522 Red Desert

[therewillbeblus]

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.

This has been one of the great pleasures of 2025, an otherwise dismal year. I've looked forward to a consistent Saturday morning ritual of reading your weekly substack, and it's never fallen short of being insightful and relatable to me in just about every way. Thank you so much for your hard work, Sloper. I hope that you cue us in to anything you might work on in the future - 2026 will be lacking something very special. Cheers to you!

Anyone who enjoys this movie and hasn't read this yet, don't sleep on it. I envy you for being able to go through it for the first time.

[domino harvey]

Props to Sloper on keeping it going all year! Maybe with some small edits for internet formatting/features you could get it collected and printed?

[Sloper]

If anyone would like to browse the series rather than trying to read the whole thing, I’ve updated the Table of Contents post with brief summaries.

This has been one of the great pleasures of 2025, an otherwise dismal year. I've looked forward to a consistent Saturday morning ritual of reading your weekly substack, and it's never fallen short of being insightful and relatable to me in just about every way. Thank you so much for your hard work, Sloper. I hope that you cue us in to anything you might work on in the future - 2026 will be lacking something very special. Cheers to you!

Thank you, TWBB. The blog has accrued 129 subscribers and just under 8500 post views across this whole year, so it has a very small audience – but it means so much to know that you, and a few others, have read and enjoyed it. So again, thank you for reading. I'm sorry you've had a bad year, and am glad that my relentlessly depressing analysis of Red Desert brought some comfort!

Maybe with some small edits for internet formatting/features you could get it collected and printed?

That's a good suggestion. However, the full series ended up being 266,000 words long, plus 18,000 words of footnotes and about 2800 screencaps. Besides the work required to hack this down to a reasonable length, I would also need to add various things that would make it viable as an academic book: a proper intro, methodology, theory, etc...all things I used to struggle with when I was a failing academic and am glad not to have to worry about anymore.

The truth is that it’s too dry and detailed to be an entertaining blog (except to strange people like me and TWBB, no offence), but it also lacks the academic rigour of peer-reviewed research. I’ve written exactly what I wanted to and am very proud of it – but it was always destined to be an eccentric oddity with a very small audience.

I’ve reached out to nearly all the (living) Antonioni scholars cited in the blog, and many of them have been kind enough to respond with some positive feedback. My hope is that it might get shared around the academic community and suggest avenues for future research. And a few other random Antonioni fans have also let me know they’ve been following along – one is currently in Ravenna on a Red Desert pilgrimage, and gleaned some useful information from the blog.