Transcendental Phenomenology and Antonioni’s Red Desert
This essay applies the ideas associated with transcendental phenomenology to the Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Il deserto rosso, known in English as Red Desert. Aspects of western philosophy can provide a viewer with a greater appreciation of the film and its meanings. After providing a brief overview of the development of phenomenological thinking and of past interpretations of Red Desert, this essay will provide an analysis and interpretation of the film’s cinematography –specifically its colours and editing– from a phenomenological point of view. Phenomenology maintains that experience is both passive –seeing, hearing, and so on– and active –walking, running, touching, and so on. One describes experience and interprets experience by relating it to a context, which is usually social or linguistic. The word phenomenology originates with the Greek word phainomenon, which means ‘appearance.’ Phenomenology is, then, the study of appearances rather than the study of reality. In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte began to seriously consider phenomenology as a theory of appearances, and to consider it essential to acquiring knowledge. Phenomenology has its origins, certainly, with debates regarding what exists in reality and what is an illusion. John Locke believed that qualities such as colors, sounds, smells, and so on were subjective, and were not indigenous to objects that produced those qualities. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stated that nothing in the world was entirely real save the whole of the world. According to Hegel, the world was not a collection of small things, but a large organism. To perceive a single part of the world, then, was to perceive something that was not real (Russell, 1972, pp. 712-713, 731). The form of phenomenological thinking to be used in this paper was proposed by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s phenomenology combined phenomenological thinking with Kant’s notion of transcendental idealism. Transcendental idealism, according to Kant, maintains that space and time are neither tangible things nor relationships between things, but forms of intuition by which one perceives things. One constructs knowledge, therefore, through sense impressions. One experiences the world through the constructs of space and time. Husserl adopted Kant’s transcendental idealism and applied it to his own phenomenological thinking: Husserl maintained that reality did not exist beyond the phenomena that one perceived. According to Husserl (1931), the physical world and one’s existence in the physical world were not exclusive, and perceiving the world constituted being in the world (p. 51). In other words, one’s experience of a particular colour exists whether or not the colour exists. Colour is central to a phenomenological interpretation of Red Desert, as well as to the historiography of research and interpretation of the film. In reviewing the literature on the interpretation of colour in painting, film and so on, two schools of thinking emerge. The first school approaches colour from the point of view of science. According to colour science, all colour is reflected light: colourless rays of light stimulate the retinas of the eyes, the information travels from the eyes through the nervous system, and finally registers as a certain colour in the brain. The second school approaches colour from a phenomenological point of view. According to phenomenology, colours adumbrate themselves. The constitution of an object is predicated on its adumbrations: different colours can appear the same from a certain point of view and a single colour can appear as different colours from different points of view (Junichi, 2005, pp. 1-2). The historiography of research into Antonioni and the 1964 film reveals two major contributions from scholars: formal colour analyses and interpretations of Antonioni’s use of colour. For the film’s production, Antonioni had arranged for locations, rooms, and even a forest to be painted, as he believed that film-processing labs could not adequately fix the colours in postproduction. Therefore, the precise use of colour was intentional. Chatman (1985) has noted that while films shot in Technicolor in the early 1960s tended to saturate the screen with colour, Antonioni mixed this saturation with muted, flat images (p. 131). The result was a “subtle alternation between colour intensity and reticence (Chatman, 1985, p. 132)” in that the red walls of the shack contrasted against the gray of the film’s backgrounds, the white walls of the hotel aisle contrasted with the pink walls of the hotel room, and so on (Chatman, 1985, p. 132; Coates, 2008, p. 13). Chatman (2007) also compared Antonioni’s frames to the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and of the Abstract Expressionists, though his was a comparison of formal elements (p. 85). Coates (2008) writes that historically, film viewers