly more specific device like industrialization and machines and pollution helped me understand this film in a way I haven't with other films.

I hate to sound like I'm minimizing the impact of this film on its fans, but if I could over-simplify it: Giuliana is the young girl in the story towards the end, that is told to her son. It represents the time in her life where modernity and industrialization began to trample the calm of nature. What was causing the "singing" she heard? "Everything. All the sounds." What does she constantly say she wants to bring with her if she runs away? "Everything." What causes her the most pain? Being alone.

And that boat. The boat with no people is important. Before that boat, it was regular, little sailboats with people she could identify. This one has nobody. The boat that has sailed across the world in the name of commerce has no face, it has no people, it has no soul. Her initial interaction with this industrial machine is totally faceless and mysterious. It doesn't have an immediate impact on her, but as her life goes on, she reaches a point where she is spending a great deal of time near ports and water, and the colossal ships that surround her disturb her. The sound of the foghorn and boats has replaced the "everything" singing of the shore and rocks and nature. Is the ending her attempt to face that fear? Almost joining one of those dreaded ships? Becoming one with it? A new nature? I'm not sure.

But the boat was the first sign of industrialization. And with a husband that profits off the destruction of the earth, and with her face to face with the pollution, how can she not feel that she is losing her grounding? That she is about to slip away? The earth she could once feel at peace with is now a threat. And of course, beyond a natural threat, the machinery and industrialization is helping to destroy man. To destroy the workers. The machines have come between the workers and a living. At the end, Corrado certainly notices it. The men he's about to send on a year-long trip in the name of extra profit are totally unaware of how alone they will be. They certainly don't give off a strong mental health look at this point. After a year of being denied most of the things they seem to want in their meeting (girls, calls with wives, etc.) what will become of them?

The exaggeration of Corrado and Ugo as oblivious men is surprisingly effective. The way the man in L'Avventura is more subtle, but here, the melodrama of Vitti's performance and her men's obliviousness seems to really help the film. She's having an existential crisis and even confesses a suicide attempt to Corrado, but what is their reaction? Totally blowing her off, asking her to calm down. And Antonioni gets excellent performances out of the characters to perfectly make us feel Guiliana's discomfort.

Red Desert is probably the Antonioni film that was clearest to me. I've seen La Camille..., Passenger, Blow-Up, and L'Avventura. I've seen the latter even on the big screen. I watched some of these films as I was getting into film, not really realizing what to look for in his films (only knew Blow-Up because of Hancock's soundtrack). Lord help me, I just don't seem to be into these films. And the first time I saw L'Avventura it blew me away, but upon re-watching, in a theater no less, I just was left cold. I don't know why. I have ADHD, and I'm sure there are dozens of films I've seen that maybe a little caffeine could help me pay better attention to. With this film, unlike the others, I found the beginning a bit hard to follow but the ending relatively easy. The film made sense to me, I think. (Did I "Get it" above?). Yet I'm cold, and left feeling little. Not unlike the way I feel about Bergman, Bresson, and Tarkovsky. That's okay I suppose. It leaves me with dozens of films to get into in the years to come. Setting the film against a context like industrialization of formerly natural landscapes helped me "get" the film a little better. But my love for Antonioni continues to wait.

(Sloper, you mention Dreyer, though, and he is indeed probably my favorite filmmaker! So it goes.)

Well what you say about the film certainly makes sense, so I'm sure you 'get' it, if such a thing is possible. I sometimes feel I'm no closer to being able to articulate what I think about this film, even after ten or more viewings...

