1. "Monuments of modern civilization" are modern cities, and modern cities are not only the so-called "human containers", but also a spiritual desert created by civilization. This is the origin of the title "Red Desert".
2. Film is not an innate ability. Film is not an image that can be captured with a film camera. It is a language, a coded language. Every element that enters the picture: light. Colors, people and objects, from big to small, their mutual relationship, their arrangement, their relationship with the center and the edge of the frame will all become important elements of the film language.
Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert" is a very important film and a moment in film history. Calling "Red Desert" a moment in film history is because the public opinion in film history is that it is the first color film in the history of world cinema.
When I say in particular that it was the first film in color, it was not the first film in color in the sense of black-and-white and color film, but in this film, it can be said that there is almost no An element of color is incidentally introduced into the film as a natural property. All the colors that appear in the film, whether it is the environment, space, or the color elements of the characters, are all intentionally designed and constructed by the director Michelangelo Antonioni. To this end, he greatly intervened in the environment, or he constructed a "real environment" that he rewrote. In order to shoot this film, Michelangelo Antonioni rented a factory. The factory is still operating as usual, but at the same time as a shooting space, the film crew repainted the entire factory color before the film started, so the final film basically Consists of three basic tones - true red, bright yellow and sapphire blue, all of which are the fullest colors, and they filled this interior space with these three colors.
In fact, as the first color film in the history of world film, it is also an important material and teaching material for color psychology. Interestingly, one material shows that when Antonioni painted all the main workshop interior walls full of true red, three days after the color change of the interior walls of the factory, the fight rate of the factory increased by more than 40%. It proves that the color of the space environment has an extremely direct influence on people's psychology and interferes with people's emotions. At the same time, everyone noticed that he used sapphire blue a lot. The large pieces of sapphire blue and the sapphire blue factory pipes formed a strong color stimulus. In English, blue is also melancholy. In a completely blue environment, about a Very optimistic and healthy people will also get depressed mood, and if they are depressed, it may be fatal.
Antonioni transforms the entire environment with artificial colors in this film is not for a psychological experiment, not for the purpose of discussing the impact of color on human society. On the contrary, he used color elements to touch and present Antonioni's favorite theme again, which can also be said to be a social issue that has puzzled Antonioni all his life, about modern society, about the modern world, about the logic of modernism , about modern cities and people.
In Antonioni's cognition, but also in the cognition of the whole generation of great European thinkers and artists after the war, they are not believers in the logic of modernism, not human progress, and modern society is superior to pre-modern society. A believer who seems to be a natural judgment, they are all skeptics of modern civilization, and Antonioni should be said to be quite prominent among them, and even has a certain extreme and stubbornness. In his view, modern civilization has created a modern city. One of Antonioni's most beloved poems by Italian poets is "Man has created a monument of civilization." Here, "monument of civilization" refers to a modern city. Monuments outlive humans.
You can probably understand from this that World War II has just ended. Under such a crisis situation as nuclear war, arms race, and confrontation with the Cold War, a generation is very worried, and a generation shows a strong philosophical level under the heavy shadow. This spirit of inquiry, on the ideological level, on the artistic level.
"Monument of modern civilization" is a modern city, and a modern city is not only a so-called "human container", but also a spiritual desert created by civilization, which is the origin of the title "Red Desert". In Antonioni's view, one of the most basic features of the modern city is that it destroys nature as a whole, banishes nature as a whole, and fills it so densely and so full with artificial creations that Humans cannot breathe and live in it. He chose the three primary colors of red, blue and yellow as the base to paint the whole city, but there is no green.
But green exists, green is eye-catching, and that is the coat of the heroine Julianna. From the beginning of the story, in the large panoramic shot, a woman is walking slowly towards us with the child. Her whole body, her steps, and her expression all imply that she is a patient of some kind of psychosis. A deeply melancholy, alienated character who yearns for a little warmth to redeem herself but never finds it, and she wears a green coat. When answering the reporter's interview, Antonioni said directly that nature has been completely destroyed in the city. Under the circumstance that nature is already inferior to the decorative bonsai in the city, this woman put green on her body, It seems that she carries a kind of yearning about natural life, about a more reasonable life, about a more reasonable society. But obviously this layer of green can't protect her, and this layer of green can't provide her with spiritual support and comfort.
