[The Red Desert] is a romantic view, no doubt, of the industrial process. But it belongs to another order of romanticism from the Soviet-style worship of controlled power, or the cottage industry idealism which expresses itself in a loathing of the conveyor-belt and the factory. It is forms and colours, architectural firmness and clarity of line, which Antonioni emphasises: the object rather than its purpose. (p. 80)

Antonioni is employing colour as the major unsettling element in a total landscape of disturbing strangeness. It is a winter landscape, in which people look pinched and chilled, and the light in any case plays tricks with colour values. In the last sequence of The Eclipse Antonioni made the ordinary look remote and ominous. Here he takes a step back, as it were, towards the more alien surroundings of L'Avventura or Il Grido, where the characters not only felt lost, but were...