Antonioni: the man who set film free

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: and being together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their lives and gave them a kind of meaning.

The more I saw L’Avventura—and I went back many times—the more I realised that Antonioni’s visual language was keeping us focused on the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo, which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly, inexorably, allowing what I eventually realised were the emotional shortcomings of the characters—Sandro’s frustration, Claudia’s self-deprecation—quietly to overwhelm them and push them into another ‘adventure’, and then another and another. Just like that opening theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and dissipating. Endlessly.

Where almost every other movie I’d seen wound things up, L’Avventura wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness, cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realised something extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.

L’Avventura gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than Breathless or Hiroshima, Mon Amour—made by two other modern masters, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, both of them still alive and working or ‘La Dolce Vita’. At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked L’Avventura. I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired ‘La Dolce Vita’, but I was challenged by L’Avventura.

Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in F Scott Fitzgerald’s novels—of which I later discovered that Antonioni was very fond, were about as foreign to my own life as it was possible to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant.