Antonioni's first color film, Red Desert was shot in the industrialized North of Italy. Here is 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. 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, rather, overly sensitive and barely sensate. The textures of her world have become alien to her. Richard Harris is Antonioni's typical male: a wanderer, at home nowhere and thus everywhere. What was considered fashionable angst in 1964 today plays with astounding emotional currency. Red Desert asks the question the earlier films were not ready to ask: "What is Man's nature when there is no more Nature?"