Abstract

This essay employs Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the capitalist social machine to explore Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert. More specifically, it addresses the psychological struggles of the film's female protagonist, Giuliana, with respect to duelling forces of capitalist deterritorialisation and Oedipal reterritorialisation. The essay also brings together Deleuze's cinema works with his and Guattari's schizoanalysis to show how Antonioni's use of the time-image itself functions as a deterritorialising force, particularly with respect to the film's pivotal island fantasy scene, where, if only momentarily, Giuliana engages in the Deleuzean act of becoming.