ecopoeticsatchicago

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Google Drive Link

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JZLmZc7X394CtPC5PVJp6u2ms8hM7vEY

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Final project

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VBAPTVUXphsLT0wm6V3bdjUZvNxlK3qd

Sorry, forgot to add them all to a folder with my reading responses!

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Google Drive with Final Presentation and so on

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1A2LoqQIcJLUF09PolQztDX4jru5hSpR_?ths=true

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 10 Reading Response

           I was particularly struck by our discussion of the influence of color in The Red Desert. As I was watching the film, I found myself looking for clues at each sign of a red hue to hint at the meaning behind the color. Michaelangelo Antonini’s treatment of color in the film depicts how dystopian the world would look absent of color. Many scenes contain elements of gray industrial buildings and factories, but one scene in particular stood out to me. When Giuliana entered the gray landscape in a green coat and her young boy trailing behind her, I was struck by the absence of greenery. It made me think about how the film draws our attention to the red, causing us to ignore the green. This perhaps Antonini’s intended metaphor for how we as humans tend to focus on the things we want to see, the things that are easy to see and right in front of us; in turn we ignore what is around us until we realize what is missing.

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Drive Folder

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pvI8eGFvoSTkaebUClL1JNXyFAlmbwbo

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 10 reading response

Week 10

In red desert, although the color grey tends to be the dominant color of nearly all the scenes in the film, the color red still has power in nearly every scene. In the background there is usually red, wether shown through the fire of the factory, the toy robot’s eyes, or even parts of the factory are all the color red. Another important mention of the color red was when Giuliana was choosing the color of her new store. She mentioned that she wanted to avoid red and use neutral colors instead because "red disturbed.” The color red indeed disturbed as shown through a scene with Ugo and Corrido. They were walking through the factory but stopped when they heard a loud a noise coming from a red machine behind them. At first, the viewer can only see part of the machine however the scene  zooms out to include the worker who is on top of the barrel. This zooming out makes Ugo and Corrido seem like ants in comparison to the barrel. Red overtakes the focus of the scene to forces the viewer to note its gran dominance it has in comparison to mankind. Another important mention of the color red was when Giuliana was choosing the color of her new store. She mentioned that she wanted to avoid red and use neutral colors instead because "red disturbed.” The color red disturbs the viewer more than the characters in the film, to symbolized as Hannah mentioned how accustomed they are with their industrial home.

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 10 Reading Response

Red Desert was a strange movie that I really enjoyed. The intersection of toxic industry and life was prevalent in all aspects: from Giuliana’s husband being the manager of the local plant to Cordarro running a mining expedition in South America to the bleak surroundings of every image to Giuliana’s discontent with life, it is fully invasive. The contrast of this landscape and what I usually think of Italy and Italians--sunny, laid-back, happy--brought another level to the film that I would not have expected. This made the story easily translatable: Giuliana could have been the pretty wife in any US Industrial town. 

After reading more about the film to get some insight from the filmmaker,  I found an interesting quote from Michaelangelo Antonini in the New Yorker: “In this film, machines, with their intrigue of power, beauty, and squalor, have an enormous effect and they have taken the place of the natural landscape. But machines are not the cause of the crisis of the anguish that people have been talking about for years. I mean that we must not long for the more primitive times, thinking that they were a more natural landscape for man.” This surprised me and is really not something that I had ever thought about, and it is hard to disagree with him. Maybe anguish is just part of the human life, and machines are just a correlation rather than a causation. Overall, I am glad to have watched Red Desert for insights such as these.

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

final project materials submission

drive folder

final project

accompanying essay

reading responses

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Merged Documents for Submission

(Eleanor Khirallah)

Here’s one PDF containing my responses to the readings, and here’s one PDF of my weekly writing assignments. I’m also going to give you a hard copy of them, but I’m missing some of the annotated writing assignments, so just in case, the digital archive is here! 

