information about the scenario entirely overcome by aesthetic detailing of material space -- including that of the worker's face, then moving beyond the human. With such diversions into physical, spatial and graphic reality, no matter how 'artificial' its appearance and compositional effect -- Il deserto rosso 's environment and portrait of then-'hi tech' modernity suggesting such a distinction as no longer viable -- and away from a purported diegesis, important narrative information 'goes missing'. In compensation, the viewer is invited to imbibe and process veritable explosions of aesthetic and conceptual material gleaned from this very precise reality, just as we do in other scenes where the film lingers on enormous eruptions of steam and coloured gas emanating from the abstract industrial landscape as if from a primordial fissure in the earth's crust. John David Rhodes writes of the Chinese Government's outraged response to Antonioni's remarkable 1972 documentary Cina Chung Kuo : 'In a sense, the Chinese officials -- whether they knew it or not -- were saying something true about Antonioni's cinema: it was often looking at what seemed to be the wrong things. But such looking constitutes his style.' (2011, p. 297) Through 'looking at the wrong things', narrative (or indeed ideological) attenuation generates room for so much else. But this potential liberation of the gaze comes at the strongly felt cost of its habitual epistemological privilege. Not 'knowing', never getting a sense of control over what we see, in fact paradoxically enables a much clearer vision of modern