The Essentials: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Best Films

While he had made five previous movies, 1957’s “Il Grido” being the most essential of the bunch, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s career didn’t really begin in earnest until a May 1960 evening at the Cannes Film Festival where his latest film, “L’Avventura,” was met with boos, exaggerated yawns, loud jeers, and even derisive laughter. Antonioni had made a mysterious, sparse and opaque film that would define the rest of his career—an unusual movie, like many others that would follow, where “nothing happens,” at least in the estimation of his harshest critics. It was, as he described it, a type of film noir in reverse—a disaffected socialite goes on a boat trip with haute bourgeois friends only to suddenly vanish on a small and remote island; she is never found. In fact she’s forgotten and evaporates from the movie’s and the characters’ consciousness. As her memory fades into the background, her boyfriend and best friend go from concerned and investigative to eventually enamored of each other and tangled in their own troubled and tortured love affair. Yet the film is not a condemnation of their putatively shallow behavior—instead it’s an exploration of the inexplicable nature of love, moral ambivalence, and fragility of modern behavior.

Filmmaker, novelist, and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet (he wrote Alain Resnais‘ masterwork, “Last Year at Marienbad“) once said, describing Antonioni’s work with a comparable auteur, “In a Hitchcock film, the meaning of what you see on the screen is constantly delayed, but at the end of the film you understand everything. With Antonioni’s [films], it’s the exact opposite.” Spartan widescreen images were always clear, but the meaning was constantly evolving even as the film ended. And so it was that the day after the Cannes premiere, forty-odd artists from the festival, including Roberto Rossellini had written to Antonioni praising his daring. The film would go on to win a Special Jury Prize “for its remarkable contribution towards the search for a new cinematic language.”

Perhaps emboldened by this affirmation, Antonioni would continue with what he described as works of searching; intricate and enigmatic mood pieces centering on disaffected, spiritually adrift characters suffering the emotional sickness of ennui, alienation, apathy and existential crises. A product of European post-war cinema, Antonioni was described as a modernist in that he dared to push cinematic language forward, but he also attempted to express anachronistic morals and emotions (he sympathizes with the lovers in “L’Avventura” even if by the codes of modern society, they are backstabbers). And while class was always a theme to a certain extent, from the socialites in “Les Amiches,” to the vagabond father in “Il Grido,” to the affluent couples in his “alienation trilogy,” his chief concern was more with the fundamental discontent that seems to be a byproduct of wealth, not wealth itself.

Antonioni’s preoccupation with this cool, sometimes dispassionate “exquisite alienation” would often take a similar form; an austere but beautiful visual majesty, an architectural enormity that often oppressed the psychology of his characters within their environment (environment being everything to the filmmaker) and temps mort [dead time], those moments after the scene’s action really ends, when the camera’s gaze lingers, soaking up the inexpressible. “Nothing happens, man; it’s just a lot of people going nowhere,” Mark Frechette, one of Antonioni’s actors, once said of his films. But each film had a voyage, albeit one where characters were inevitably trapped in an intricate psychosis of indifference, ambivalence and weighted silences.

The filmmaker would be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1995, two years after the same honor was bestowed on his counterpart Federico Fellini. The latter will always be the greater household name in cinema, but with Antonioni’s contributions to the form and the dismantling of conventional grammar perhaps not getting their due appreciation from any but the most rarefied of cinephile circles over the years, we’d argue a wider reassessment can’t be far behind. Maybe with last week’s belated Criterion Collection release of “La Notte,” perhaps the most sensually striking of all his modern tetralogy, the time is now. With this wrong finally righted (we’re sure it was a rights thing but “La Notte” belonged in the collection a decade ago), we decided to take a look at the essentials of a sometimes overlooked titan of cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni.

“L’Avventura” (“The Adventure” 1960)
Anticipating Hitchcock’s daring protagonist switch before “Psycho,” as aforementioned, Antonioni’s sixth film was a breakthrough game-changer for the filmmaker and he would never look back. Eschewing conventional plot and narrative forms, the Italian modernist tapped into the European post-war zeitgeist by exploring notions of uncertainty, unease and ennui. A “noir in reverse,” “L’Avventura” is almost two different films in one: an austere, haunting and strangely disquieting first half where a socialite goes missing on a remote island while on a boat trip with her well-to-do friends, its chilly environment, as usual, is the perfect setting for the disaffected psychology of the characters (a fundamental element of all subsequent Antonioni films). In its second half, “L’Avventura” all but abandons the missing girl—she drifts away like a foggy, forlorn memory—and then tracks her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) as they eventually fall in love while initially searching in vain for their lost companion. The picture could be seen as an erosion of values—how friends abandon their compatriots for a shallow affair that’s likely not going to last, but Antonioni is actually operating on a more complex level and embracing their relationship, not condemning it (which is usually the case with the torrid affairs he depicts). For Antonioni, eroticism is an emotional tool to mask the characters shortcomings. Sandro, for instance, having sold out his artistic side for hollow work in the commercial world. In the end actions are never judged; this is not about consequences. As such, “L’Avventura,” is a bold but apropos title, forcing us to think of this type of affair as an adventure that may not lead anywhere or even mean very much, in its exploration of the complexities of desire, longing and connection. Because just like Antonioni’s similarly themed explorations that followed, it’s a film that almost never provides satisfying or easy answers to the mysteries of human behavior.