Looking back at The Adventure
by Douglas Messerli
[ filmreviews ]
With the deaths on July 30, 2007, of two great directors, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, I determined that I should write about both, since they had together greatly impacted my thinking about film and my enjoyment of the genre. In July 2006 I had written an essay on Antonioni's L'Avventura, and I also wanted to reconsider a film about which I had had mixed feelings about upon my first viewing six years after that first film, Blow-Up. After seeing Blow-Up anew, I still have some qualms about it, but as with Antonioni's earlier work, those stem from the opposite of what most viewers often express. For me the Italian director is too narratively structured, too literal in his storytelling. But no one interested in the art of cinema can truly question his mastery of the visual image. And that is what draws me to his works again and again.
Outside the frame
When L'Avventura was first shown at the 1960 Cannes film festival, the audience expressed their hostility to the film with whistles, foot-stamping, and derisive shouts. Although the movie was more enthusiastically received by the critics, and won that year's Special Jury Prize, its American premier resulted in a near-complete puzzlement on the part of noted critics such as Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times. "Watching L'Avventura ('The Adventure'), which came to the Beekman yesterday, is like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several reels have got lost. Just when it seems to be beginning to make a dramatic point or to develop a line of continuity that will crystallize into some sense, it will jump into a random situation that appears as if it might be due perhaps three reels later and never explain what has been omitted." "'Tis strange," Crowther concluded.
If over the years Antonioni's film has grown in reputation, even its admirers have continued to stress the film's seemingly disjunctive and unconventional narrative. My beloved guide to World Film Directors (published by HW Wilson) describes the work as eschewing conventional narrative, as a film "without story." Film historian Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, in a lovely essay on L'Avventura, reprinted in the New Criterion DVD of the film, describes it as a groundbreaking work that revealed:
"...films do not have to be structured around major events, that very little drama can happen and a film can still be fascinating to its audience. It also showed - and this was harder for audiences to grasp - that events in films do not have to be, in an obvious way, meaningful. L'Avventura presents its characters behaving according to motivations unclear to themselves as much as to the audience. ...They are, to use a word very fashionable at the time the film came out, alienated. But to say, as many critics did, that the film is "about" alienation is to miss the point. The film shows, it doesn't argue."
In short, while still admitting to the difficulty of Antonioni's cinema masterwork, admirers argued - concurring with the director's own comments published in his Cannes Statement - that the narrative was a non-psychological one, that although the characters might be aware of their erotic impulses, being conscious of them does not diminish their force: "The fact that matters is that such an examination is not enough. It is only is only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adventure. For even though we know that the ancient codes of morality are decrepit and no longer tenable, we persist, with a sense of perversity that I would only ironically define as pathetic, in remaining loyal to them." Nowell-Smith argues that this non-pyschological approach, in fact, changed the face of cinema in representing its characters as doing unexpected things in unexpected places, as acting in ways which are recognizable perhaps but which do not conform to the previous cinematic "clichés of how we think things ought to happen."
Although I had previously missed viewing this important film, I knew of its reputation and had read just such comments. Upon finally getting the opportunity to view it, accordingly, I was surprised at how differently from both its detractors and admirers I perceived it forty-six years later.
Perhaps it is simply because I prefer non-pyscholgical narratives that I saw the movie so differently. Or perhaps over these many years our perceptions of films and cinematic images have so radically changed that it is difficult to understand the reactions of filmgoers and commentators in 1960, the year when I had just become a teenager.
Perhaps one should begin with the dominating feature of the movie, its images shot primarily in shades of gray: the blasted landscape of the island where the action begins and the several small Sicilian villages and town - with their sometimes menacing and often liberating architectural structures - the central couple explore in the second half of the film, today still seem fresh. As we know through his other films (it is the theme, indeed, of his Blow-Up) Antonioni primarily is a filmmaker whose art is centered on how the camera reveals and creates meaning as opposed to using images to structure a narrative presentation of the real.
