L'avventura
L’avventura is the first part of the ‘love trilogy’ which also includes La notte and L’eclisse. Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s second muse, stars in all three films. When a young woman (Lea Massari) goes missing during a cruise, her fiancé and her best friend go looking for her, with surprising results. Film programme to accompany the Antonioni exhibition ‘Il maestro del cinema moderno’.
The premise seems simple enough: Anna, a rich young woman (Lea Massari) disappears on a boat trip along the South-Italian coast and her fiancé Sandro and best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) go looking for her. Their search for Anna leads the two across a rocky, blustery and desolate island, where previously unexpressed feelings now find an outlet. The film was booed when it premiered at Cannes: the unsolved disappearance was regarded as an offensive technical weakness of the script. Antonioni was able to collect the Jury Prize only after a support campaign was launched.
The trilogy L”avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L”eclisse (1962) – all three starring Antonioni”s muse Monica Vitti – is regarded as the beginning of modern cinema. Antonioni strongly believed in meticulously stylized images, convinced as he was that narrative dialogues and action would only get in the way of the psychology of the characters. He preferred to express feelings of alienation and faltering communication in carefully choreographed mise-en-scène and beautifully framed, desolate shots of cities and landscapes.
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Michelangelo Antonioni
From 12 September 2015 to 17 January 2016, Eye presented Michelangelo Antonioni – Il maestro del cinema moderno, an exhibition about one of the foremost innovators in film from the last century. The exhibition showed how Antonioni renewed the grammar of film by thinking in terms of the image and less in terms of narrative.
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