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

week 10: reading response

I wanted to talk about the use of sound in Red Desert. I wanted to highlight 3 different classes of sound that are used to significant effect in the film. The first, which I found most interesting, is the solo female singing voice that opens the film. It is overlaid on the sound of factories (the second class I will talk about) as pictures of factories play visually against the title cards at first; the factory sound then fades out and leaves just the female singing voice, before it is abruptly cut off by a shot of flames spurting out of a factory chimney. The only other place this sound cue recurs is in a crucial point later in the play, during the story Giuliana tells her son, when the rocks start singing to the girl on the island. This sequence, set in idyllic, pastel colors in opposition to the rest of the film’s bleak color palette, represents a space and time removed from the reality of the rest of the film. As opposed to the other 2 sound classes, I see this solo female singing voice as a symbol for the pure, yet wavering voice of nature, that is rudely interrupted by the brute force of industrialism. The second is the jarring clatter of industrial machinery, primarily in the first 15 minutes or so of the film, but also the softer whirring hums of industrial activity that occur in other scenes throughout the film. They represent how industrialism has become an inescapable backdrop to the film’s reality, that also contributes to the inability of the characters to connect. For example, at around the 12:30 mark, loud banging sounds interrupt Ugo and Carrada’s conversation, where Carrada never learns the reason Ugo believes Giuliani to be ill. The third is the electronic music that plays, which I see as a nod to the psychological impact of industrialism, represented by the second class of sounds, on the humans that live within it, distorting a pure sound of nature, as represented by the first class, into something tinny, synthetic, and ultimately uncanny. This third class particularly functions as a motif for Giuliani’s isolation, as it plays during key moments in Giuliani’s emotional arc; particularly, it plays after Giuliani discovers the falsity of her son’s paralysis, underscoring her relapse into isolation.

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Merged Documents for Submission

(By Chiang, Yan Li)

Here are my reading responses as culled into 1 PDF folder.

Here are the slides I used for my presentation, the citations, the actual project, and its assembly instructions.

Thank you for a wonderful quarter! I’ve been hugely inspired by everyone’s issues and work!

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 10 Reading Response

When I watched Red Desert, I found it to be incredibly jarring, mainly due to how entrenched the characters were in this industrial world. Aside from Giuliana’s fantasy island, every shot took place in an industrial setting where any bright color looked garish against a background of gray. The beach scene formed such a contrast to the rest of the movie that it seemed more implausible than the other settings, even though one would be more likely to encounter a beautiful beach in Italy as opposed to a completely grayed out street. I think this really demonstrates how an artist can generate his or her own world, and make the reader or viewer believe in it even when it lies outside our daily physical reality.

After reading more on Antonioni’s thoughts about the movie, I was drawn to the idea of Giuliana’s failure to adapt to an industrial world. While the garishness of her world is partly intended to project her own inner state, she still experiences industry as a physical world outside herself in which she cannot feel comfortable. By contrast, her son, Valerio, is being groomed by her husband, Ugo, to inhabit this world comfortably. The robot beside his bed, the chemistry set and the gyroscope shown to him by his father are all products of industry that will help him acclimate to the world around him. When he pretends to be paralyzed, this also seems like a product of his industrial upbringing, where he acts coldly and fails to take into account his mother’s feelings or anxiety. 

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Final Project Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FwPWGTvFQtkBqdoFKC69D5u5koRokUVdl6Va0YcraAo/edit?usp=sharing

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Final Project Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ObgdNuGtNYMH-Tw6WRbPLOVbI2q7z3Vcp45KYy5eG4o/edit?usp=sharing

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Final Project

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18y0Xq06a22Oba01Quc7eZkygSFjKwhpf/view?usp=sharing

this is the first draft – to be edited

Olivia Alcabes

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Lov Final Project Presentation

Brandon Lov

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1av-wevnN5DTh4LljKQD_W0pLt76r7W4h-oDAN-ufDJU/edit?usp=sharing