The narrative of L'Avventura, accordingly, is a loosely strung series of events. A group of affluent vacationers are gathered on a yacht off the coast of Sicily. Among the passengers are Anna (Lea Massari), her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), along with the yacht's owner, Patrizia, Raimondo, Giulia, and Corrado. Anna and Sandro have evidently been having some difficulties with their relationship, particularly concerning Sandro's recurring absences, and - as the group decides to swim and, later, explore a nearby deserted volcanic island, Brasilazzo - she confesses to Sandro that she needs some further time away from him in order to reassess their affair.
The visitors settle down for a pleasant sun-bathe, but when they begin to plan their departure, realize that Anna is nowhere in sight. At first, they presume she's simply gone for a short walk, and Sandro and Claudia, in particular, irritatedly search for her. When their efforts fail, the others join in, scouring the small mountainous island, ultimately peering into the waters about in fear of an accident or (is it possible?) suicide. Anna cannot be found, and most the group return to the yacht to seek out help from the nearest police station. Sandro, Claudia, and Corrado remain on the island, a rainstorm driving them into a small cabin they have discovered in their searches. Writing of the movie, nearly all previous commentators have been mystified or, at least, bothered by the fact that Antonioni's story never reveals what becomes of Anna.
It is during the search for Anna that we first begin to perceive that Claudia and Sandro are attracted to one another; by the end of their search, they desperately attempt to keep a distance between themselves. Sandro leaves the island to check other nearby islands - compelled by the possibility that Anna escaped on a passing boat they may have heard - while Claudia agrees to join the party at the Montaldo's grand house.
At their palazzo, however, Claudia becomes more and more distracted as she obviously feels increasing guilt for ceasing to search for her missing friend and simultaneously is drawn to reconnoiter with Sandro. Gloria's vengeful flirtation (her husband has verbally abused her throughout the early part of this film) with the young Prince Goffredo adds to Claudia's sense of displacement and frustration. Hearing that Sandro is traveling to a small town where a pharmacist has claimed to have encountered Anna, she leaves her sanctuary, meeting Sandro as he is inquires into the facts. After meeting with the pharmacist and his unhappy wife, the couple follows his suggestion that Anna may have taken the bus to Noto. As they travel in that direction their passion for each other boils over, and stopping briefly at a seemingly deserted village whose ugly architecture repels them, they consummate their love in a field nearby.
The rest of the story primarily concerns their vacillating passion set against the landscape of Noto. When they finally check into a hotel on the outskirts of town, having nearly abandoned their attempts to find Anna, they encounter Patrizia and others in the midst of a grand party which they are suddenly expected to attend. Claudia claims to be too tired; Sandro, attending to the party without her, is drawn to a girl who, from a distance, looks remarkably similar to the dark-haired Anna.
Claudia is unable to sleep, and when Sandro fails to return, goes in search of him, discovering her new lover and the woman in the midst of sex on a banquet-room couch. As Claudia runs from the building in tears, Sandro joins her, himself breaking down in remorse. The film ends with her stroking his head in apparent forgiveness for his sexual digression.
There is no doubt that the plot I have just recounted is minimal and that character motivations - some of which I have interpolated in my above description - are often left vague. The immensely slow pace of the film's "story," moreover - the director's almost indolent presentation of events (it is not incidental that both female characters spend much of the movie in bed and that near the end of the film, as I have recounted, the major actor is simply too tired to participate in events) - draws the viewer's attention away from the film's narrative conventions. Nonetheless, I would argue that the tale of this missing woman and its effects on the characters are quite comprehensible to even a novice of psychological motivation.
