After nature: Red Desert on DVD

Red Desert (1964) opens with images of industrial architecture, immense pipes and strange towers seen from some distance in rack focus, rendered as ghostly, uninhabitable monuments, as though our eyes need adjust to these unprecedented apparitions of a new kind of landscape. Our visual lives were already inundated with the products of such places, but Red Desert lingers at the source of these products. The film’s setting changes with each sequence, yet the striking palate modulates only slightly. Collaborating with cinematographer Carlo di Palma, director Michelangelo Antonioni introduced colour into his work with this film, and it’s as though he strove to introduce each one at a time. If Red Desert still arrests us through its use of colour and design alone, it may be because each and every shape and colour is photographed as though only just discovered. Our world has changed, this film tells us, and the change is total.

Guiliana (Monica Vitti) enters this landscape with her son Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi) in fuzzy green and orange coats, colours so vivid they seem otherworldly here. Giuliana herself seems transported from another, very different place, still reeling from the taxing journey. Who is this woman? She seems well-to-do, vaguely resembles a young Barbara Streisand, yet she approaches a stranger lunching near the site of a strike and pleads with him to buy his already half-eaten sandwich. She then scurries off to consume the sandwich ravenously, and in private. As we get to know and try to make sense of such behaviour, we might surmise that her desire for the sandwich derives from some displaced urge for human contact, yet her need to eat it unseen reveals an inability to follow-through with this puzzling attempt at intimacy. It all seems very peculiar, but here’s the catch: neurotic as she appears, Giuliana is perhaps the most normal person in Red Desert.

Giuliana’s husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) works for the company who erected those spectral chemical plants. Compared to his wife Ugo seems perfectly amiable, socially adept. When he smiles he looks like Steve Buscemi. He expresses concern for Giuliana, who has recently survived an auto accident, yet he seems incapable of dealing with her hysteria. He clumsily attempts to seduce her to no effect. Along comes Corrado (Richard Harris), a fellow industrialist consulting Ugo in his search for workers to take to Patagonia. Corrado is undergoing his own existential crisis and seems drawn to Giuliana. He tells her he keeps moving around, that he feels out of place everywhere he goes. He’s embodied, rather fittingly, by an Irish actor, though he’s meant to be Italian. Does he really relate to her? Or does he simply find her vulnerability appealing, perhaps erotically inviting? He speaks as though trying to comfort her yet too often just sounds condescending and pompous. Among the most fascinating elements in Red Desert is Giuliana’s slow emergence as its most powerful character. She may be paranoid and neurotic, almost childlike in Vitti’s timid, occasionally playful performance, but where Corrado waxes philosophical and romanticizes his search for meaning, it’s Giuliana who genuinely searches, urgently scouring the desert-like world of Red Desert for some place where she won’t feel so hopelessly ungrounded, unmoored as the cargo ships that continually slide into frame, and haunted by the electronic drones that permeate the soundtrack.

Red Desert is a film in which landscape possesses an overwhelming influence on the human psyche (and vice versa). Its images of environmental devastation are not to be taken as lament—they’re far too aesthetically charged, drawing upon the work of contemporaneous painters such as Morandi, Pollock, and Rothko. This wintry post-natural world is in one sense observed objectively, without sentiment. How its landscape effects the characters, or rather, how it’s already effected the characters, most of whom, like Ugo or Valerio, are by now fully assimilated, is the essential subject. Red Desert capitalizes on the sense of modern alienation and bourgeois repression cultivated in Antonioni’s preceding trilogy of L’avventura (60), La notte (61) and L’eclisse (62). This lineage is most apparent in the famous sequence where Giuliana, Ugo, Corrado, and three others partake in a failed orgy in a seaside hut. One of the women tears apart the bright red walls of the hut for firewood—a gesture that might also be a small homage to Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (62), which also satirizes bourgeois manners. Yet this film takes a bold step forward, advancing on Antonioni’s established themes and style, not only in its distinctive audiovisual design, which looks forward to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (76) or the ecologically-themed photography of Edward Burtynsky, amongst many other important works of art, but also in its almost perverse pushing of the boundaries of drama—Red Desert is endlessly fascinating, richly detailed, mysterious, and hypnotic, but it would be misleading to call it in any sense entertaining.

Criterion’s new release of Red Desert on DVD and Blu-ray is itself a strange and beautiful object, designed to highlight the film’s most chilling and engaging images and garnished with supplements that offer plentiful insights into the making and reception of the film while, wisely, never going so far as to pretend there could be anything like a definitive interpretation of its bizarre and enigmatic story, one that still seems to speak to us from some under-explored place that both surrounds us and remains invisible.

High-minded themes fall disappointingly flat In Delgo... not that anyone noticed

With their natural resources evaporating, the winged Nohrins immigrated to Jhamora, the country long settled by the lizard-like, mystically inclined Lockni, and were initially welcomed warmly. But the Nohrins got greedy and took more than their share and things got ugly, ending only when the Nohrin evil schemer Sedessa was banished to some awful place inhabited by gargoyle-like creatures with digestion problems. All this is relayed in the swiftly paced prelude to Delgo and, though parallels to real life histories of colonialism—including recent misadventures in the Middle East—are admirably conveyed, the deluge of exposition may prove a bit much for the little ones to absorb. Me, I had more trouble keeping the goofy names straight. Who comes up with this stuff?

The exploration of the perils of empire, the inclusion of a character with a gambling addiction, and the forbidden interracial romance that drives the narrative give Delgo some nice, timely shading, but I’m not certain if that all these efforts finally play out to any great effect. The first third intrigues well enough, but once the action starts the character development essentially stops and there’s an awful lot of over-long fights and chases that lack excitement. It doesn’t help that several characters are drearily flat, while potentially more dynamic characters are either shelved early on or suffer deeply uninspired vocal performances from the Freddie Prinze, Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt or especially Chris Kattan, who voices the hero’s grating fop sidekick.

The best thing in Delgo is in fact the worst thing in Delgo, at least in moral terms, which is to say the villain predictably steals the show. Anne Bancroft may have died three and a half years ago, but her sultry voice makes one final and highly pleasurable contribution here as Sedessa, by far the most eroticized creature on display in this otherwise largely neutered fantasy realm. In one scene she slinks about in a crimson, skin-tight, crushed velvet dress and some sort of corset, or at least a push-up bra. In another she dons thigh-high boots and ass-hugging pants. She uses her sexuality to mystify and manipulate those whom she figures can advance her plot to provoke a new war between the Nohrins and Lockni on false terms in yet another unspoken link to the invasion of Iraq. Again, I wonder how much a six-year-old will respond to such undertones, but for parents a little taste of Mrs. Robinson should help to pass the time.

As I post this I've just learned that Delgo now possesses the unhappy distinction of having experienced the worst wide release opening ever, earning only half a million bucks on over 2000 screens on its first weekend. Can't say I was shocked to learn this since I watched it in a theatre with one adults and two kids. It is by no means a great movie of any kind, but it makes you wonder just how hopeless it is trying to put a kid's cartoon out these days that doesn't have the stamp of Disney or one of its imprints on it. 

Otherness versus other people: the dual nature of Werner Herzog's strange, haunting Encounters

The delivery of fresh, wakeful images as an antidote to the world’s endless avalanche of worn, numbing ones has been a guiding promise throughout Werner Herzog’s career, a prolific filmography going back 46 years now. Thus Herzog’s acceptance of The Discovery Channel’s offer to make a film in Antarctica was surely spurred in part by the vast, inhospitable continent’s own promise of abundant, beguiling strangeness. It seemed inevitable. Peruvian jungles, African deserts, Bavarian highlands, outer space, or the South Pole: the landscapes where the unusually determined—and usually highly eccentric—few dare to traipse has always been Herzog’s creative habitat, the places with the strongest current of vision, apparition and mirage.

Indeed, in the opening moments of Encounters at the End of the World Herzog confesses that it was seeing some especially evocative Antarctic underwater photography, taken by his producer Henry Kaiser, that made him want to go. So while Herzog’s bold, observant, opinionated, probing and often dryly hilarious narration is, as always, a highlight, the sequences which unveil the grandest spectacles of the seemingly alien world of Antarctica—coral looming like nicotine thunderheads, jellyfish resembling free-floating atomic explosions—are precisely the ones that leave Herzog speechless, his silent wonder providing all the more space for us to attempt to absorb and grapple with what we see. Not to mention what we hear, like those seal calls that one scientist, at a loss for more empirical points of comparison, simply describes as sounding like Pink Floyd.

