Transcendental Phenomenology and Antonioni’s Red Desert
Transcendental Phenomenology and Antonioni’s Red Desert
This essay applies the ideas associated with transcendental phenomenology to the Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Il deserto rosso, known in English as Red Desert. Aspects of western philosophy can provide a viewer with a greater appreciation of the film and its meanings. After providing a brief overview of the development of phenomenological thinking and of past interpretations of Red Desert, this essay will provide an analysis and interpretation of the film’s cinematography –specifically its colours and editing– from a phenomenological point of view. Phenomenology maintains that experience is both passive –seeing, hearing, and so on– and active –walking, running, touching, and so on. One describes experience and interprets experience by relating it to a context, which is usually social or linguistic. The word phenomenology originates with the Greek word phainomenon, which means ‘appearance.’ Phenomenology is, then, the study of appearances rather than the study of reality. In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte began to seriously consider phenomenology as a theory of appearances, and to consider it essential to acquiring knowledge. Phenomenology has its origins, certainly, with debates regarding what exists in reality and what is an illusion. John Locke believed that qualities such as colors, sounds, smells, and so on were subjective, and were not indigenous to objects that produced those qualities. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stated that nothing in the world was entirely real save the whole of the world. According to Hegel, the world was not a collection of small things, but a large organism. To perceive a single part of the world, then, was to perceive something that was not real (Russell, 1972, pp. 712-713, 731). The form of phenomenological thinking to be used in this paper was proposed by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s
This essay applies the ideas associated with transcendental phenomenology to the Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Il deserto rosso, known in English as Red Desert. Aspects of western philosophy can provide a viewer with a greater appreciation of the film and its meanings. After providing a brief overview of the development of phenomenological thinking and of past interpretations of Red Desert, this essay will provide an analysis and interpretation of the film’s cinematography –specifically its colours and editing– from a phenomenological point of view. Phenomenology maintains that experience is both passive –seeing, hearing, and so on– and active –walking, running, touching, and so on. One describes experience and interprets experience by relating it to a context, which is usually social or linguistic. The word phenomenology originates with the Greek word phainomenon, which means ‘appearance.’ Phenomenology is, then, the study of appearances rather than the study of reality. In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte began to seriously consider phenomenology as a theory of appearances, and to consider it essential to acquiring knowledge. Phenomenology has its origins, certainly, with debates regarding what exists in reality and what is an illusion. John Locke believed that qualities such as colors, sounds, smells, and so on were subjective, and were not indigenous to objects that produced those qualities. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stated that nothing in the world was entirely real save the whole of the world. According to Hegel, the world was not a collection of small things, but a large organism. To perceive a single part of the world, then, was to perceive something that was not real (Russell, 1972, pp. 712-713, 731). The form of phenomenological thinking to be used in this paper was proposed by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s