This is not the story, after all, of two women who fall in love with the same man, but of the love of three individuals for each other. An early scene on the yacht soon after Anna has pretended to spot a shark (a clear cry for help), in which she and Claudia remove their swimsuits and play a game of "dressing up," ending in Anna's offering of her costumes to Claudia (perhaps hinting to her friend that she "take over" her life) reveals the closeness of these two women. I am not implying that the two have a lesbian relationship (although, given the film's narrative openness, this scene suggests there may be sublimated sexual desires, a possibility reiterated by an earlier scene in which Claudia impatiently and, perhaps, frustratedly, waits outside the apartment where her friend and Sandro have sex), but proffer these incidents up as evidence that they are more than casual friends.
If the reader will permit me, let me play the role, for a moment, of an amateur psychologist. As anyone who has lost a close friend knows, there is often a mutual attraction - if for no other reason than to share in the inevitable guilt of surviving and the need to heal one's sense of loss - between friends of that individual. If the relationship has also been a sexual one, as with Anna and Sandro, that attraction can further extend to a sexual desire between the remaining friends. As in many such instances, these two figures attempt to deny that attraction, which only ends in further frustration and greater unassuaged guilt. Each can only feel that they are, in part, responsible for whatever has happened, and in this case, they have some reason to suspect they are personally culpable. The pent up emotions can gradually grow to enormous proportions until - as Antonioni has suggested - the codes of morality are broken. Claudia and Sandro are emotionally compelled to release their shared love for Anna in the arms of one another, and everything in their own pasts comes tumbling upon them in that act. As Claudia says, life has become complicated. The gentle strokes that Claudia shares with Sandro at film's end, accordingly, do not emanate perhaps as much from her acceptance of his personal betrayal as from her recognition that in his sexual encounter with the stranger he has sought to assuage his guilt, to be reunited with the missing Anna. Finally, one must not overlook the obvious, that each of them is an unmarried, attractive young person to whom the other quite simply is sexually drawn.
The reason these characters seem so fresh to us and so removed from the standard cinematic (and dramatic) stereotypes is not because the characters act without motivation - any of the thousands of cartoonishly drawn film figures of the last forty years might be representative of such unmotivated behavior - but because they are so deeply psychologically drawn. These actors behave like real people facing the intense personal dilemmas with which human beings are often faced. In opposition to Gloria and Goffredo's childlike sexual flirtations, Sandro and Claudia are flawed adults who act out the natural whims - the "adventures" - of mind and heart. The only alienation they must face relates to the empty-headed friends of the fiction in which they are imprisoned, for they are recognizably close to those of us who wait outside the camera's frame.
Deception
Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up begins with an image of deception. Released from either prison or a flophouse (several reviewers have suggested the latter), Thomas, along with other denizens of the place, moves slowly through the gate. The skuzzy young man - whose face, somewhat like Pound's metro image of "petals on a wet, black bough" stands out (he is played after all the photogenic actor David Hemmings) against the other gauntly determined faces of the others - carries a small paper sack like a treasure, keeping his distance from his fellow inmates, seemingly resisting their friendly (we hear none of their conversation) advances. The moment they have walked away, Thomas turns and walks in the other direction, settling into a convertible and throwing the bag containing what we now perceive as an expensive camera, into the back seat. If we haven't guessed, we might at least suspect something is not as it seems - and, indeed, we later discover that the central figure of this film has been on a secretive "shoot," snapping shots of the men inside the institution for a book of photographs he is planning to publish with the help of his friend, Ron (Peter Bowles).
Immediately after, we are presented with a carload of screaming mimes, what should be a contradiction in terms, out on what appears to be an obnoxious early morning joyride (I once quipped that all mimes should be shot at birth), but is actually a "rag," a raucous mod-60s way of raising money for charity.
Thomas returns to his studio/home, ready to shoot the "birds," dressed in the newest mod fashions, over whom he hovers while caressing and kissing each in order to get them to "perform," while also, alternately berating and verbally abusing them. Such evidently is the lot of a fashion model, for despite all the abuse, the women wait patiently between his frequent absences, while new would-be models stand at his door hoping to gain his admittance.
