#Week10 EmelineP

[ecopoeticsuchicago]

Hi all, 

Link to my project (uploaded to Drive for ease in access) above!

[ecopoeticsuchicago]

Il Deserto Rosso reading response

 In the scene in the shack by the ocean, Corrado sticks his foot through the wall of the bedroom. Although an action of little consequence in the moment—the others shrug, unperturbed, the scene goes on—the now-porous wall comes back into focus several minutes later, when one of the wives (Emilia?) pulls the rest of the plank out to throw it in the fire (“si muore di freddo,” she explains). The rest jump in, the mood growing increasingly hysterical, breaking off more planks of wall and piling them up inside the really very minuscule woodstove, with bits of newly broken chair to boot. I found the scene unexpectedly disturbing.

There are two kinds of obsession represented in Il Deserto Rosso. The one belongs to these characters who pull down the entirety of the wall when several planks would have sufficed; it runs its course to the point of exhaustion. It belongs especially to Corrado, who pursues Giuliana steadily, subtly at first and then forcefully, when she’s come to his apartment. The other kind of obsession, more cyclical than it is linear, belongs to Giuliana, and comes in waves and fits, finding expression in her panic in the face of the expanse of the ocean, of the factories and the mechanical toy with which her son plays, and in the inability to fully connect to or disconnect from those around her (“perché non sono una donna sola, per quanto a volte, è come sono separata....i corpi sono separati”: the scene of this elucidation is made tragic by the sailor’s incomprehension; her words reach no ears but her own, further illustrating her point); a consequence, apparently, of the “accident”—which the other characters use to explain away her erratic behavior. 

A fight of the rational against the perceived “irrational,” the other characters’ treatment of Giuliana and her mental state is disturbing. But this rational world of theirs is shown to be contrived at various points of the film, as when Corrado reveals himself to be wholeheartedly capitalist after telling Giuliana he was a socialist; or as when the men strong-arm the brown-haired wife into admitting that the scream from outside was but a facet of her imagination. Only Giuliana stands unequivocally by what she’s heard. These men have constructed a reality for the landscape and the world in which they live, a reality which Giuliana, since her accident, cannot. In a way (and perhaps this is a stretch) the film might be taken as a twist on the classic tragedy of the prophet, who sees more than the rest but always at some cost; Giuliana sees the present that the others don’t, and suffers for it.