PMA Films: “Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair”: Red Desert (1964)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 117 minutes. Not Rated. In Italian with English subtitles.
Screens as part of "Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair," a week-long festival presented in partnership with the American Cinematheque. Discounted festival passes ($65, or $50 for PMA members and students) are available here. A festival pass will automatically register you for all "Bleak Week" screenings. Click the "Get Tickets" link above to purchase tickets for this single screening.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and Red Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age—about a disaffected woman, brilliantly portrayed by Antonioni muse Monica Vitti, wandering through a bleak industrial landscape beset by power plants and environmental toxins, and tentatively flirting with her husband’s coworker, played by Richard Harris—continues to keep viewers spellbound. With one startling, painterly composition after another—of abandoned fishing cottages, electrical towers, looming docked ships—Red Desert creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age.
About “Bleak Week”:
Presented in partnership with the American Cinematheque, “Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair” is an annual festival showcasing some of the greatest works of cinema from across the globe that venture into the darkest sides of humanity and the bleakest points in human history.
PMA Films joins the fifth annual edition in June 2026 as the festival expands to nearly 100 theaters across the U.S., Canada, UK and South and Central America, with each venue presenting its own lineup of uncompromising films defined by unpleasant truths and raw empathy.
The Portland Museum of Art’s lineup features 11 masterpieces from a variety of decades, genres, and international auteurs, beginning with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers on June 8 and concluding with Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry on June 14. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Tár) will join us to discuss Taste of Cherry. PMA Films will also host its first 16mm film screenings in many years in partnership with Kinonik on June 9 (Kiss Me Deadly/La Jetée) and June 11 (Black Girl), and will partner with SPACE Gallery to screen the devastating animated films Watership Down and The Plague Dogs at SPACE on June 13.