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A widowed queen, living aloof from her people, restlessly travels from one castle to another. The people know little of her. Her enemies send a young poet to assassinate her. The plot is uncovered and the poet escapes, but accidentally meets the queen. She initially sees her dead husband whom the young man resembles.
The plot of this film is adapted from Jean Cocteau's The Eagle Has Two Heads. It was made by Michelangelo Antonioni. He shot it on videotape and, after experimenting with the color processes, the final tape was transferred to film. In many ways it is an experimental work, using a set-piece of the theatre to work more intensively on the quality and color of the images. The purpose behind it was not to reduce the cost of shooting on film, but to gain the flexibility of technique the video system offers. In another sense, it allows Antonioni to continue the experiments with color in decor, design and photography first started in Red Desert (1964) and continued intermittently through all his later films, most notably in Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point.