(A personal favourite moment: three parka-enveloped scientists silently pressing their ears to the ice floor to listen to seal calls, looking like participants in a Beckett play. Herzog lingers on this, milking it for deadpan comedy.)

Yet the richest source of fascination plumbed in Encounters at the End of the World is, perhaps surprisingly, not the otherness of Antarctica but other people. When Herzog and his crew of one arrive at McMurdo Station, an international encampment of ugly prefab buildings and circling Caterpillars, and are forced to wait some days before they’re able to venture into the white wilderness, they turn inward rather than out, wandering through various dorms and laboratories, meeting the 1000 or so people residing therein: a Colorado banker who joined the Peace Corps in Guatemala and now drives “Ivan” the Terra Bus; a European philosopher who had Homer read to him before he learned to read; a Chicano plumber whose bizarre finger lengths indicate Aztec royal family ancestry; a linguist now working on a continent with no languages. In McMurdo, freaks are the norm. So well-suited are they for the director’s interests it’s almost as though these people are auditioning for Herzog, the preparation for which consumes a lifetime. To paraphrase one of these subjects, it’s as though everyone who wants to fall off the map finds themselves sinking to the bottom of the world, to the point where all lines converge.

In Grizzly Man, his last documentary, Herzog was charged with constructing a portrait of a dead man through the editing together of the dead man’s own video footage, an act of cinematographic archeology that gave Herzog plenty of room to editorialize, drawing lines that convey where the exploratory sensibilities of Herzog and the self-styled bear activist Timothy Treadwell met and parted. In Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog is less inclined to steer the conversation, letting his subjects dictate the themes, a major one of course being the title’s allusions to human extinction, directing our attention to the astonishing manifestations of global warming visible to anyone who lives among the polar ice shelves.

There is one key figure for whom Herzog does however attempt to speak for, a lone penguin fleeing inexplicably from the safety of his brothers, heading straight toward a distant mountain range where only certain death awaits. Why does he do it? Herzog wonders, regarding the penguin’s seemingly suicidal impulse in a way that’s at once comical, philosophical and sad. Herzog reveres the penguin’s mystery and keeps conjecture to a minimum, but it’s parallel to our own species’ rushing toward apocalypse can hardly be missed.

Old Joy: fleeting glimpses as feature film

It's one of those moments when the flickering image nearly becomes something else, a portal, when the audience’s perspective overlaps that of the characters’: though the car window a wild landscape passes, the characters sealed within, longing for what’s outside. Once the car’s parked, the doors opened, the invisible barrier is penetrated and the spell broken, the fluidity of steady movement replaced by awkward stumbling onto rough earth. There are these pesky moments that only touch you when passing you by.

I’m referring to moments in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, adapted by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond from Raymond’s short story. The premise is so simple –two estranged friends reconnect for a night of camping and day-hike to a hot spring– that such reveries just bubble up from the fortitude of the atmosphere, accentuated by Yo La Tengo’s hushed score. It’s a different sort of character identification than we’re accustomed to, one entirely about implications drawn from few rather than innumerable cues.

The friends are Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, whose music shares a particular kinship with Reichardt’s vision). Both are in their late 30s, with the period of their lives in which they could easily relate to one and other clearly far behind them. Mark has more or less settled into grown-up life in Portland, Oregon. We first see him attempting half-convincing yogic meditation when he gets the surprise invitation from Kurt, resulting in disapproving glares from his very pregnant wife.

Mark’s reserved, perhaps uncomfortable. Kurt effortlessly assumes control of the conversation once on the road. He’s a lonely, non-committal, restless spirit with vaguely New Age tendencies, still sniffing around for some elusive satori that convention advises is best found in our 20s. Gradually Kurt’s nervousness hints at a deeper, long-simmering panic. He confesses that this trip was intended to rekindle their friendship, though once the words leave his mouth it’s obvious such hopes are in vain.

