165 - L'Avventura, 1960, Italy. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

165 - L'Avventura, 1960, Italy.  Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Where is Anna?

That is the obvious question, but it is not the real one.

The real question is, Where is everyone else?

Anna is merely missing.

The rest of them are lost.

Gertrude Stein called her generation "the Lost Generation," referring to the 1920s American ex-patriot artists on the left bank of the Seine.  Hemingway.  Fitzgerald.  Eliot.  Pound.

But Antonioni seems to be making the case for his generation of the 1960s in Europe.  And they are lost in a different way.

At least the ex-pats were intellectually engaged.  They wondered what was happening.  And wrote about it.  And gave great art and literature to the world.

In that sense perhaps Antonioni himself is the progeny of that generation.  He is intellectually engaged.  He wonders what is happening.  He has given great art to the world.

But his characters are not and have not.

Sandro, the protagonist of l'Avventura, is no writer or bullfighter or big-game hunter or deep-sea fisherman.  He is no Hemingway man being tested for grace under pressure.

He is a rich playboy who fills the boredom of his life with women and without thought.  And when his lover goes missing, he reverts to her friend.  And when he gets her friend, he reverts to a prostitute.  And none of it means anything to him.

Unless it finally does in the end.

Sandro confides his regret that he gave up his artistic dreams to be a mid-rate architect.

And the final moment in the film suggests that the characters recognize the emptiness of their lives.  And feel.  And suffer.  And long for something more.

Maybe.

Unless their final emotions are the natural, shallow reactions to their current situation.  Only to be repeated again in an endless cycle.

It is possible he will never learn.

This is a serious film.  Beautifully staged.  Beautifully framed.  Beautifully photographed.

And it came along at a time when cinema mattered to people.

And it could have an impact on society.

And be discussed by intelligent and cultured people.

Members of the audience at the Cannes Film Festival booed it.  Yet it won the Jury Prize.

Not long after it started to be ranked with Citizen Kane and Battleship Potemkin.

It is the kind of film that can seem like a different film each time it is watched.  It is carefully crafted and nuanced.

After this viewing I believe Anna left the island very much alive.  That when she gave Claudia her blouse, she was giving Claudia her man, and that she knew that she would leave.  When she tries to have one more conversation with Sandro on the rocks, she realizes that he will never understand her and never change.

So she takes that little boat that we see in that one shot--the kind of clue that David Lynch would later use throughout his work--and does in fact make her way . . . somewhere.

But it could have turned out another way as well.  That is my theory today.

Antonioni intently worked on developing the idea of the "open film," a film whose narrative is open to audience interpretation.

By our time, this notion has gone too far in the other direction, where hacks leave the responsibility to the viewer because they themselves are incapable of making strong artistic choices.

But when Antonioni introduced his films, it opened up new ideas for filmmakers and audiences alike.

And it elevated film as an art form, suggesting that like painting and music and literature, film could also enter into more subjective and abstract territories.

Antonioni is proving to be a good director for us to discover.

Anna may be missing, but Antonioni's mastery of the craft is not.

Let us join him on this adventure.