Women of Italian Cinema - Co-Presented by The Center for
Italian Studies, Stony Brook University
Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT
Starring Monica Vitti
Wednesday, March 27th at 7:30pm
35mm Screening!
Introduction by Giuseppe Gazzola, Stony Brook University
$16 Public | $10 Members
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of
contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and Red
Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This
provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age—about a
disaffected woman, brilliantly portrayed by Antonioni muse Monica Vitti,
wandering through a bleak industrial landscape beset by power plants and
environmental toxins, and tentatively flirting with her husband’s coworker,
played by Richard Harris—continues to keep viewers spellbound. With one
startling, painterly composition after another—of abandoned fishing cottages,
electrical towers, looming docked ships—Red Desert creates a nearly apocalyptic
image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the
modern age. (Italy, 1964, 117 min., color, 35mm)