Antonioni is one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of 20th century film and the second half of the 20th century. His achievements in film history are shown in that almost every film he makes has a very unique aspect of film aesthetics, film poetics and film language. contribution. And in this film his experiment is color. Antonioni has always been such a director before. Every object, every prop, and every space environment that enters his footage cannot be natural, but he has intervened and rewritten it. At the most extreme, in order to show that the city as a modern desert, as a nature has disappeared, and nature is only a decorative text, all the trees in a park are cut down to make a movie. I often say that this is a very paradoxical situation, you have to accuse human beings of the invasion of nature, and in the end you have further invaded the remaining nature.
In this film, in addition to the three primary colors of red, blue and yellow, Antonioni also used a lot of white and ash caused by severe industrial pollution, which is the familiar fog like smog. And the factory space he chose is a smelter, and there is also a large number of chemical industries in it. In the film, the smoke from the chimney is yellow, and the space where the smoke diffuses is gray.
The large area of white is also a color element in this film. The hospital where Juliana went to see a doctor is white, and the hospital is of course a white space. Antonioni went to extremes to spray all the decorative green plants in the corner of the hospital. Do not let any natural green be revealed, and give this desert a feeling of hope, because the most important color meaning of green is hope, life and nature.
We have mentioned in many of the previous films that the art of film has always progressed with the advancement of technology, and that the art of film is constantly changing due to the intervention of new technologies, so the entry of color is also an important turning point in the history of film, and it is also a rupture moment. Once the film was black and white, the screen world was black and white. Great cinematographers and great film artists developed black and white tones and the infinitely rich gray tones between black and white into a set of film styling languages. They succeeded in creating narratives of light and shadow during the period of black and white films. So, at that time we can say without hesitation that film is an art of writing with light.
But when new technology appeared, when color film matured and people started to use color film, color was regarded as a natural attribute of the object being photographed, because our world, the vast world, is colored, and it seems very natural to have color. Another situation is that when color film was first obtained, people were messing with colors, when the actors were wearing colorful clothes, and the whole screen looked like a tropical parrot, like a macaw, it was just an extreme color contrast. It took quite a while before people realized that the colors in movies are never the result of natural attributes. The colors in movies are caused by being unified or not unified under a specific lighting effect and a specific tone. The incongruity between the colors and color blocks will become the language of the film, the meaning of the film and the story of the film.
But at this moment in film history we encountered in "Red Desert", Antonioni used color in the most extreme way as an artificial attribute, an ideographic element, as the most powerful and most powerful visual language of film. The whole structure of the impactful thing in the film reminds us that color is an important modeling language in the film language. It is bound to penetrate deeply into the story, and it even determines the tone of the story, the tone of the emotions, and the expression of the fate of the characters.
Back in the movies, red is used as a color of danger, warning, mania, violence, blue is used as a color of melancholy, and in European cultural traditions, yellow always means confusion, frenzy, betrayal, the most famous example is In The Last Supper, only Judas wears yellow, so the three colors carry some kind of negative or negative emotion or metaphor, and the space formed by these three colors is a modern industrial Space is also the space of modern civilization, and it is also the space in which the heroine is lost.
In fact, when we enter the story space, we will quickly realize a basic feature of the film, which is another moment in film history created by Antonioni, that there is no real thing in the film that can be called a plot or a clues to the story. Antonioni's films are known as plotless films, and his first plotless film was 1960's Adventures. When the film was released and caused a storm at major film festivals in Europe, journalists and critics made a somewhat exaggerated claim that the millennia-old Aristotelian plot rhythm had collapsed before us. His films are plotless films, and at the same time his films are very good at expressing inaction time, that is, time is not meaningful. He uses inaction time on the screen to express the sense of inaction of modern life. , completely unable to answer who I am, why I am here, and why I am doing this.
One of the most important cinematic grammars that form Antonioni's plotless films and meaningless time is used repeatedly in "Red Desert," where the camera begins in an empty scene, in an empty shot, and then the protagonist enters the painting, there are Dialogues take place, meaningless wandering appears, cameras follow, and long takes. But it's very interesting, often when the camera finally stops its movement and falls in a fixed scene, the character walks out of the frame, but after the character walks out of the frame, the camera still stays there, facing this empty The scene was delayed for a long time in the face of that desolate industrial space.
