the red desert

Thinking about the Isetta and the 1960s and, despite its current reputation, the space and quiet of many things of the late 60s and early 70s.  I once used to spend hours watching French and Italian films in London at inexpensive, near-empty matinee showings.  The Red Desert is an existential classic: 1964, not much of a plot, just a troubled woman, her general anxiety in the world; the world pretty colourless but also surreal in its industrial, unforgiving, spare unbeauty.  Long stretches without dialogue, most of it shot with a telephoto lens – God how I loved this stuff.  It was my interior landscape, and often my exterior one as well. 
This very small clip is completely typical:

I must say, despite all those endless classes in the urbane civic landscapes of a Europe we were taught to aspire to, these grey streets were more like what I found there.  Even in the late 1980s, a train stop away from Barcelona landed you in streets like this: suspicious, empty, grudging.