Drucker wrote:To me these both have to do with the foundation of her world crumbling against her power. There is an uneasy dizziness to many of the scenes of the film. Point of views shift, and a scene which clearly features three characters comes to feature two. There are many with Giuliana, Corrado, and Ugo which do this. The scene in the house on the water seems to do this, too. Giuliana dizzingly moves between two men. Other women do it, too. Other men do it. Who is one loyal to in this situation? The overall issue is the instability of the world, exemplified by Corrado who continues to move around. Like the other Anotnioni films, there is certainly a resolution at the end of the film, but does it fix the fundamental issues that bring up the conflict? It seems that Giuliana is doing more of the same: moving around and adding things to her plate. More items. More work to do. More people to interact with. That seems to be her means of dealing with her issues she feels when alone. Unfortunately, there is no going back to the peace she felt before the machines and the streets and the industry came.

Yes, instability is a key issue here, and you’ve described very well some of the scenes that foreground the shifting relationships between people. L’avventura is Antonioni’s most overt exploration of this theme, but it pervades nearly all his work: that awe and terror in the face of mutability, especially when it comes to human affections, but also with regard to technology, industry, progress, an individual’s career, or simply (and most fundamentally) existence itself.

You’re absolutely right about Giuliana ‘adding things to her plate’, grasping at any chance of a connection – with any body or any thing – that presents itself to her, in the hope that she might eventually find something that doesn’t shift beneath her. Her abortive impulse to sail away at the end is the final expression of this, an echo of the earlier scene where she looks at the map and wonders whether there is somewhere in the world where she might feel safe and recover from that recurring sensation of drowning in quicksand. Perhaps there is solid ground in another country, another culture. But even then, she seemed aware that this was a fantasy, and that the instability plaguing her was too fundamental to be avoided simply by re-locating. In pragmatic terms, she needs to take the advice of her doctor and settle down: not by seeking and finding that solid ground that doesn’t exist, but by accepting her unstable environment, learning to avoid the pitfalls (the poisonous yellow smoke, whatever that stands for).

Drucker wrote:Giuliana is the young girl in the story towards the end, that is told to her son. It represents the time in her life where modernity and industrialization began to trample the calm of nature. What was causing the "singing" she heard? "Everything. All the sounds." What does she constantly say she wants to bring with her if she runs away? "Everything." What causes her the most pain? Being alone.

And that boat. The boat with no people is important. Before that boat, it was regular, little sailboats with people she could identify. This one has nobody. The boat that has sailed across the world in the name of commerce has no face, it has no people, it has no soul. Her initial interaction with this industrial machine is totally faceless and mysterious. It doesn't have an immediate impact on her, but as her life goes on, she reaches a point where she is spending a great deal of time near ports and water, and the colossal ships that surround her disturb her. The sound of the foghorn and boats has replaced the "everything" singing of the shore and rocks and nature. Is the ending her attempt to face that fear? Almost joining one of those dreaded ships? Becoming one with it? A new nature? I'm not sure.

But the boat was the first sign of industrialization. And with a husband that profits off the destruction of the earth, and with her face to face with the pollution, how can she not feel that she is losing her grounding? That she is about to slip away? The earth she could once feel at peace with is now a threat. And of course, beyond a natural threat, the machinery and industrialization is helping to destroy man. To destroy the workers. The machines have come between the workers and a living. At the end, Corrado certainly notices it. The men he's about to send on a year-long trip in the name of extra profit are totally unaware of how alone they will be. They certainly don't give off a strong mental health look at this point. After a year of being denied most of the things they seem to want in their meeting (girls, calls with wives, etc.) what will become of them?

Some really thought-provoking insights here – I need to do more thinking about the story Giuliana tells Valerio, so I’ll probably respond more fully another time.

One point I might dispute here: I’m not sure the phantom ship represents the first sign of industrialisation. Look at the other ships, the ones the girl is ‘used to’. They are coloured red and blue, exactly the same as the huge cargo ship Giuliana sees outside her window just after the story ends (and it’s a colour combination that occurs several times in the film). That transitional moment, where Giuliana stares hopelessly out at the harbour, supports your very astute reading of her identification with the girl in the story, the sense that she has lost that idyllic paradise, or that it represents an idealised alternative of her real environment. But the white-sailed ship seems to be the catalyst that awakens ‘everything’ and makes it sing; so I’m not sure that fits with the idea that it signifies encroaching modernity.

