Antonioni’s L’Avventura: Visual Aesthetics at the Cusp

            Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’Avventura (1960) ushers in a new way of looking at film. The images are striking in how they juxtapose natural beauty against a modernist sense of alienation between human individuals. This theme can be seen in almost every segment of the film but is none more striking than in the segment of about thirty minutes into the film when the protagonists, middle class Italians, go on a day boating trip to a rugged offshore island. By comparing these visuals with early postmodernist ideas taken from Susan Sontag’s musings on photography as metaphor, we can see that Antonioni conveyed the sense of the alienation of the individual, yielding to beautiful natural forces relevant in their metaphorical nature as larger than life, and he did so through the images he highlighted in this significant segment of the film. 

            The turn from modernism to an early form of postmodernism in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, occurred due to the stagnation of modernist thought perceived by critics who wanted any sense of art in Western society to reflect a relevance to the individual  Art needs to include a sense of relevancy by confirming the popular icons of the time as metaphorically important to the consumer (See for instance Susan Sontag’s article on “Camp” [1964] that achieved notoriety as a battle cry for pop art of the 1960s.) Artists, such as the filmmaker Antonioni, chose to show the disillusionment of the individual in the modernist societal structure, but want to do so in more relevant ways than the strictly structural ethos of modernism.

Antonioni presents L’Avventura as a film which is almost plotless. A plot exists, but in a two- and one-half hour film, there is not much of one. When I first saw L’Avventura in the 1980’s, I was in an academic program at a large school which fostered a healthy art film society, showing art films most every day of the week. I told a friend, who had an undergraduate degree in film studies, that I was going to see the film because I enjoyed films from the era and I wanted to hear some Italian. He rolled his eyes upward and made the statement, “That film is three hours long, and three things happen.” In a way, my friend’s cynicism is correct. But I would argue that this point, this plot-without-plot which turns its story to focus on characters caught up in a single incident--the disappearance of one of the protagonists on the rugged offshore island--is what makes Antonioni’s film so emblematic of the turn from modernist structuralism to postmodernist relevancy. Here the viewer has no choice but to view the film with a sense of immediacy, appreciating each scene as it rolls by with a sense that this moment is important, this image is relevant to the sense of identity for each of us viewing the film. In Sontag’s equally important essay “Against Interpretation” from 1963, she heralds, “The world, our world, is depleted enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99). The larger-than-life vistas that loom in the background of the characters of L’Avventura are immediate signals of alienation in a world that demands to be viewed moment by moment.

In taking her ideas into the realm of visual metaphor, Sontag later on displays the sense which Antonioni is going for in L’Avventura, the sense that visual images mean more than what they appear on the surface, that they speak to underlying issues which their subjects hold. Sontag writes, “Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are” (175). But looking at a photographic image should not be a procedure of strict analysis. Rather, “Photographs are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood” (174).  Photograph images, and she mentions their use in film where they are more structured and more made to fit specific timelines of viewing, become one of the prime examples of Sontag’s thesis that art should be appreciated in the moment, viscerally and experienced “more immediately.” So when Antonioni sets up his shots of human individuals against dramatic natural backgrounds, he does so with the sense that the image needs to show an underlying message behind it, and to show that message in an immediate moment.

A dramatic image such as occurs in counter number 33:38 shows a single human juxtaposed against a gigantic natural background. A manmade structure is present, an abandoned shepherd’s lean-to; this is a common juxtaposition in the film -- a natural setting with a cold unemotional manmade structure in the same frame. The comparison of humanity with nature takes precedence in the interpretation.

 

Figure 1. A lone figure searches for Anna, who has disappeared.

The first thirty minutes of the film show a young girl, Anna, bored and disillusioned with her middle-class Italian life. She goes on the excursion with friends, including her boyfriend Sando and her best friend Claudia. Anna disappears. Though the title is disputed, this disappearance is the catalyst for the rest of the film, and it thus becomes the “adventure” of the title. The disappearance is never completely resolved, though it becomes less worrisome as the film progresses. Sand and Claudia continue searching for her over all of southern Italy once it becomes clear that she somehow left the island (probably). They search over the course of a few months, developing a love affair of their own which has its ups and downs, ending on a note of confusion as to how they will continue. That is the plot, such as it is.

Returning to image one, we see one of Anna’s friends, an older gentleman, searching for her. So the image has some relevancy to plot. But in the course of the immediate moment, the image is one of juxtaposition of the lone human individual with overtaking natural elements. Before relating the plot, that feeling, that sense of immediacy, is what overwhelms the viewer of the image. The individual pictured is older, more of a symbol of a bygone day, a modernist sense of loneliness in the face of a harsh world. His searching gaze for Anna is on a more immediate level a search for meaning in a harsh world of natural danger and man-made abandonment.

