Transcendental Phenomenology And Antonioni's Red Desert

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,

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