A quick visit to his artist friend Bill next door reveals the similar issues of deception and self-delusion. He clearly is deluding himself about his relationship with his live-in girlfriend, Patricia (Sarah Miles), as we perceive in her and Thomas's intense glances and is later revealed in her quick visit to her neighbor after having sex with Bill. The artist also iterates what will be a major theme of Antonioni's work: stating that his art often seems empty until he can extract an image or idea from it. In other words, what seems to be empty may come to have great meaning if looked at in long enough or from various perspectives.
It is a dangerous theme for a filmmaker, perhaps, whose works have often seemed to some critics a plotless and whose images, although stunningly beautiful, seem to many viewers as completely disjunctive.
As I made clear in my discussion of L'Avventura, I don't "read" Antonioni at all in that way. But many early and even later viewers of Blow-Up felt that it was without a coherent story, that its central issue was about illusion and reality, and that these issues were wrapped up in metaphysical concerns. The reviewer of Variety, for example, began "There may be some meaning, some commentary about life being a game, beyond what remains locked in the mind of the film's creator... But it is doubtful that the general public will get the "message" of this film." According to Ronan O'Casey, who played the mysterious lover of Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) and the later corpse of the film, a reporter from the German magazine, Der Spiegel, "kept saying," during an interview with him, "But this movie makes no sense - no narrative thread, no plot line!" A number of critics expressed confusion over whether or not there had really been a murder and a corpse.
O'Casey accounts for the confusion by reporting that, after vast over-expenditures, producer Carlo Ponti appeared on the set, closing down further shooting, and that Antonioni was left with no choice but to piece together the fragments he had already filmed"
"The intended story was a follows: the young lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa and me to Maryon Park in London conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival. I pick up Vanessa in a nice new dark green Jaguar and drive through London - giving Antonini a chance to film that swinging, trendy, Sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. We stop and I buy Vanessa a man's watch, which she wear thought the rest of the film. We then saunter hand in hand into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of the park Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances at the spot where her new lover is hiding. He shoots me (unlucky me), and the two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans go awry when he notices Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns out, he has."
In a luncheon meeting with O'Casey - whom his friends know as Case - I pointed out that the original story upon which this film is based is far more disjunctive and disorienting. In Julio Cortázar's masterful tale - which, according to the credits, "suggested" Antonioni's work - the photographer comes upon a woman and a young boy (15 years of age) apparently engaged in a romantic tryst. He imagines the boy's excitement and fear as the older woman toys with him, entertaining possible endings of the story: the boy may join the woman for sex, the boy may get cold feet and run, etc. But suddenly he notices something else, a man waiting in a car nearby. His camera catches the movement of the man toward the couple, and he suddenly recognizes the horror of what he has witnessed: that the man himself is involved in the affair, that he has perhaps used the woman as decoy, has, at the very least, been the cause of her flirtation. What lies ahead for the boy is not an innocent "first love," but that "the real boss was waiting there, smiling petulantly, already certain of his business; he was not the first to send a woman in the vanguard, to bring him the prisoners manacled with flowers. The rest of it would be so simple, the car, some house or another, drinks, stimulating engravings, tardy tears, the awakening in hell." When the man spies the photographer, the boy escapes, the man responding, perhaps, by shooting the boy (or woman): "...the man was directly center, his mouth half open, you could see a shaking black tongue, and he lifted his hands slowly, bringing them into the foreground, an instant still in perfect focus, and then all of him a lump that blotted out the island, the tree, and I shut my eyes, I didn't want to see any more, and I covered my face and broke into tears like an idiot." Cortázar's story is not so much about deception - although the couple certainly attempts to deceive the boy - as it is about misperception, of the impossibility of ever understanding the whole of any story, and the dangers of believing what one thinks he has perceived. In a sense, I suggested, we should be thankful to Ponti that Antonioni was unable to bring his film to even greater coherency, for then it might have lost any relationship to its purported source.