Three minutes later in the film, the still image which I have second in my progression shows this character returned to the bottom of the cliff to the spot where the party’s boat was anchored. At counter number 36:20 five characters stand, each looking in different directions. What are they looking for? Knowing the plot, the viewer may think they are looking for Anna. But none of them appear to be that concerned anymore. Instead they look in differing directions, none looking at any of the others, lost in their own disillusionment. The character in the back is Sando, Anna’s boyfriend. Even he appears more disillusioned than concerned.

Figure 2. Five friends are disillusioned with the search for Anna. They cannot communicate their unease, looking in different directions with varying degrees of annoyance.

 

 

The final image I present is Anna’s friend Claudia. The others are content to leave the island, letting maritime workers search for Anna. But the consensus is that she left the island with someone else, something the close viewer of the film would have seen in a distant motorboat’s departure, and something which is confirmed days later in Sando and Claudia’s search on the mainland. Anna, the protagonist of the first half hour of the film, is never seen on screen again. In this third image, counter number 38:14, Claudia has climbed back up to the top of the cliff and stands against a roaring sky of clouds and wind. Again, the viewer asks, “Is she searching for Anna?” If not, what could she be searching for? These questions betray what the image shows, that the disillusionment of the modern world set against a natural backdrop overwhelms the individual with a kind of despair. (The entire sequence of the film can best be viewed at counter numbers 33:25 through 38:14 in the link given in the Works Cited.)

Figure 3. Claudia is overwhelmed in the search for Anna against an ominous natural background.

     This disillusionment is not a new theme. For the modern authors of 1890s Britain, Thomas Hardy especially, the natural landscape is a treasure of mystical beauty and the ugliness or reality wrestling with each other. Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native and the title character of Jude the Obscure embrace the mystical beauty of their natural landscape in a fog-filled mystical blanket all the while wanting desperately to escape from these rural lands that imprison them. L’Avventura carries on this tradition of angst within the individual, but it does so through images of the manmade and the natural against which we see them juxtaposed. Their search is for a missing friend, not for escape from their lot in life. Yet we cannot help but see their displeasure at their identities when thrown against the images the world offers them.

L’Avventura won two British BAFTA awards, but was not as celebrated in America. The American director Martin Ritt pays homage to it as an influence of his popular 1964 film Hud starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. Throwing out these names of popular Hollywood icons is apropos at this point, though, because in relating how the imagery of the film acts as a metaphor for the disillusioned condition of the middle class, we enter the realm of how images present themselves as messengers of popularity. The consumer takes images from popular sources, such as films, and interprets them according to guidelines which are socially conditioned. Sometimes this process leads to an intended interpretation guided by the one presenting the message. See for instance the study of Malinowitz which investigates the notion of the flim-flam artist in popular literature, how that artist acts within the literature itself, and how that particular type of manipulation is prevalent in consumer society. L’Avventura is today an art film, but in the Europe of its time it was presented as an emotional adventure, much like the previous melodramas of Antonioni had been -- Le Amiches (The Girlfriends) for example. Interestingly enough, Antonioni’s film Blow Up from 1966 would be in English and would address the pop culture phenomenon of the ‘60s more directly in a story of hidden depravity within contemporary society masked by the new pop fads of 1960’s Britain. In that film, a photographer inadvertently captures what could be a murder in the shadows behind the subjects of his photography. The murderers find out and pull tricks of their own, hiding their true motives behind images of innocence in order to take the photographs from him. In L’Avventura, the imagery metaphor is subtle in its stratagem of intent. The intent is to show the pervasive disillusionment within middle class society, but to do so from a moment-by-moment clash of images rather than a modernist strategy of structural completion.

By appealing to the popularity of its director and the genre of film within which it was produced, L’Avventura becomes an example of the turn from a structure-oriented modernism to a more immediacy-oriented postmodernism. The message of the film is much like the disillusioned message of the modernist world, faced with the destructive elements of the aftermath of the world wars and the emptiness caused by a society replete with demands to conform to norms of consumerism. This aspect of the film makes some want to view it only as modernist and therefore only concerned with formal structure. But the postmodernist world confronts these consumerist images directly. Antonioni, along with Sontag and other pop artists of the 1960s, takes us beyond structure as we contemplate the image in its visceral, immediate reality.

 

References.

Antonioni, Michelangelo. Blow Up. Carlo Ponti producer, 1966

-----. L’Avventura. Amato Pennisilico producer, 1960. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7w1_UiKES8 (This study specifically centers on counter numbers 33:25 through 38:14.) Retrieved 30 Sept 2020.

-----. Le Amiches. Giovanni Addessi, producer, 1955.

Malinowitz, Harriet, “Textual Trouble in River City: Literacy, Rhetoric, and Consumerism in the Music Man." College English 62.1 (1999): 58-82.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984. 

-----. “Camp” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.

published 1/23/24 by Nicholas Harris