“The credibility of an artificial world, the reliability of an artificial eye, depend on the consistency of their relationship with our reality and on a system of deviation from the norms of our experience.”

In the quote above, V.F. Perkins (1993, 123–4, my emphases) summarises what he identifies as the major flaws of Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964), the first colour film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Perkins is not averse to the expressionist use of colour in general, acknowledging its affective coherence in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Instead, his critique targets colour choices that rupture a film’s ontological unity, changing ‘the rules at the player’s convenience’ (Perkins 1993, 123). I am highlighting Perkins’ view not to dispute it, but to point out that he and Antonioni both presume a consensual, discoverable world: ‘our’ reality.

“Manufactured Echoes” investigates the colour techniques used in Red Desert to challenge an uncomplicated presumption of universal reality that industrial standards and a supposedly normal self imply. The essay asks what is at stake in notions of a singular reality that ‘we’ all agree upon. Both film colour and the notion of women’s neurosis emerge through processes of standardisation and normalisation in the early 20^th Century (Blackman and Walkerdine 2001; Cubitt 2014). Individual human phenomenology at any given time and space affects the perception of colour. The consensus that gave rise to colour standards is not, therefore, straightforwardly consensual.

While I limit my analysis to questions of gender, the colour in Red Desert also reveals tensions between the regulatory biopolitics of colour and individual lived experience (Pierotti 2019). Further, the history of race and film colour has been productively investigated by other scholars (see Dootson 2016; Dyer 2017; Roth 2009), and Western culture’s obsessive fear of colour’s unruly indeterminacy has previously been associated with women, queer, pathologised, racialised and colonised folks (Batchelor 2000).

“Manufactured Echoes” intervenes by overlaying the narrative of a woman pathologised by men (including the director) upon the gendered scientific standardisation of film colour. Antonioni chooses a creative, highly technical approach to film colour as an expression of Giuliana’s ‘neurosis’. In describing the dye transfer process that Technicolor continued producing long after it had mothballed its bulky three-strip camera technology, Murray Pomerance (2009) has outlined the arduous work that went into achieving the filmic colours the director found acceptable. Antonioni (1996, 285) claimed that there was only one sequence he filmed using ‘normal’ colours: the fantasy sequence of the young girl swimming. This, he says, ‘shows reality as Giuliana wishes it were—that is, different from the world that appears to her as transformed, alienated, obsessive to the point of being monstrously deformed’. Antonioni intended to express Giuliana’s crises on screen as coherently incoherent; the use of stylised colours is an attempt to translate the deformation of her experience.

My own essayistic transgression positions Giuliana’s terror of a reality to which she must adjust in relation to colour standards, one example of a so-called property of nature devised without equitable consensus. Antonioni insists he is ‘not against progress’ but interested in those who fail to adapt to it, ‘a sort of process of natural selection’ (1996, 285). Despite this ambivalence and perhaps aided by the passage of time, Monica Vitti’s performance articulates a certain challenge to normative assumptions about reality and inexorable industrialisation. “Manufactured Echoes” repositions Giuliana’s failure to adjust to the toxic traps set by ‘progress’ against the gendered history of scientific colour standards, which eliminates the very possibility of tetrachromatic vision from its inception. As Elena Gipponi points out in the generous review to this video, the hindsight of contemporary climate breakdown suggests that Giuliana’s neurosis was a perfectly rational response to wanton devastation wreaked on land and sea (see also Ussher 2011).

My recent film practice doctoral project (Philip 2024) incorporated philosophical interventions by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, feminist and queer theorists with a background in science. Each challenges the ways in which objective reality comes to be understood as passive matter that is represented in various ways. Haraway (1998) argues that observation and resulting scientific objectivity are always partial, emerging from the cultural contexts which situate that partiality. Barad (2007) illustrates how the construction of scientific devices and experimental conditions are vital to empirical objectivity. For Barad, avoiding the meeting of matter and meaning is impossible, but looking at concepts through one another—a diffraction of ideas—provides a way to examine their effects. While these theories are too complex to sufficiently outline here, they deeply informed the methodology employed in “Manufactured Echoes.”

The videographic essay invites the viewer to look at and listen to its primary source media in a manner that generates interference patterns rather than simple reproduction, a key aspect of diffraction. As Haraway (2004, 69) puts it:

In the case of “Manufactured Echoes,” Red Desert is recontextualised and re-objectified through my aesthetic and technical choices. I avoid the use of voice over to keep the essay’s discourse relatively depersonalised. Reading text while looking at images requires effort from the viewer, one that I hope encourages their own questions to interfere with the piece. The choice of music, most of which is my own sound design, adds a further electronic dissonance. Rather than the alienating industrial electronica of the film’s original soundtrack, I aimed at ambiguously melodic harmonies layered with rumbling undertones. Each aesthetic element is purposefully juxtaposed without any emerging as dominant.

Upon watching a draft of “Manufactured Echoes,” Catherine Grant felt it was more of an essay film than a videographic essay. While I do not aim to address the precise parameters of this distinction, I see it as a fitting statement given that Haraway’s diffraction models itself on multiple horizons of contestable meaning rather than synthesising an argument towards definitive closure (Geerts and van der Tuin 2016). By videographically filtering the film through the scientific history that technically enables Antonioni’s artistic vision, “Manufactured Echoes” brings together aesthetic analysis and media archaeological historiography by way of a queer, feminist approach.

Antonioni, Michelangelo, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, eds. Carlo Di Carlo, Giorgio Tinazzi, trans. Marga Cottino-Jones (Marsilio, 1996).

Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007).

Batchelor, David, Chromophobia (Reaktion, 2000).

Blackman, Lisa, and Valerie Walkerdine, Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies (Palgrave, 2001).

Cubitt, Sean, The Practice of Light a Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, Leonardo Book Series (The MIT Press, 2014).

Dootson, Kirsty Sinclair, ‘“The Hollywood Powder Puff War”: Technicolor Cosmetics in the 1930s’, Film History 28.1 (2016): 107–31.

Dyer, Richard, White, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2017).

Geerts, Evelien, and Iris van der Tuin, ‘The Feminist Futures of Reading Diffractively: How Barad’s Methodology Replaces Conflict-Based Readings of Beauvoir and Irigaray’, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, 1 January 2016: 1.

Haraway, Donna J., ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14.3 (1988): 575–99.

–––, The Haraway Reader (Routledge, 2004).

Perkins, V. F., Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Da Capo Press, 1993).

Philip, Andrew, We Tattooed Your Mother: Agential Realism, Filmic Realism, Documentary Practice, [PhD thesis] (University of Reading, 2024).

Pierotti, Federico, ‘Biopolitics of Colour in Mid-Century Italian Visual Culture: Red Desert and the “New Techniques of Life”’, Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, 19.32 (2019).

Pomerance, Murray, ‘Notes on Some Limits of Technicolor: The Antonioni Case’, Senses of Cinema, no. 53 (2009).

Red Desert (Il deserto rosso), dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni (1964).

Roth, Lorna, ‘Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 34.1 (2009): 111–33.

Ussher, Jane M., The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience (Routledge, 2011).

Andrew Philip is an experienced filmmaker with over 25 years directing, editing, and animating both commercial and experimental projects. He is a Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, combining creative practice with research.

Through a hybridization between an explanatory mode and a more poetic and evocative register, Andrew Philip’s video essay, ‘Manufactured Echoes’, is worthy of praise for its ability to explore some of the theoretical and conceptual dichotomies that colour evokes in images, such as natural versus artificial, reproduction versus production, subjective versus objective. In particular, the video essay, using Antonioni’s film Red Desert, questions the existence of a perceptual norm in relation to colour. The film’s protagonist, Giuliana (played by Monica Vitti), is a neurotic woman who is unable to adapt to the efficiency and functionalism—the ‘technical changes in our lives’, as mentioned by Antonioni himself in the archive footage—that are considered ‘normal’. As Federico Pierotti has argued in his biopolitical reading of Red Desert (2019), the so-called ‘functional colours’ do not function for Giuliana. One of the video essay’s strengths is its emphasis that no material support or standard is neutral. Even the film strip, seemingly a raw and primary medium, has in fact been formatted to incorporate sexual and racial differences: the standardisation of light and colour rendering is based on white skin as the ideal reference point. Similarly, the standard colourimetric observer, identified experimentally in the 1920s, is generally considered to be male, unlike the subjects used to test the material qualities of films in laboratories. These subjects were known as ‘girl heads’ or ‘China girls’: anonymous white women employed as models in front of colour samples (Yue 2021).

From a formal point of view, Philip makes generous use of slow motion, freeze frames, desktop documentaries and electronic sound design. Of these various videographic strategies, the use of reverse motion is particularly striking. This is because it evokes the past in the contemporary world, creating a true resonance, an echo, between the two. Although Red Desert was not inspired by an eco-critical sensibility, the placement of the word ‘Fine’ at the beginning of the video, the rewinding of the film and the structure of the video essay (which follows an A-B-C-B-A pattern) seem to suggest that the perceptual crisis experienced by Giuliana is representative of today’s broader environmental issues. There is a connection between Antonioni’s exploration of the rise of industrial living and the impact of industrial development on the contemporary landscape, on the new geological epoch called the Anthropocene.

Genevieve Yue, Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, Fordham University Press, 2021.

Pierotti, Federico, ‘Biopolitics of Colour in Mid-Century Italian Visual Culture: Red Desert and the “New Techniques of Life”’, Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, 19.32 (2019).

“Manufactured Echoes” by Andrew Philip offers a formally inventive and intellectually ambitious reengagement with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso. By opening with the final shot of the film played in reverse, accompanied by Giuliana’s earlier statement, “there’s something terrible in reality,” the essay establishes a compelling audiovisual dispositif that evokes the retrospective labour of interpretation prompted by the film’s open ending. In doing so, it also performs a kind of “reverse interpretation” of the film, deconstructing established assumptions about colour and perception through a gendered reading.

Structured around three interrelated sections (“Industrial Colours”, “Colour in Our Reality,” and “The Colours in Giuliana’s Reality”), the essay provides a clear and effective framework for navigating the film’s chromatic complexity. It productively connects Antonioni’s use of Eastmancolor printed via Technicolor dye transfer, as well as his well-documented interventions in the profilmic environment, to broader questions concerning the material and industrial conditions of colour. The crucial role of Carlo Di Palma’s cinematographic choices, however, might have been acknowledged more explicitly in this context.

One of the essay’s most stimulating contributions lies in its attempt to relate the industrial standardization of colour to the emergence of normative perceptual models, notably the “standard observer” developed in early twentieth-century colorimetry. This line of inquiry, already explored in recent scholarship on the epistemological and biopolitical dimensions of colour, finds here a suggestive extension into videographic form, particularly through its articulation with psychiatric discourses and gendered configurations of perception.

The essay succeeds in opening the question of Giuliana’s subjective or pathological vision onto a broader historical and theoretical horizon. Its use of archival materials, scientific sources, and critical references, combined with a carefully paced and reflective montage, effectively brings together and reframes existing perspectives, offering a valuable contribution to the study of Antonioni’s film.

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