have a tendency to form a binary opposition between monochrome and polychrome, and Red Desert responds to this tendency by blurring the opposition. It does this by pairing a primary color with color schemes that privilege monochrome (p. 3). The same scholars have also attributed social meanings to Antonioni’s use of colour. Antonioni believed that filmmaking had not progressed technically or narratively since the silent era, and in December of 1942 wrote that “…art was no longer concerned with the representation of an inner world…and when people are content to retrace already beaten paths…then that art is finished (Antonioni, 2009, pp. 111-112).” With Antonioni’s statement in mind, scholars tend to focus on the film’s portrayal of the body’s interaction with its environment, and state that the use of colour indicates the characters’ uneasiness with industrialization, pollution, and the like (Chatman, 2007, p. 85; Coates, 2008, p. 10). What these interpretations suggest –but do not explicitly explore– is how the characters in Red Desert experience the colours with which they are presented. Lucja Demby wrote that Giuliana, the film’s protagonist, “sees the world as colored blotches that do not add up to a whole (Coates, 2008, p. 12).” She suggests that what Giuliana sees is the same abstracted landscapes that the film’s viewer sees, and that the film’s environments serve as a description of Giuliana’s experience of their appearance. This interpretation remains closer to Husserl’s phenomenological description of the world than to an interpretation that contextualizes the world within social attributes. In June 1940, Antonioni wrote a discussion of Hegel’s aesthetic theories in Corriere padano, stating that filmmaking represented the external appearances of nature, and not nature itself: “the reader is to understand by this the mode of appearance, not of materiality (Antonioni, 2009, p. 113).” This writing seems to suggest phenomenological thinking. Red Desert’s setting is highly conducive to such thinking. The film takes place in an industrial and port town outside of Ravenna. The protagonist, Giuliana, is married to Ugo, who is an executive at the refinery. Corrado travels to the refinery in search of labourers to accompany him on a business trip to South America. The film’s storyline is superfluous, and is comprised primarily of the characters standing, walking through, and looking at the interiors of buildings and industrial environments. The characters experience the environments both passively and actively, and the film language used by Antonioni extrapolates their experience. The film extrapolates Giuliana’s experience of the world as a phenomenon. One of the earliest scenes in the film contains a shot of Giuliana standing off the side of a road, wearing a bright green coat, and staring off-camera. The next shot is what she sees: a landscape of debris and industrial waste. The debris is entirely of a single colour: charcoal. The film emphasizes the monochromatic colour, implying at once the arbitrariness of colour and that what Giuliana perceives is not the world but the appearance of the world. If one applies Husserl’s thinking to his scene, the landscape of debris and Giuliana’s existence in that landscape are not exclusive. Her perception of the landscape constitutes her being in the landscape (Husserl, 1931, p. 51). A scene taking place in an apartment draws the viewer’s attention to the arbitrariness of Giuliana’s perception. The scene begins with a shot of the back of Giuliana’s head has she takes her coat off. In the background, an unidentified figure moves behind a blurred glass door. The next shot is a close-up of Corrado’s hands holding a photograph. The following shot portrays Giuliana with her coat all the way off and sitting down. The staccato editing of the shot of the figure behind the door with the shot of the photograph implies that what is onscreen is what Giuliana perceives. However, an obstructed figure and a photograph are both impressions of objects, rather than onscreen objects themselves. The world provides Giuliana in that moment the appearance of objects rather than the actual objects as Antonioni provides the viewer with the same. The film uses focus in order to produce the effect of the environment encompassing the figures. One can interpret this technique, which is repeated throughout the film, from a phenomenological point of view in that the use of focus places human beings in the world. Three shots draw the viewer’s attention to this technique, all of which contain objects in the foreground that are out of focus. These objects are all also of a colour that contrasts with the background. During the scene where Giuliana and Corrado walk away from the apartment building, three pink flowers are out of focus in the foreground (fig. 1). These flowers contrast with the white and black exterior walls of the building. During a scene where Guiliana and Corrado walk along a large array of towers, a portion of a one of the towers