Antonioni's first color film, Red Desert was shot in the industrialized North of Italy. "The film was born on the spot and the color was born with it," Antonioni has said. With a beautifully restored print, we rediscover Antonioni, the painter on film; Antonioni, the abstract expressionist. Visually and thematically, Red Desert is nothing short of breathtaking for being extraordinarily ahead of its time. Its very beauty is hewn from an environmental apocalypse that is at once metaphor and reality: factories, pipes, yellow smoke trailing to the sky; figures lost in a poisoned fog, staring into a poisoned bog... A decade after the Independent Group's optimism for humanity in a postwar era of progress, Antonioni declared it a wash. In 1964, Red Desert is post-Promise. It is also proto-feminist, distilling psychology into a protracted reaction shot, just as Monica Vitti distills the ambivalence of her earlier performances into the figure of a woman so anxiety-ridden she is no longer sensual, at once overly sensitive and barely sensate. The textures of her world have become alien to her. (The wife of the factory owner, she suffers a nervous breakdown following an automobile accident.) Richard Harris is Antonioni's prototypical male: a wanderer, at home nowhere and thus everywhere, he drifts into her world and, just as easily, out again. "Everyone has (your) malady, in one form or another," he tells her. "You ask what you should look at, I ask how I should live." What was considered fashionable angst in 1964 today plays with astounding emotional currency. In celebration of the restored Red Desert we present, on consecutive Sundays in February, the trilogy of films that preceded it-L'Avventura, La Notte and Eclipse-with an appreciation of how everything in them led to this masterpiece. Red Desert asks the question the other films were not ready to ask: "What is Man's nature when there is no more Nature?"