Word: avventura
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...shot of a blond woman, seen from the back in a spaghetti-strapped black dress, peering out at the sea. It could be the Mediterranean, the backdrop to the Grand Palais. But it's actually a remote Italian island; for the photo is from Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, a sensation when it showed at the 1960 Cannes fest - sensational because it was greeted with both acclaim and perplexed hostility. In Antonioni's modernist adventure, the central mystery of a missing girl was never solved. We hope that all the enigmas of Cannes 2009 will be answered by Sunday...
...Here, then, was a film that upended narrative, set a new tempo for serious movies and aspired not to theater but to painting. The combination of these innovations, or affronts, made L'Avventura a precedent-setting movie. So did the fierce debate surrounding it. Indeed, you could say that at that Cannes festival - as the professionals loved or hated, puzzled and argued over this beautiful, forbidding artifact - modernist cinema was born...
...Even the controversy about the mysterioso ending of L'Avventura could be seen as good showmanship: give 'em something to talk about on the way out of the theater. Antonioni's films soon became famous for their endings. The last 7-1/2 mins. of Eclipse comprises a series of static, underpopulated street scenes in which none of the major characters appear. Blowup we'll get to in a moment, and Zabriskie Point ends with the shot of a house ... that blows up. The next-to-last scene of The Passenger is one continuous, wildly elaborate tracking shot that lasts...
...like one continuous moving image. Antonioni, true to his creed, won't say - unless we are to take Blowup's last shot as the answer to this larger question. Thomas is seen from a distance alone on a green field. And then he disappears, as Anna had in L'Avventura. This is the anticonjuror's dogma: not seeing is believing...
...Criterion L'Avventura...