#34 — L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
When launching into the list for the nineteen-sixties, I thought about noting how many mainstays of the decade countdowns up to this point would now be absent from the proceedings, including Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg and especially Martin Scorsese. As it turns out, I have a way of invoking the latter, which does bring me a dose of relief. While I’m always trying to track through the classic cinema I’ve missed–especially the classic foreign films that remain my most shameful blind spot–I know that I specifically watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura for the first time because of Martin Scorsese. After the great Italian film director’s death, in 2007, Scorsese was enlisted to write an appreciation of the man and artist, focusing most of his attention on the 1960 classic that, as Scorsese put it, “gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies.” That was good enough for me. I watched it at my first opportunity.

I’d love to report that I collapsed into the film’s carefully rhythmless rhythms, finding the purity of Antonioni’s vision to be as transformational for me as it was for little Marty from Queens (well, not so little, as Scorsese would have been in his late teens when L’Avventura was released). I don’t know if that was even possible anymore, given the decades of widening ripples of influence that I had to surf over to get to the original vision. Still, it was bracing, challenging, intoxicating and elusive. It was cinema translated into a dream and then back again, logic and continuity falling away like tender, flaking skin. The film involves a group of privilege people embarking on a yacht journey, and eventually the mysterious disappearance of one member of the party. Even that single sentence gives the plot too much weight, makes it overly prominent in the vernacular of the film. If the deepest films are those which use the story as a conduit for greater points, then L’Avventura demonstrates that the greater points can sometimes resound so strongly that they vibrate the story into rickety framework with shards of sheetrock dangling precariously. It may still be there, but it’s a ghost of a thing.

Any thesis I put forward about Antonioni’s deeper meaning–the slippery nature of truth, the way passionate need fades into indifference, the rot within the wealthy class–would be the flimsiest guesswork. In a way, that’s exactly why I like and admire L’Avventura. In it’s stubbornness to avoid easy analysis, the film becomes a sort of meditation on the breadth of cinema itself, expanding beyond accepted boundaries to demonstrate how mood and feel and hypnotic imagery can can have an impact as surely as clockwork plotting and piercing dialogue. I don’t watch L’Avventura–as I perhaps should–with the studiousness of a cineaste striving to unlock its secrets. Instead, I’m an audience member willingly transported, as assuredly as if it were some perfectly realize fantasy film or stirring interstellar adventure. I put myself in Antonioni’s hands, sure that there’s a purpose to where he carries me. Scorsese noted that his repeat viewings of L’Avventura and Antonioni’s like-minded films had a simple motivation: “I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wandering through them.” I can’t claim to see Antonioni’s masterpiece the way Scorsese does, but I at least identify with his sensation of blissful wanderlust.