I’m told the film’s title refers to a Chinese proverb. It slips into the film’s spare dialogue as Kurt recounts a strange, affecting dream. That Old Joy seems founded in proverb, in a piece of wisdom honed down to something both essential and multifaceted, seems appropriate, directing us toward a reading of the film that might do justice to its measure of depth in tone and feeling.

There were more than 10 years between Reichardt’s debut feature River of Grass and this, her follow-up. (In between was a short entitled ‘Ode,’ with music by Oldham.) I’ve no idea what Reichardt did in the meantime, but there’s something curiously satisfying in the fact that she’s waited so long to –in the literal sense– say so little. Old Joy’s only 76 minutes long, distinguished by a dearth of narrative events, and feels utterly out of time, an accumulation of details and feelings more than a story. Yet I don’t think there’s a single moment that doesn’t hold the glow from the filaments at the film’s core.

Reichardt lets things play out in a way that’s pointed, poetic and maybe not as dire as it first seems. After parting ways with Mark, Kurt appears unnervingly aimless on a nocturnal urban street, passing some change onto a homeless guy as an act of fleeting communion, or way to stave off fear of eventually winding up in the same place. The camera swings off into the street that gives way to the darkness on the edge of town and the title suddenly appears, abandoning Kurt but leaving him very much alive in the closing moments of this quiet film that only grows in meaning and beauty after its over.

Undercurrents, and then some: Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life

Hong Shen and Sanming Han, the central characters in Jia Zhang-ke’s Golden Lion-winning film Still Life, never meet. Rather, they navigate kindred routes through drowning places, each in search of an errant spouse, each bearing witness to a world in the process of a systematic vanishing. Jia, whose previous films include Platform and Unknown Pleasures, has developed a directorial perspective that, while often constructed around potent, beautiful images, is very specifically concerned with the evocation of the unseen. With Still Life, which functions in part as a documentary about the flooding of villages and the displacement of over 1,500,000 people resulting from China’s colossal Three Gorges Dam Project, the unseen takes on a new level of resonance: the lost world that once lined the Yangtze River is in a sense still there, located somewhere in Jia’s frame. It’s just that it’s underwater.

Shen, a former miner, attempts to find the bought wife who left him 16 years ago with their unborn child. Upon his arrival in Fengjie he hires a mercenary motorcyclist to take him to his wife’s address, yet all that’s left of her street is a small, grassy knoll nosing up through the water’s surface. Shen manages to track down his brother-in-law, who explains that his wife has gone down-river to find work but will eventually return. Shen procures local work and opts to wait. The main industry in the region is, unsurprisingly, demolition. Walls and buildings tumble down all around him as Shen walks from one place to another. Even the place where he’s managed to find cheap accommodation gets tagged by government officials with the dreaded line of spray paint that indicates where the water will reach next.

The performance style in Still Life, as with other Jia films, tends toward the placid, yet one of the film’s more lively exchanges finds Shen talking to a charismatic young coworker who, hearing of Shen’s search, waxes philosophical about how Shen is a nostalgic man living in very un-nostalgic times. But is he? The Three Gorges Dam Project is arguably nurturing an epidemic of nostalgia, uprooting so many families from their homes and driving them to parts unknown. Jia, too cultivates an atmosphere of melancholy through striking images of lone individuals gazing out at crumbling vistas, or through his always beguiling and surprising push-ins on endearing figures, like in the scene where a little kid in underwear enters Shen’s room, steals one of his cigarettes and lights up.

Sanming doesn’t appear until 40 minutes into Still Life, but the timing of her entrance is shrewd: a more assertive character than Shen, she raises the level of urgency in the film with her presence, coming to Fengjie not to reunite with her husband but to demand a divorce. Ultimately she and Shen function jointly as a sort of Janus-head in the scheme of Jia’s examination, two modern Chinese landing in a 2000-year-old community condemned to death in the name of industry, poised on the precipice of cataclysmic social change, one face looking back, the other forward, both momentarily transfixed with destruction. And Still Life, Jia’s poetic entry into the cinema of ecological alienation, will transfix you, too.