Audio transcription
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John Quackenbush 0:01
October 5, 2012. The Harvard Film Archive screened L’avventura. This is the recording of the introduction by HFA programmer David Pendleton.
David Pendleton 0:13
[BEGINNING AUDIO MISSING] In our retrospective we will be including all of his feature films and many of his short films—all of his feature films made up until his stroke in 1985. Therefore, we'll be going from his early documentaries through the groundbreaking films starring Monica Vitti through his international period when he was shooting in London and in the US and in China, and then on to the later experiments.
But we begin tonight in L’avventura from 1960. When Antonioni made this film he was already a well known filmmaker in Italy, and was getting some regular exposure at the major European film festivals. But after this film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, he went well on his way to becoming a major international figure… although also a divisive one, it must be said, as you can see from the premiere at Cannes. If you read the reviews from Cannes every year, there's always films that get booed and one of them was L’avventura or so the story goes. The story goes that Antonioni and Monica Vitti, his lead actor, were both reduced to tears at the reception of the film at Cannes, and yet two years later in 1962, it placed second in Sight and Sound’s film poll—which goes to show you both how radically influential the film was, how well received it was, but also how controversial or divisive It was.
Like Godard, Antonioni is one of those figures associated with modern cinema, who's seen as a divisive figure. More than anyone else, his name that's associated with the rise of what we might call “art cinema,” that is to say narrative feature films, where the image takes primacy over speech, where ambiguity is more important than then final meaning where plots might sort of come together and then dissolve, appear to be missing sections, etc. And it's the modernity and the modernism of Antonioni’s approach to narrative that made him so well known, and they also go hand in hand with the way that he approaches presenting space and time on screen. He sort of takes up where the Neorealists left off in postwar time in cinema with deep focus. That is, where everything all the way to the background in the frame is in focus, which emphasizes the place of the characters within the frame, the sense of space within the image. And at the same time goes for elliptical narratives, episodic narratives, and always ambiguous endings. In fact, sometimes Antonioni is seen as sort of the master of the long take—that is, using very lengthy shots—but if you look at the actual length of Antonioni shots, they've ranged widely from film to film, and my guess is that it has more to do with the long silences in the film, the sparseness often of the action, that makes the shots seem longer than they are.
Just a little bit of biography: Antonioni was something of a renaissance figure. He was born in Ferrara in 1912, and took an interest in architecture as a young man. That interest as you'll see, never leaves him. He also took up painting as a teenager and you'll see that the male protagonist in L’avventura is an architect—or wants to be an architect, works for an architectural firm—and one of the other characters is a teenage painter. He also began writing at a young age, although he studied business and economics at the University of Bologna and went to work as a bank teller in Ferrara to support himself while he began working in amateur theatrics and eventually became a film critic. And then finally, in the very beginning in the 1940s, enrolled in the famous Centro Sperimentale di Cinema, the famous film school in Rome, and actually was beginning to work on his first film, the short documentary People of the Po River Valley at the height of the war, got involved in the resistance, then went on to make a number of short films in the late 1940s. And then began making features in 1950 and sort of slowly followed this rising [INAUDIBLE] arc throughout the 1950s until as I said, he announced himself internationally with L’avventura, his first collaboration with Monica Vitti, the actress. She was a classically trained actress, but what Antonioni especially loved about working with her was the expressiveness of her face, which really comes through in the three films that he made with her that are often called the a trilogy or the trilogy: L’avventura, La Notte and The Eclipse. She also stars in a couple of subsequent films, as you'll see.
So just finally, a word about the title of the film L’avventura. It’s one of those titles that's always kept in the original language. In English, the word simply means “adventure.” It could be meant, ironically, in a way. Adventure suggests epic which suggests that the story—which is about a young woman who leaves or who vanishes—is a sort of anti-Odyssey, or sort of ironic Odyssey and the word also means a fling or an affair. And that brings up Antonioni’s great theme in these films in the early 1960s, which is about what happens to emotions, what happens to sexuality, to affect, to romance, in a world where tradition is vanishing, and modernity is encouraging an emphasis on a kind of a capitalist view where nothing's meant to last, where things are meant to be exchanged, etc.
Finally, just a few things, I want to thank Cinecittà Luce and Cineteca Nazionale for their prints and for their help in making these screenings possible. We're about to see a beautiful print of L’avventura from the Cineteca Nazionale that's based on restoration on which Antonioni himself worked near the end of his life. (We’ll be projecting the subtitles electronically this evening.) And finally, I want to thank the people who really made this program possible and who were instigators at the very beginning. It's been our fortune lately when we show Italian cinema to partner with the Consulate General of Italy in Boston. And we've had, I think, some really remarkable collaborations with them. For that I want to thank the Consul General Giuseppe Pastoralli and the Head of Cultural Affairs Ubaldo Panitti, who's here to say a few words. After he speaks, we'll also be looking at the trailer for Blow-Up. Although the trailer is incredibly faded. The film itself will not look like this. We have a beautiful print from our own collection. But it's interesting to see the way that Antonioni was marketed to a mass audience, particularly for Blow-Up, which of course was the film about swinging in London. In any case, I will stop talking now. But please welcome to the podium and please thank Head of Cultural Affairs Ubaldo Panitti.
Ubaldo Panitti 7:25
Thank you, David. Just a few words, I will be very brief. Don't worry. I would just like to thank David, Haden and all the staff at Harvard Film Archive for the terrific job that they did in collecting all the movies from Cinecittà Luce and Cineteca Nazionale.
[AUDIO ENDS]
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