is out of focus in the foreground. The portion of the tower is a dark red, which contrasts with the brown and gray of the landscape. During a scene where Giuliana walks past a large, docked red ship, several pieces of detritus –particularly a set of charcoal-colored pipes– are out of focus in the foreground. There is no audible dialogue in any of these shots, only figures that engage in active experience of the world –specifically, walking to and from places. The film uses focus together with a reoccurring image of the back of Giuliana’s head to suggest her experience of the world. There are six shots in the film of the back of Giuliana’s head set against an out-of-focus background: the first is where she walks into frame wearing a green coat past a group of refinery labourers, the second is where she looks at a fruit vendor who is dressed entirely in gray, the third is where she rises up into frame and looks at the group of people in the red room of Ugo’s shack, the fourth is where she lies on Corrado’s bed and stares at a purple ceiling, the fifth is where she sits up from the bed and sits in front of a red and purple background, and the sixth is where she is about to leave the factory engulfed in yellow smoke. The repeated image of the back of Giuliana’s head together with the emphasis on arbitrary colours suggests that the abstracted images she sees are the appearance of objects and not the objects themselves. The film uses camera movement to suggest Giuliana’s altered experience of the world. Nearly every shot of Giuliana in the film is either static or contains a pan. There are only two shots of Giuliana where the camera moves on a dolly. Both dolly movements imply Giuliana’s altered perception of the world. The first dolly is early in the film, where Giuliana walks through a refinery in search of Ugo. She stops briefly, a gust of air blows her hair up, she looks off camera to the left of the frame, and walks toward Ugo and Corrado. It is in this scene where she first meets Corrado, and the dolly movement eventually reveals Corrado. The dolly movement reflects Giuliana’s experience in that moment in that she perceives a new person in the world. The second dolly is during the scene taking place in Ugo’s shack, where Giuliana eats bird’s eggs that are believed to act as an aphrodisiac. Giuliana stands inside the shack, looks off camera, and smothers the back of her head with hands (fig. 2). While this happens, the camera dollys to the viewer’s left. The dolly movement reflects Giuliana’s experience in that moment in that she briefly perceives the world differently, presumably under the influence of an aphrodisiac. Antonioni seems to associate colour with other physical sensations experienced by being in and part of the world –particularly boredom and sexual desire. Colour reflects the sensation of boredom when Giuliana tells Corrado midway through the film: “I can’t look at the sea for long, or I lose interest in what’s happening on the land.” Later, Giuliana narrates a story of a girl on a beach while viewer sees the blue of the sky and the ocean. In addition to its use of colour, this sequence brings the difference between film language and literary language to the fore, yet also draws the viewer’s attention to how the viewer perceives appearances and generates appearances in his or her mind. Colour reflects the sensation of sexual desire when Giuliana visits Corrado’s hotel room. After the couple engages in sex, the room’s walls and furniture physically change to a light pink. The insistence that what Giuliana perceives in Red Desert are not real things but only the appearances of real things originates in Hegel as well as Husserl (Russell, 1972, p. 731). The ideas associated with Hegel and Husserl’s phenomenology can provide a viewer with a greater appreciation of Antonioni’s film as an example of a particular medium and as a tactile experience. The viewer experiences the appearances of objects and environments in the film through its use of colour. Antonioni, however, insists that these appearances are arbitrary by using colour in an experimental manner. An interpretation of the film’s use of colour, focus, and editing from a phenomenological point of view assists, therefore, in understanding the arbitrariness of appearances both in reality and in film media.

Figure 1 Figure 2

Reference:
Antonioni, M. (2009). On color. October 128, 111-120.
Chatman, S. (1985). Antonioni. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chatman, S. (2007). End of story. Artforum 46(3), 85-86.
Coates, P. (2008). On the dialectics of filmic colors (in general) and red (in particular). Film Criticism 32(3), 2-23.
Husserl, E. & Boyce Gibson, W.R. (Ed.)(1931). Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology. New York: MacMillan.
Junichi, M. (2005). Space and color: Toward an ecological phenomenology. Continental Philosophy Review 38(1-2), 1-17.
Russell, B. (1972). The history of western philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster.