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Alternatively, if you wish to purchase this article individually, you may do so via JSTOR. Please follow the instructions on this page.I. L'Avventura: An Abstract Solitude
A filmmaker is a man like any other; and yet his life is not
the same. Seeing
is for us a necessity. For a painter too the problem is one of
seeing; but
while for the painter it is a matter of uncovering a static
reality, or at most
a rhythm that can be held in a single image, for a director the
problem is
to catch a reality which is never static, is always moving toward
or away
from a moment of crystallisation, and to present this movement,
this arriving
and moving on, as a new perception.1
What do I remember most about Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura? A woman disappears. Her friends look for her. There are lots of shots of waves crashing against the desolate island where this takes place. She is never found.
The film caused a scandal when it was first screened, primarily because of the anguished cries of 'what happened to the narrative?' For many, it seemed as if Antonioni had gone off the deep end, taken many of his followers with him. More than anything else, the film was accused of being boring. Forty years later, we know better.
The director's emphasis on 'seeing' in the text cited above is an obvious, yet integral, aspect of the ways in which Antonioni constructs his films so that the viewer may recognise the difference between stasis and movement. This is at the heart of his distinction between cinema and painting. One, despite how fluid it may appear, is irrevocably static. The other, even when it is perceived as slow and deliberate, is inexorably