In Antonioni's work the photographer sees nothing, a fact he repeats several times throughout the film. Neither does he proffer any imaginative observations. He merely observes a couple in the park, a woman and an older man, who kiss and hold hands. It is the woman's demand for his film that arouses any curiosity he might have. The later appearance of a strange, fair-haired man following him - even though we may not know who it is (Case sites it as an example of the illogical film clips with which Antonini was left) - further hints that something is amiss; like Thomas, we instinctively sense he has something to do with the woman, reiterated in the action of Thomas checking the lock on his glove compartment upon returning to his car. When Jane actually appears at his door, we understand that she is not, like the other women in Thomas's life, hoping to model, to get herself on film - although she tries to deceive him by letting him believe she seeks such a career or is offering him sex - as she is in getting herself off film by destroying the images he has taken. To Thomas's first statement to her in the park: "Don't let's spoil everything, we've only met," Jane responds, "No, we haven't met. You've never met me."
Accordingly, Thomas recognizes her deceptions, greeting her at the door as she attempts to escape with his camera; he, in turn, deceiving her by pretending to return the role of film while keeping the actual canister.
Soon after, the two young girls who have earlier stalked him in hopes of a career, return, also willing (and reticent) to have sex in exchange for a "shoot." Thomas also deceives them in a hilarious satire of an orgy, the group wrestling about in, significantly, purple (the color associated with exaggerated literary effects and turn-of-the century sexual tales) paper like three young puppies rather than lustful adults. The minute he has finished, he orders them out.
Like his artist friend, the photographer attempts to extract meaning from his series of purposeless acts. What we and he at first see is nearly the opposite of what Bill does in his art. Bill's art is made of thousands of dots of color, from which he ultimately extracts an image. Thomas's work is outwardly a complete image, a representation of the reality he has seen in the park. But as he grows curious about the glance of the woman in the image, the sequence of the events he has witnessed - as he begins to enlarge those images - we are reminded that photographs are also made up of a series a dots, and the more frequently he enlarges those images the more apparent it becomes that they are not "real" at all but rather a series of dots imitating reality, things of art.
What he and we discover in those increasingly hard to read blurred and dotted artifacts is the occurrence of a real and horrible act; the seemingly innocent love between Jane and the older man was in "reality" a set up, the murderer waiting in the bushes with a gun. A late night trip back to the park awakens the young man to a new reality: a corpse lies in the dark. Who to tell? How does one speak the truth to a society whose reality is itself blurred by deceit?
By the time he has returned home, his studio has been looted, all but one of the photographs taken. Attempting to report the events to his friend, he accidentally comes upon Jane in the street, but she disappears as quickly as he has spotted her. He discovers his friend at a party where nearly everyone is drugged, quite literally "out of their minds." The model who has told him she is on her way to Paris answers his quip "I thought you were supposed to be in Paris," with a statement that exposes the extreme level of self-deception these people have achieved: "I 'am' in Paris!"
The next morning the corpse is also missing. Thomas no longer has anything left to prove, no evidence that he too has been not deceived. Antonioni ends his film with an inevitable, Fellini-like image of a world where nothing but deception is allowed. The car of mimes reappears, entering the park. There the white-faced pretenders take their positions upon the tennis court, playing, in every sense of that word, a game, Thomas watching in bemused silence. Hitting the invisible ball over the fence, they wait for Thomas to throw it back. He pauses, considering perhaps to what level he needs to participate in this world of deceptions, finally joining the pack, picking it up and tossing it back. Just as suddenly, he too, disappears.
In my reading of the film Antonioni has created a clearly narrative, quite coherent film about a world that survives on its own pretense, a world that depends upon everyone's being deceived. And, in that fact, Blow-Up presents a world, which like a surreally expanded balloon, should be prepared for precisely what its title suggests, a great bang, a explosion of the air upon which it lives.