Three other points of interest in this sequence: it begins and ends with an out-of-focus shot, but otherwise every image (I think) remains in focus; the sand is pink (sabbia rosa), as are the rocks that are said to resemble human figures, in contrast to the deserto rosso of the title; and, staying on the subject of the ‘beautiful colours of nature’ that pervade this environment, notice how the gorgeous light blue (celeste again) of the sea transitions seamlessly into the pink sand on the beach, as the camera pans lovingly from one to the other...and compare this to the deliberate, harsh contrasts between the blocks of artificial colour in Giuliana’s world.

I purchased the Japanese blu-ray of Red Desert sourced from the recent 4K restoration. Here I've made some screenshot comparison with previous editions. I tried my best to match the few shots on DVDBeaver.

IVC


Criterion


BFI



IVC


Criterion


BFI


IVC


Criterion


BFI


more IVC screenshots

...

That's a beautiful picture quality for sure, but I think I prefer the color grading on the Criterion, at least judging from those samples.

The recent 4K restoration from 2017 premiered in Venice Classics the same year - details below... The restoration as supervised by Luciano Tovoli who shot CHUNG KUO CINA, THE PASSENGER & IL MISTERO DI OBERWALD with Antonioni...

Restauro realizzato in 4K a partire dai negativi scena e colonna messi a disposizione da RTI-Mediaset. La correzione del colore è stata supervisionata presso il laboratorio Fotocinema dal direttore della fotografia Luciano Tovoli al fine di restituire al film il cromatismo ed il tono fotografico voluti all'epoca da Michelangelo Antonioni e Carlo di Palma. L'acquisizione ed il restauro del suono sono stati realizzati presso il laboratorio del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale sotto la supervisione di Federico Savina.

Tovoli's track record in this respect is...

...well, let's just say I worked on Arrow's Deep Red and leave it discreetly at that.

Fair point... Anyway a couple of further glimpses of the work...

IL DESERTO ROSSO prima e dopo il restauro

"Il deserto rosso" restaurato tra i classici di Venezia 74

Just received the disc of the new resto from Japan...

It is in fact rather interesting, with a punctilious colour palette... I'll have to watch a few more times and compare with the BFI & Criterion versions (both now around ten years old) to be absolutely sure, although already it seems to be a quite consistent & fundamentally successful new 4K restoration by the CSC...

MichaelB wrote:Tovoli's track record in this respect is...

...well, let's just say I worked on Arrow's Deep Red and leave it discreetly at that.

I know that the original grading of the restoration was deemed at the time to be another one of Tovoli's Follies but now that we know better about this, how much of the issue was coming from him and how much was coming from the color signature of Ritrovata ?

I've seen the original grading in theater back in 2015 and it simply looked like any Ritrovata-graded restoration : dull contrast, veiled and colored blacks and a clear shift towards a yellow-greenish palette.

Didn't Arrow color-correct whatever was given to them for that title?

If anything the greys are slightly blueish here but all other colours are rendered sharp & true...

This is not a Ritrovata resto, rather the work of Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in 2017, a place where I am often to be found...

IL DESERTO ROSSO I'm taking about...

swo17 wrote:Didn't Arrow color-correct whatever was given to them for that title?

They did, but at the showing I attended, the DCP had the now-usual Ritrovata color signture (that Arrow indeed corrected for their release).

Over the last few years, I’ve written a scene-by-scene analysis of Red Desert (totalling around 150k words), and I’ve now started a Substack on which I’ll be posting this in 52 parts throughout 2025. I realise it’s a slightly odd (read: insane) thing to do, but at least it harms no one other than myself… And subscription is free.

