L'avventura (1960) - by Faro

        L’avventura means “the Adventure”, and in this case the director Michelangelo Antonioni  is using the word as an ironic joke. This film takes place near mystery and adventure, but never brings it fully into the frame nor allows for traditional narrative development. This is because a story of bold adventure is not the goal of this film; Antonioni is interested in images... the relationship between characters and the scenery of life at a purely visual level. Language and narrative merely set the context for the images.

 

So what is truly happening in this film? We have two idle girls, Anna and Claudia, joining friends for a private boat trip. On board are three coupled lovers; bored, bitter, and indifferent. But Claudia is a single girl who stands a bit apart from all this languid indulgence. They come to an island, and shortly after arriving on this barren rock her friend Anna disappears (...was that another boat leaving in the distance in one brief scene? difficult to say...), and it seems that a mysterious adventure has begun.

 

Let us look closer, and view this mystery through Claudia’s eyes. Even before the adventure begins we see Claudia looking away from her friends off the back of the boat,

then after the disappearance of Anna she looks around the island but eventually ends up staring deep into the maelstrom of the waters crashing against an inlet of the island,

after one night and one day they give up the search for Anna and begin to travel aimlessly. We find Claudia exploring the house of the rich and powerful that she has joined with, but she is looking out at the mountains,

and she finally accepts the tenacious advances of Anna’s lover and there is a flurry of passion 

that becomes cool within days. So we watch her one early morning as she seeks him in the disarray left from an elegant party that he attended the night before while she chose to turn in early,

and she finds him with an expensive call-girl and runs out and leaves the hotel, making him come after her, and in the end she stands strong beside him and looks at Mt. Etna (an active volcano) while he sits and cries from guilt and ennui.

All of this activity, all of this searching, and all of it with her back to the camera. Not looking at us, not looking at the people around her, but looking outward and thus signaling her tangential connection to the so-called narrative. The mystery of her lost friend quickly evaporates. Her affair w/ Anna’s lover dissolves into separation. In the end she is strong and merciful, accepting him and his weakness, but still she is looking out and away. 

This is the essence of the movie. This whole film she has been involved in her own private searching, the search to better understand her relationship to the epic scope of the natural world by looking at it from the confines of man-made structures; boats, houses, relationships, hotels. As John Berger so eloquently expressed, it is “About Looking”. That is where she and the director explore the private adventure of Self... in the Images.