FOURTH ENTRY: L'AVVENTURA (1960)[For information on this 10-part list see here]
Michelangelo Antonini is one of the those directors whose films define the film snob in all of us. Foreign, avant-garde, and lacking conventional pacing or plotting, I bet with the glances of a few frames of his movies you can immediately imagine a bunch of film school students smoking, in berets, discussing the merits of his movies in independently-owned coffee houses in college towns or bohemian urban districts.
The first film I saw of his was Blowup, and it was probably one of the first movies, anything by Stanley Kubrick aside, where camera movement and vivid imagery seemed to be more captivating than characters or story. I saw this maybe when I was 19 or 20, and I felt after the film concluded that my movie-watching leisure time was irreversibly stolen away by a film that went off on tangents and wrapped up inconclusively. It had a lot of visual flash but no substance, which is how I would describe a brain-dead multiplex blockbuster, but in this sense Blow-Up had the appeal of an art gallery exhibit, containing incredible images but not enough narrative movement to be appropriate for the film medium.
Go years into the future and into my Netflix era. I had already spent a summer in D.C. and a year or two in Chicago and through the accompanying access to high-quality and diverse independent art movies, I had already internalized an expectation for an adventurous spirit in filmmaking, regardless of how non-narrative or unstructured the core plot might be. If I could leave the theater challenged, moved, or compelled by the cinematic medium, not necessarily in equal combinations, than the movie was worth watching.
I don’t know why L'avventura came up to the top of my Netflix ‘Q’ but I was watching it prepared for the uncertain film-going experience I had from watching Blow-Up. For some reason, as I began my habit of looking up as much non-spoiler movie information before I had time to watch it, I saw a review of the DVD release of L'avventura that claimed the commentary track on the movie to be “the best commentary track ever”. More on that in a little bit.
L'avventura, on the surface, is incredibly easy to summarize. Two incredibly attractive Italian female friends go on a boating trip with a bunch of other eccentric friends, one of whom is the lover of one of the girls, a real smug fellow. The boating trip is to this isolated rocky island off the Italian coast. While they patiently explore the rock, the girl attached to the smug guy disappears. The mystery of the missing girl dissolves from the plot of the movie as the remaining girl and the guy start a romantic relationship while they travel. I'll leave it that so the conclusion won't be spoiled.
After the rather anti-climatic ending to this movie, I felt a similar frustration just like after I watched Blow-Up, in that I was wondering if that really was all I was going to get from this movie. At over 2 hours, it seemed to take a long time to get to a barely significant plot resolution. However, I had another block of time to play the commentary track over the movie as I watched it in full for a second time. My philosophy on commentary tracks is there are way too many movies of all stripes out there, and if I’m going to commit my leisure time to be a moderate film buff, I simply can’t bother with a bunch of extra comments beyond the pure work of film itself, unless the movie is tremendously compelling, revolutionary, or so unique that I have to know the artistic motivation behind it. L'avventura didn’t really meet these criteria, but “best commentary track ever” and a lazy Sunday was motivation enough to give the film another whirl.
The commentary was not a celebrity or director but a film scholar discussing the innovative film-making style L’Avventura displayed. While I was impatiently moving from meandering and philandering scene during the first watch, the director was actually using a compelling new film language, what the scholar called ‘metonymic’ film-making. As with abstract philosophy or anything based on denying what you see and comprehend, ‘metonymic’ film-making is hard to describe but I took it to mean a representation of the visual environment, through film, that serves as a commentary on what the film is trying to express. It’s best illustrated through examples the scholar discusses on the commentary track. At the beginning of L'avventura, the main female character’s father argues with her in an open field with buildings in the background: on the father’s side is an old Church, and on the daughter’s side is an apartment building in construction, representing old relics and new ideas on the landscape, respectively. As the two girls and smug guy go through a tunnel on the way to their journey, it serves as an actual passageway from one character’s situation to another. Finally, as the group on the yacht trip explore the empty, rocky island where the girl disappears, the emptiness and desolation of the environment reflects the shallow interactions of the characters, while intricately engineered shots have the younger explorers appear in the distant background of the older characters, as if they were thought balloons, or younger versions of these older couples. Without training in this film language, all of this is not obvious, but once the commentary track informed me, I felt like I had just stumbled onto a secret cinema code that might be able to explain a lot of other visually or narratively confusing films, especially those by Antonini. An essential point on the commentary track was the scholar's views on why the director used this technique. The inner emotional battles going on under the surface of the characters could just not be naturally expressed in dialogue, and so the filmmaker decided to use objects, angles, and the placement of film elements to offer a hint at these character's feelings in a poetic, uniquely cinematic way. So what I thought was an all style and no substance story was almost the entire point... I just didn't bother to notice the true star of the movie, the director, offering explanation and exposition in every subtle frame.
I can’t tell you how annoying and alienating it is in mediocare to moderate quality TV, literature, or movies to have to tolerate the clumsy exposition scene. What might seem natural or almost believable in a work of fiction completely gets shattered by a character explaining how they feel, or revealing a plot mystery in a way that no human being would ever actually speak. I understand that there has to be some suspension of disbelief that these are actual real characters and some forgiveness, especially in an episodic TV format, of plot plausibility in order to have a drama wrap up nicely in 45 minutes to make room for another wacky adventure next week. But snobbery aside, why waste time and lose authenticity to have a character describe how they feel when you can make the situation so natural and universal that you don’t need to be told what a character is thinking. In the 'metonymic' style of L'avventura, images are provided as a way for the viewer to use their own abstract emotional experiences and personal past to empathize with the characters. One of the great things about the one-season long Freaks and Geeks is that on the surface the plots are mundane and typical of many high school youth dramas, but the outright honesty of the characters and the completely believable dialogue places your adolescent experiences right with the freaks or geeks at their respective corner tables at the lunch-hall cafeteria, with the occasional well-placed rock anthem adding an exclamation point to teenage angst by tapping into musical memories as well. What L'avventura (and it turns out a lot of other movies that I adore) argues is that it’s much more natural to use imagery rather than dialogue to convey emotions that can never be adequately articulated. In fact, representing emotions this way makes them more stronger. A technique that the film scholar mentions is that Antonnini goes a step further than Freaks and Geeks and many other movies by eliminating almost any background music. There’s no swelling of strings to let you know it’s time to cry and no shrieky violins to tell you to be scared (with apologies to Bernard Hermann and Alfred Hitchcock). Rather you are just supposed to look and listen to the environment and gradually take in the filmmaker's perspective as he angles his shots and provides deliberate fade-in and fade-outs to tap into your own subconscious processing of these character’s motivations.
Needless to say I was very excited to pick up a DVD of La Notte, Antoninni's follow-up to L'avventura . I had a sense that I would be viewing it in a uniquely intense way that I have never watched a movie before. It was a compelling viewing experience too (with no commentary track to set me straight), but I'm sure his style evolved and there were new ways he was representing the unstated in that film. There's also a danger in looking for symbolism and metonyms too much. Unless I know beforehand that a filmmaker was deliberately composing every frame in this style, I'd rather pay attention to everything more urgent in a new movie that I see, like plot, characters, acting, etc. That aside, L'avventura sparked a new understanding of film that I can't shake off. If I am confused or upset by a film that isn't straightforward, I'm no longer going to dismiss it as over my head. Rather, like the best visual art, these films are going to require focused study and repeated viewings in order to unravel the enigmatic expressions truly creative filmmakers present.