As we mentioned earlier, Antonioni is known as the founder of the plotless movie, and the film "Adventure", which represents the plotless movie, is also known as another moment in film history. That story opens with what we thought was the heroine's character missing, and then her friends go to find the missing person, and soon the missing person is completely forgotten, and a new love relationship begins among the searchers.
In connection with "Adventures", we will see that as a plotless film, the heroine of "Red Desert" has an emotional experience. As the wife of this giant factory owner, she has an affair. It looks like a typical movie story. But the affair was Antonioni, so accidental, so lacking in passion, and so unhappy in the end. Because we will clearly see that it is not so much the heroine Hong Xing goes out to find a life adventure, it is just the heroine desperately trying to find a little warmth in different types of interpersonal relationships, a little bit of human connection A real connection between people.
And this relationship obviously disappointed her extremely, and correspondingly, it is also a scene that I always admire every time I rewatch this movie is that after this relationship finally disappoints the heroine, there is one of her The scene in the corridor of the hospital, if you have seen it, you may remember that the neurotic heroine is also so tired and the heroine who almost wants to give up her life hides in a corner, and then her body keeps moving towards Leaning back, as if to hide himself in this corner.
Correspondingly, the camera continues to push forward, gradually from the mid-ground to the close-up, so a wonderful visual effect is formed. The heroine is leaning against an angle formed by two white walls. When it is pushed forward gradually, the visual recognition of the angle formed by the extremely scattered light and shadow disappears. In the viewing experience of the audience, it seems that the wall is unfolding in front of us, and the corner of the wall where the heroine tries to hide. Visually non-existent, she seems to be completely exposed to the space by the approaching camera once again. In my opinion, this is a very cinematic and very genius moment of the shot that visually presents to us the meaning of that so-called plot, the plotless, plot-less affair, and gives us a powerful visual interpretation of the film, although the unwary or lay audience may simply ignore this moment and simply fail to recognize such a moment of visual experience that is only possible in film.
The film starred Monica Vitti, who played Julianna. She was one of the most important actresses in the European film scene of that era. She was also Antonioni's patent actor. Most of the films in which she succeeded in portraying different versions of the modern man in Antonioni's style.
What is a modern man? In Antonioni's dictionary, in Antonioni's definition, modern man is someone who has lost the ability to love, who is no longer able to love. At the same time, they are also a group of people who have lost their mobility, which is called mental paralysis. They can't take forceful action, they can't take effective action, they can't forge genuine relationships between people, let alone intimacy, let alone kinship connections. Therefore, the modern desert is not only a remnant after human beings have destroyed nature, but also a desert in which everyone is like an orphan, and everyone is like an exile.
In Antonioni's sequence, that is, in the "modern man quartet" formed by "Adventures", "Night", "Eclipse" and "Red Desert", it becomes a one-person portrait by Mo Nika Witty's performance to successfully outline. It is very interesting that art films usually do not rely on or rely on the performance of the actors, because it does not have too much dramatic plot design, not too many moments to force the audience to identify, so Monica Vitti or The role of Juliana often appears in panoramas and large panoramas. She is often a very insignificant character in a huge modern industrial jungle or a modern desert. Needless to say, she controls her own destiny. She even touches the painting. The visual image of the box is not of sufficient scale or size.
But at the same time, in such a picture composed of long shots and big scenes, when an outstanding talented actor is in the middle, her performance is actually an extremely important force or an important element. In this film, Juliana's actor Monica Vitti's extremely accurate performance, not only with her expression, but also with her whole body, successfully deduces the neurotic personality of our time, or one of our times. a social mental illness. There's a moment in the film where Juliana has to paint her room in the house, so she's been experimenting with all kinds of colored paints, the whole wall is painted in different colors like a palette, and finally We know that she chose royal blue, a space filled with her melancholic emotions, and of course a space that will intensify her melancholia.
