CiNEMERCATOR - Avventura 1960
Filmlover,
Merthe Voorhoeve,
Andreas van Riet,
Maaike Hasselaar
& Elisabeth van Vliet,
each are programming 1 precious film per month. That's 4 precious films per month!
CiNEMERCATOR
doors open 19:00
start 20:00
ticket 3€
7-10
Michelangelo Antonioni
L'Avventura
1960
Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the great architects of modern European cinema, had little interest in making films behave properly. After beginning in the orbit of Italian neorealism, he gradually turned his attention away from social reality and towards the private landscapes of disconnection, desire and boredom. L’Avventura (1960) is the film where that language fully crystallises; the first part of the loose trilogy completed by La notte and L’eclisse.
It begins with a disappearance and then, rather perversely, loses interest in solving it. Anna vanishes from a small island; her friends search for her, but the real subject gradually becomes the strange emotional vacuum her absence exposes.
Antonioni’s revolution is almost embarrassingly simple: he lets nothing happen for long enough that we are forced to notice everything else. Architecture, bodies, silences, the geometry of a room- all become more expressive than dialogue. Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti move through the film like people trying to remember what desire is supposed to feel like.
It’s often called a film about alienation, which is true but not quite sufficient. L’Avventura is less interested in loneliness than in the peculiar boredom of people who can no longer tell what they want. The missing woman becomes almost incidental. What disappears instead is certainty about love, morality, narrative- even cinema itself.
No wonder the film caused such a stir at Cannes in 1960, where it received the Jury Prize. Antonioni had made a mystery in which the mystery itself slowly becomes irrelevant. And he is perfectly happy to leave the hole open.
This film is chosen by Andreas
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