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The Red Desert
(Il deserto rosso)

V is for Vitti
Screening on Film
Directed by Michelango Antonioni.
With Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chianetti.
Italy, 1964, 35mm, color, 116 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

Monica Vitti is the traumatized heroine who roams the industrial landscape of Ravenna in search of escape from her engineer husband and her own ennui. Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film is prescient in its pairing of existential and ecological concerns, exposing the psychic costs of Italy’s economic miracle in the scarred urban environment. At once a psychological drama and an architectural portrait, the film remains a classic of Italian post-neorealist cinema.

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Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow