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Director: Michelangelo
Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini,
Tonino Guerra
Photography: Aldo Scavarda
Art Director: Piero Poletto
Music: Giovanni Fusco
Cast: Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari,
Dominique Blanchar, Renzo Ricci, Lelio Luttazzi, Esmeralda
Ruspoli, James Addams, Dorothy De Poliolo
Editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Producer: Cino Del Duca
Copy restored by Mediaset Cinema Forever
and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia,
in co-operation with Compass Film and
Société Cinématographique Lyre
Year: 1960. Running Time: 140’
Anna, the wealthy daughter of a retired diplomat and engaged
to Sandro, a young architect, is invited, along with her
friend Claudia, on a cruise on the yacht of a rich
shipbuilder. The cruise party arrives in the Eolie Islands
through superb ocean views, but none of the participants
seems to perceive the magic beauty of the place. During a
scheduled stop, Anna suddenly disappears. The yacht must
return immediately to avoid the incoming storm, but Sandro
and Claudia remain behind to search for Anna. While absorbed
in their pursuit of Anna, a fatal attraction develops
between the two and little by little turns into a feeling
that unites them. them. The conclusion takes place in
Taormina, as the new couple rejoins their cruise companions
and no one asks for news of Anna. The same night, Claudia
discovers Sandro with another woman and immediately flees.
Eventually, Sandro finds her and she, resignedly, forgives
him.
L’Avventura firmly consolidated the international
reputation of Michelangelo Antonioni, officially nominated
the prophet of the impossibility of communication in 1960.
The first episode in a superb trilogy on love – though not
only love, also the stresses of contemporary life,
loneliness – that includes La Notte and
L’Eclisse (and the epilogue of Deserto Rosso),
L’Avventura is one of Antonioni’s most perfect and
significant creations. The one in which, telling the story
of the existential disappearance of a person and the birth
of a contrasting feeling, he outlines a manifesto for a
cinema of silence, one that penetrates human feelings more
deeply and manages to transmit such feelings in intensity of
a face, in a slow moving sequence or in the ‘noise’ of
nature.
Shot in the face of endless financial and climatic
difficulties in the Eolie Islands during force 8 gale, the
film was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival. It was
greeted with such contrasting opinions that the director and
his new muse, Monica Vitti immediately packed their bags to
return sadly to Italy. But then it received the jury’s
special prize in recognition of a new approach to modern
cinema that was not rhetoric and was more European than
Italian.
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Michelangelo Antonioni
He is known as one of the great masters of cinema. Born in Ferrara,
he worked as the assistant director and collaborated on the script
for Un Pilota Ritorna (1942) by Rossellini, and directed
his first documentary, Gente del Po, in 1947. At 38, he
shot his first film, Cronaca di un Amore (1950), an acute
analysis of a couple in crisis, which was continued in La
Signora senza Camelie (1952) and Le Amiche (1955), in
which he outlines the recurring themes in his films on the
difficulty of existence: of maintaining true, stabile relationships
in the uneasiness of man. He rose to international fame with
L’Avventura (1960), which won the jury’s special award at the
Cannes Film Festival. After Deserto Rosso (1964), he began
filming abroad, in America and England, the films Blow-up
(1967) and Professione: Reporter (1972). After a long
reprieve, he returned to film in 1995 with Al di la’delle nuvole,
co-directed with Wim Wenders, which won the Fipresci award in
Venezia. He was awarded the Oscar for his Career, and in 2004, he
participated in an outside competition at the 61st Cinema Exhibition
of Venice with his episode of the film Eros.
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