A lot of discussions refer to this scene because it appears to be a moment of everyday life where a wealthy, upper-class woman seems to be doing her own thing to paint her room, or at least choose a futuristic color for her room. This scene seems ordinary, and the reason why it is discussed repeatedly is because Antonioni himself clearly stated that Juliana's position at this moment is the director's position. He tried to use this scene to form a self-reference to the way he used color in the film, he reminded everyone that every director is also a painter, color is not a natural intervening element captured by the camera lens, but a selected , has been debugged, has been adjusted, with such an element of strong subjective color and subjective expression, so this passage is a kind of hallmark of Antonioni.
You may have heard that the one who likes to leave a mark in his films the most is Hitchcock, the Hollywood master. Sign your own video. And Antonioni's signature is that he places a self-referential moment in his films, like in Adventures where he uses a close-up: a chessboard with a hand swinging a piece on it, and then he puts the Small props that are not related to the chessboard are brought to the chessboard, and then taken out. The same Antonioni himself told us that it was a moment when he referred to himself and signed himself, he referred to the frame with the chess board, and he used the constant taking things in and out, rearranging the pieces rather than playing a part of the game. A hand, to refer to the process of a director using the frame to cut and select.
He told us very consciously that what entered the frame of the screen was not just a space naturally cut by the camera's viewfinder, but a space that was artificially constructed. A director is also a painter. The frame is the end point of the screen world and the start point of the screen world. When something is placed in the frame, it will inevitably form such a way of film language that we call composition. And Antonioni keeps reminding us that he is not only a film storyteller, but more importantly, he is a conscious user, builder and prompter of film language. He reminds us that film is not an innate ability, film is not an image that can be captured with a film camera, it is a language, a coded language, every element that enters the picture , light and color, people and objects, from big to small, their mutual relationship, their arrangement, their relationship with the center and edge of the frame will all become important elements of the film language. Movies are, after all, stories told through pictures.
Regarding the director Michelangelo Antonioni, I must tell you that this is one of my most beloved directors and the first film master in the master study that I opened at the film school. This director is also a late bloomer. , also a director who has moved from documentary to feature film. It was his long documentary career that formed the inner poetry of the peculiar documentary-like long shots in his subsequent feature films. In fact, this figure has a close connection with contemporary Chinese history, which is also the most dramatic part of his life as an artist. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, he was commissioned by Italian TV and the Italian Communist Party to come to Red China. Shooting documentaries and promoting red China to the world.
At that time, he received the highest reception at the state level, and the state provided him with various facilities to shoot a documentary called "China". Then the documentary was filmed, and finally it became a full-length documentary with two versions of eight hours and ten hours. Antonioni was very happy that his documentary was thanked and recognized, just as the documentary was about to be released around the world, when the People's Daily published a feature article titled "Anti-China Clown Michelangelo Antonioni", and then His film and whether it was released constituted an international political event in that particular era. I still remember the internal reference film "China" I watched in my youth, and the criticism of "Anti-China Clown Antonioni" that I read and participated in.
Such a historic misreading—that he was ultimately identified as a political enemy for his zealous promotion of Red China—in fact greatly affected Antonioni’s creative career and his subsequent business cards. , and also the shooting of one of my favorite Antonioni films, Zoom. In this film, he cuts into a crime with a journalist in the wrong place at the wrong time to take the wrong photo, while creating a cinematic or visual theme called "" We are always looking, we may not necessarily see." We are always watching, and what we think we are seeing is often just an illusion brought about by prejudice and convention. Since then this theme has been extended in almost all of his later films, about witnessing, about the unreliability of witnesses, about seeing and not seeing Not true.
Antonioni has always been a sharp critic of modern civilization and modern capitalism, but this incident has caused a deep wound or a deep confusion in his heart. Today we are going to watch Antonioni's long-length film about China. In fact, we will encounter a precious visual document again with some kind of surprise, about that particular era, about that particular history, about that particular The faces of the Chinese people in the era and the specific history, the Chinese people's bodies, the social spaces and social scenes that the Chinese people once had.
This is a historical anecdote that I want to share with you, and it is also a historical anecdote that allows us to grasp how the history of Europe and China, which were still very far away at the time, were connected in a strange way, and in a strange cinematic way. connected. It is also such a historical anecdote, or a story that sounds like a historical legend today, reminding us that Antonioni has a profound vision for modern society, between individuals and history in a highly developed modern civilization, and social space. How reflection, or audiovisual reflection, is structured and presented in a unique, highly personal way in each film.
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