Re: Sight and Sound (2002) Greatest Films Club
L'Avventura:
What makes this film the greatest film since Citizen Kane is that it successfully created an altogether new cinema. As has been touched upon already, film had basically been rooted in literature. Sure, actualities were not literature, but cinematic narrative supplanted actuality when audiences spoke with their wallets that they wanted narrative. In perhaps the golden age of cinema, certainly American cinema at least, the 1920s and 1930s, film was driven by narrative. Yes, there were exceptions. For example, across the waters, Dovzhenko's (sp?) Earth created a lyrical tone that outweighed narrative drive. Still, that tonal quality likely spawned from classical cinematic language-devices such as montage, rather than was invented on its own. In other words, montage was its springboard, or at least there was a springboard, in a sense.
Now let me jump ahead and skip an almost unforgivable amount of cinema (sorry) to the blooming European art-house movement of the late-50s and early 60s. It was then that filmmakers hinted at new directions cinema could have taken from that point forward, and, today, perhaps still can take, were filmmakers and financiers so enamored with narrative for a multitude of reasons. Examples included Hiroshima, Mon Amour (and of course it's eventual successor LYAM), Godard's deconstructionism, maybe Bergman's cosmic-religious symbolism if you want to stretch it out a bit...but, still, the great affects these films/filmmakers produced were in one way or another a result of a narrativistic springboard (i.e. literature, in one way or another).
In this context, then, what makes L'Avventura so great is that it introduced a new cinema for a mass audience: a cinema not rooted in literature, but ARCHITECTURE. Yes, Antonioni made cinematic architecture rather than literature.
Of course, films by their very nature operate within a period of time. Take away the time quotient, and one is left with still photography. Even a film comprised of two frames takes time to watch. In addition, let us not forget that Antonioni was making films for a mass audience; they were meant to be seen, and his audience was conditioned to expect a narrativistic cinematic language (which explains the initial boos and hisses at Cannes). Also, Antonioni's predisposition was to express ideas of alienation in the modern world -- the impossibility of love. That idea was part of his artistic makeup. Therefore, he probably ruminated on this and through his early work, tried to discover how he as a filmmaker, then, could palatably convey the idea of the impossibility of love, especially when, from his worldview, this impossibility stems from an inability to actively exist in the modern world? Answer: one has to express his/her ideas not via characters and their actions, but via the spaces they inhabit, which dictate their inaction. This was Antonioni's breaking point. And what a revolutionary approach this was.
Antonioni doesn't care whether you as a viewer can project yourself onto the characters in his films. It's beside the point. Antonioni doesn't care if you don't think his characters act realistically, or even naturally. It's beside the point. And, it follows, he doesn't care if the ultimate resolution of their external actions doesn't amount to much. It's beside the point. What is important is to pay attention to that which surrounds the characters and, as such, that which bears down on the characters to directly and symbolically give them internal states of mind, internal states of being.
The eponymous "The Adventure" is not an external one. It's an internal one. So how does a filmmaker convey to an audience a purely internal journey, one which is predicated to a large degree by the external environment? Well, to quote Gene Youngblood, it's via the "objective correlative," where external objects give the cinematic viewer awareness of internal character states of mind and being. What a revolutionary approach to cinema! -- to focus the camera on stationary, external objects, such as buildings and foliage, as if THEY were the living and breathing characters, and, in so doing, use those objects to vicariously comment on the lack of living and breathing subjective emotional states of the human characters -- what gripping and exciting cinema!
I don't think such a new cinema had been successfully invented up to that point. Again, a cinematic architectural style blossomed rather than a cinematic literary style.
Okay, some of my readers now are probably arguing, "I see. In this guy's opinion, L'Avventura is the second greatest film of all time, simply due to historical importance, which really wasn't so important to begin with. What a moron!" Well, for one, Antonioni was a master, and it's a credit to his artistry that cinematic architecture did not supplant cinematic literature, because, let's face it, it's hard to make successfully produce cinematic architecture. I myself know Antonioni's films are great, if for no other reason than I know I would never ever be able to make films as great as his, no matter how hard I worked at it. See what I mean? Since his type of cinema is hard to accomplish, cinematic architectural films usually aren't too good, if they are even made at all. Thus, audiences haven't had ample opportunity to get accustomed to it still-ahead-of-its-time sensibilities, and so it hasn't really impacted cinema to the degree that you naysayers reading this will probably insist a historically important film such as L'Avventura must have. The inability of subsequent filmmakers to "keep up" with Antonioni's ahead-of-the-curve cinema personifies his virtues as a cinematic master, make no mistake about it.
With regard to L'Avventura and it's ending:
By the end of the film, Monica Vitti's character has gone from meandering about in implicit deference to male domination (and not just human males, but male structures, again the idea of strong, dominant, "male" architecture defining an alienated state), to realizing that she, in fact, is dominant. Actually, it is her duty to take control from that point forward. In point of fact, it is the male sex who is more emotionally dead. He compensates through brute force posturing and sexual flings (the oft-stated eros idea) to subjugate the female, which is simply an emotional cover-up.
In the final shot of L'Avventura, Antonioni sublimely summarizes everything he has to say: the female, the up-till-now dormant volcano, now able to self-realize and overcome, even supercede, the blank wall that is the male, he who is looking for love and can't find it without the pity of the female, conveyed through the motherly pat on the back of the head Claudia (Monica Vitti) gives Sandro.
And this fundamental idea, is not just Antonioni's mental complex ("that filmmaker has some serious issues, dude"); I can point to examples where this idea manifests itself in our real world, today. Didn't Nancy Pelosi this week essentially concretely bring to fruition what I wrote in the previous paragraph happens at the end of L'Avventura?
The plot of the film is the internal emotional adventure, which certainly has an arch. The plot is not the coordinates that the characters externally move between. To complain that Antonioni doesn't resolve his films is to miss this basic understanding. To say that nothing happens at end of L'Avventura is a terribly gross cinematic misunderstanding. The end of the film presents a truly epic emotional revolution comparable in its magnitude to the physical transformation across time that transpires throughout 2001: A Space Odysee. It is a purely THE Adventure, told in a truely original manner.
I'm sure I have failed to write all that I had hoped to with this post; after all, it's hard to coherently write all that you have to say about a topic on the first draft, so I hope that your reactions to what I have written continues to further continued potent discussion. Thanks.
