WATCH PARTY: Red Desert (1964) Michelangelo Antonioni @ Richard Tucker Library

AI is telling me "yes—this is one of the best possible uses of your super-clear 85" screen, but *only if* you’re comfortable programming a visually dominant, low-plot film" (so there you go). We'll see if this holds up in the room with the nice screen to the left of the entrance at Richard Tucker Library. This will be my fifth Antonioni film, I believe. RUNTIME: 120 minutes RATING: NR SYNOPSIS: 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. BLURBS: "Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in color, from 1964, is his most mysterious and awe-inspiring work." - Richard Brody, *The New Yorker* "This flawed masterpiece is a political film, anger seething beneath the seductively beautiful surface, and a contrast to the surrounding devastation is provided by a simple fable told to a small boy by his mother." - Philip French, *Observer (UK)* "Perhaps the most extraordinary and riveting film of Antonioni's entire career; and correspondingly impossible to synopsise." - Geoff Andrew, *Time Out*