Why do we need people? What do we need from them? What does it mean to love and be loved? I have no idea and neither does Giuliana, so this week’s post is long and rambling, with an extended digression about Ophüls and Kubrick. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…

‘There is nothing in the film beyond what you feel,’ said Antonioni. There is nothing in Red Desert beyond what Giuliana feels (or beyond what we feel about her feelings), so how do we read her relationship with her physical and social environment? slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…

It’s easy to see why Stanley Kubrick was inspired by Max Ophüls’ use of camera movement to transport characters and audience onto another plane of reality. The effect can be romantic but also dizzying, a dream that waltzes into a nightmare.

Red Desert is a (knowingly) doomed attempt to evoke a state of fear that cannot be portrayed directly. It is a fear of ‘colours, people, everything,’ of an entity that appears on the wall, then on the ceiling, then in the gaze and touch of another person. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…

In this astonishing image from Satyajit Ray’s Devi, the individual and her surroundings are dissolved by sunlight. This trick-of-excessive-light symbolises the delusion that has been imposed on Doya; the film suggests that the clearer light of reason might have prevented this.

Antonioni admitted to having abused Lucia Bosè on the set of his first film. Rather than separating the art from the artist, we can connect this abuse to something ugly in Antonioni's films. The rape scene in Red Desert is a (very complex) case in point. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…

The most dream-like and (strangely) the most memorable scene in Red Desert: an entire room turns pink, to the sound of sinister electronic music. This will suggest different meanings to each viewer. For me, of course, the scene is about horror and despair. slowmovingpictures.org/p/everything-t…

Four bedrooms: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Night of the Hunter, Red Desert, and The Parallax View. The frames are theatrical, artificial; the characters trapped within a construct, a pathology, a conspiracy, dogma, or (in the case of Red Desert) something more nebulous.

‘Did I ever tell you my favourite colour was blue?’ Look at Sam Neill's face, in this scene from In the Mouth of Madness, and tell me that colours aren't terrifying. They remind us we are contingent fragments of reality, created against our will and annihilated in the same way.

‘My genius is my ability to do the wrong thing at the right time. Is there any final test of genius but success?’ Gillian Anderson, in The House of Mirth, makes us empathise with failure: we see Lily making all the wrong decisions, and we know we would have made them too.