DOOMED TO MALAISE & ALIENATION

”After the release of L’Avventura, the bold aesthetic risks Antonioni took with the film received so much criticism the filmmakers were booed at the initial Cannes Film Festival premiere (where, after much controversy, the film also subsequently won the critics’ top prize and would top the AFI poll of the greatest films two years later). The massive failure of the initial Cannes showing ultimately left Monica Vitti walking out in tears. The New York Times wrote a frustrated review debunking the film, with critic Bosley Crowther writing, “L’Avventura… is like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several reels have got lost.”  The critic is surely referring to Antonioni’s innovative risks in ignoring conventional Hollywood match-cutting by cutting a scene sparsely after extended takes, leaving many images inconclusively disconnected from one another, and ultimately breaking down significant narrative understanding between the previous image and the next.”

''There is a concern for space in L’Avventura, an obsessive need to distance and alienate the characters through positioning. The land and surroundings often seem more alive than the characters, though serving equally as a metaphor for our cold, detached existence. Is life a series of repetitive and meaningless encounters? How can two islands meet, but for an accidental calling?''

It would be an immense disservice to suggest that Michelangelo Antonioni’s film ”L’Avventura” is a tract, demonstrating a thesis of existentialism in a cinematic context. ”L’Avventura” is a major film, not because of its ideas, but because it is a fine artwork embodying those ideas. In other words, the way it was was in no small measure, part of what it is all about.

The ”simple” plot, which inverted and subverted popular cliche’s and formula resulted in a sanding away, down to a bedrock of narrative ambivalence that dispalyed none of the industry,s typical gloss and sheen. Pangs of nihilism become a chronic condition of the script, seemingly to arise from the deadened ruins of  post WWII Europe, where the hope of the ”New Man” of  a new Babylon that greeted the first machine age, is now recycled into something new, limited and warily pessimistic.

L'Avventura, 1960

Antonioni’s film making is in itself part of the revoluton in consciousness that is the film’s subject. He has used methods of composition, of action, and of editing that disregard the traditions of film fiction, even of film realism, in order to internalize the work, to make its style consonant with the honesties of the story and the characters inner quandaries, in which lying and other prevarications deepen the sense of instability and restlessness.

The film opens with Anna walking toward the camera as she leaves home for the cruise. Claudia arrives to join her, but the camera remains on Anna and her father as Claudia crosses the background. Claudia enters the film peripherally, just as she enters the story. Antonioni is prefiguring the shift of the picture’s center, with the seeming heroine in the foreground and the real heroine in the background, thus in his very composition making an ironic comment on the surprises that life has in store.

L'Avventura.

The Anna and Claudia go to pick up Sandro at his apartment, and at first Anna rather sullenly postpones going upstairs to see him after they get there. When she goes up, she surprises us by insisting on going to bed with him at once while Caludia waits below in the piazza. Antonioni handles this odd situation, with editing and camera angles to show that the patient Caludia infers what is causing the delay; in an oblique way he implicates her in the world of sex with Sandro, as a subtle preparation for her direct involvement to follow.

”In Antonioni’s world, sex is not intimate, special, or romantic — but everything that is the opposite. The only human connection is one of a mutually amoral nature, but even in a world of despair, isolation, and emotional alienation from others, the common human experience is shared. Riccardo’s lack of compassion, much like Sandro’s infidelity in L’Avventura, does not represent a mere moral misgiving, but a reaction to the fabric of abject duplicity interwoven in a mechanized, post-industrial world.”

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L'Avventura

In another scene, Antonioni uses the two undressed girls to evoke an attar of sex, and interchangeability, as if one could serve for the other. He underscores this by having Anna give Claudia a blouse. Claudia wears it later, after Anna disappears, thus shocking Anna’s distraught father and also furthering the suggestion of inheritance. She replaces Anna and inherits her position vis-a-vis Sandro.

However, the crucially different element in Antonioni’s style is the use of time. The search for the lost Anna is carried out with disregard for traditional editing, the mechanical acceleration of pace within a sequence. Antonioni is not simply trying to replace condensed screen time with lapsed real time; he is destroying stock methods, replacing them with fidelity to mood and thought, making time a visible balance in his structure.

The tonal center of the film shifts during the search for Anna. Claudia slips on a rock and Sandro catches her arm. There is a quick glance between them and a quick withdrawal of her arm, but it is a moment of shock. We have just seen a flash of naked feeling that is, by conventional rules, grossly out of place given the seriousness of Anna’s mysterious disappearance. Antonioni was able to transmute into film terms, completely, one of the functions of the novel; suspension of time to luxuriate in character resonance and mood.

L'Avventura. Her gesture implies that life without illusions can be lived.

Sandro kisses Claudia aboard the yacht, less than a day after Anna has disappeared. After a moment’s hesitation she breaks away. The first time they really kiss is a few days later in Sicily during their search for Anna, and here again Antonioni uses the element of time to enrich his material. He prolongs the encounter, pressing with different close-ups, as the pair lie on the ground kissing. So deliberately are we made to watch that we look past the event to what it signifies. Sandro, the somewhat jaded, somewhat frightened middle aged man, kisses Claudia as if this were the only rite he knows to assure himself that he is still living, as if he must have someone whom he thinks he loves, without even a three day gap, just as he would have to eat and drink in three days.

Claudia embraces him with an attitude of admission and of release; as if she had always loved him, had been jealous of Anna, and is now so intoxicated by the disturbances in her life that she can confess these things unconventionally soon. She becomes, in a sense, a visual metaphor for everyday mystery, and a the qualities of emptiness and desertion which permeate  Antonioni’s novellistic approach that is non-literary.

The final sequence of ”L’Avventura”may be one of the key moments in modern film. After Claudia’s ruthless honesty with herself about her love for Sandro, after he has, in fact, proposed marriage, she discovers that he has immediately been unfaithful. And, one mat say, idly so, just because the chance was offered. In the space of a few minutes Antonioni then encompasses a small revolution.

”The anxiety and ambience that is created by the music, long takes, and discordant narrative paints a reality that seems to be an exaggeration of our own. Where Bergman’s visual expressionism emphasized the internal psychology of his characters, Antonioni makes use of the austere distancing of his motionless camera to alienate his. In this light, the theme of alienation takes on its homonymic word meanings as reality seems to surface as a foreign planet that is merely being explored by human visitors. primarily a visual one. The imagistic contrasts, background, and environment — or the visual — defines essentially all we need to know about these characters. … but as Antonioni’s cinema is more about lack of spoken communication between individuals, it is left to up the visual to show what they are incapable of expressing themselves. Thus, a dialectic here is important, but less important is a cogent story, exposition, storytelling, or conventional narrative. Antonioni is not concerned with these things. Instead, he exemplifies the dynamics of spatiality and temporality in a pure pictorialism as dispossessed characters are separated from others against an exacting and dominating backdrop.

Antonioni employs a Marxist critique similar to his predecessors and contemporary socialist realists such as Ken Loach, but at the same time, Antonioni critiques this position by exploring the individual’s place in society with sympathy to inevitabilities and reluctance to engage in traditional neorealist idealism.”