One discovery I wanted to share here is a possible source for the film’s title. The phrase ‘the red desert’ occurs near the beginning of Max Frisch’s novel Homo Faber. A plane is crash-landing in a remote part of Mexico, and one of the passengers, Walter Faber, describes the view from the plane window: ‘In the distance the blue mountains. Sierra Madre Oriental. Below us the red desert.’ Towards the end of Red Desert we see the 1959 Italian edition of Homo Faber on Corrado’s bedside table, in which the final phrase of the passage just quoted reads, ‘il deserto rosso.’ (On the other bedside table is Italo Calvino’s The Watcher, which is also an important source text for this film.)

Walter Faber, like Corrado, is an industrialist preparing a major construction project in South America. He has a disturbing affair with a woman and is left questioning all his assumptions about reality and his place in the world. Without spoiling too much, there are lots of really interesting parallels between Frisch’s novel and Antonioni’s film, although the novel is well worth reading for its own sake. I say a few things about this in Part 2 of the blog series, and will do a deep dive on it in Part 44 when I get to Corrado's final scene.

I think this is an original discovery, but if anyone here has heard about it before please let me know…

This is actually no big secret...

For instance amongst MA's notes for DESERTO ROSSO @ Archivio Antonioni...

"Appunti sopralluoghi per 'Deserto rosso' " [1963 - 1964] - .... Nell'ultima pagina appunti su titoli di Max Frisch (Homo faber) e Calvino (La giornata di uno scrutatore)...

The genesis of the title is a more complicated with the reference you make only one potential element of input...

MA's copy of Homo Faber...

Homo faber : resoconto / Max Frisch
biblioteca
Milano : Feltrinelli, 1960
285 p. / 21 cm.

Thanks ellipsis, I hadn't found that - very interesting. But it looks like the notebook just lists those two books among other props used in the film. Have you come across any references to the specific detail of the 'red desert' in Homo Faber?

And I definitely agree that there is more going on in the phrase 'red desert' than an allusion to this novel! But I think the novel deals with many of the same themes as the film, and the connections between them are very rich and multi-dimensional.

Not specifically...

There's these further references to Frisch & Homo Faber...

Appunto per "Deserto rosso" e riflessioni incompiute su incesto in letteratura e sulla filosofia s.d..... -8D239b. Riflessione sulla propria indifferenza di fronte al tema dell'incesto in letteratura (con riferimenti a Homo faber di Max Frisch e a L'uomo senza qualità di Musil). Il brano è mutilo

Appunti per trattamento (forse "Deserto rosso") e riflessione su India e USA [1962 - 1964]... Dietro il primo c'è un brano incompleto con un riferimento bibliografico, F. 328 (il riferimento è stato completato con un'altra penna e trasformato in Frisch - 328. Probabilmente gli altri riferimenti con una "F." rimandano anch'essi a uno dei numerosi testi di Max Frisch presenti nella biblioteca di M.A.)

Riflessione sul finale dei propri film s.d... .A. riflette sul fatto che le vicende narrate nei suoi film non dovrebbero avere una conclusione netta, ma dovrebbero essere lasciate sospese, in modo da continuare ad essere interessanti. Il brano è probabilmente una bozza per 8D52, che sarebbe diventato parte di un racconto di Quel bowling sul Tevere
Frammento di pagina dattiloscritta con Olivetti, incollato su foglio A4. Sul lato sinistro sono presenti segnature a biro blu, pennarello fucsia, pennarello rosso e pennarello verde. Sul bordo superiore è stata manoscritta a biro nera una citazione da Max Frisch (cfr. 1A Libri 1101-1106): "Ogni cosa terminata cessa di essere domicilio del nostro spirito". "Pag. 71".

Note this latter reference does not cite DESERTO ROSSO specifically & could apply broadly to MA's filmmaking as well as particularly to one of the stories in his collection Quel Bowling sul Tevere as suggested...

BTW Volker Schlöndorff 's VOYAGER (1991), involving future MA collaborators Sam Shepard & Rudy Wurlitzer, is an actual screen adaptation of Max Frisch's Homo Faber...