L’avventura

EN

André S. Labarthe: Which is in your career is the film that seems to you, today, to be most important and why?

Michelangelo Antonioni: I have always thought that a certain amount of frivolity was necessary to answer such questions. These are questions which only aim to satisfy the curiosity of readers. It is obvious to say that all my films have as much importance in my career as in my life. Finally, I don’t seem to understand how I should answer: from a critical viewpoint, certainly not, that is not my business. I would not be objective, and I would try in vain to identify the reasons for a preference among my films. From the human viewpoint, let us say, then. In this case, I would say the most important of my films is L’avventura, because it is the one which cost me the most, which taught me the most, which more than any other film forced me to be present to myself. In respect to that I ought to explain how it often happens that I am absent from myself, but we get into the realm of gossip there and I don’t enjoy that.

André S. Labarthe in conversation with Michelangelo Antonioni1

“In L'Avventura, he follows her. Outside, at a bench, they both cry. This crying is very moving, but I actually liked this running of hers much more. How all those distances, all those searches in the film, culminate in this one scene. How this scene is full of meaning because of everything that happened before. There’s often a number of moments in a film that don't mean much in themselves. And then suddenly there is a scene that draws all those loose ends together and fixes them in a movement of someone in a space.”

Frans van de Staak2

“To direct is to organize time and space. Antonioni’s genius is to have not set characters in front of a set, but to have ensured that the instability and the mystery of emotions (his topic) are expressed first of all through time and space before resulting in the action and in what the heroes say and do. I realize belatedly, while leafing again through Le Métier de vivre, searching for “You entrusted your life to a hair”, that Pavese, to whom Antonioni is often so close, has expressed the problem better than I could: “Creating an ‘instantaneous’ work of art (the ‘fragment’) is easy, just as it is relatively easy to experience a brief instant of morality, but to create a work that exceeds the instant is difficult, just as it is difficult to live longer than the length of a heart beat, the realm of the heavens.” And this attempt of an answer: “Stylistic situations could be your tale-images, in other words, a manner of presenting images that are not reality’s material descriptions, but ‘imaginary symbols to which things happen,’ the story’s characters.” And finally this: “The unity of a work will hence consist in the linkage of all its moments from a same absolute or, if one likes, metaphysical period.” This mysterious reconciliation of Marxism’s evolution with the memory of metaphysics at Aristotle’s expense explains perhaps why Hiroshima, My Love and L’avventura inaugurate what will soon have to be explicitly named: new cinema.”

Jacques Doniol-Valcroze3

“The DVD's resources, the freeze frame, the return to the visual elements that constitute it (altough the sound is also very important), enable us to take stock of the incredibly brutal gesture represented by this orgy in which a woman comes in broad daylight for having been digested by thousands of men. In the sequence’s midst, the very image of the origin of the world – a frontal shot of the female sex. And during the credits that follow this entire scene, the sudden demonstration of urges’ labor, of all this lava of desire and frustration that runs subterraneously throughout the movie, sutures Anna’s (Lea Massari) disappearance – who was intended to be its heroine – makes its way for the remaining through torturous paths, between the imperatives of social relationships and the individual’s anxieties. These belong to an era, a place and social category clearly defined by the film. The breach opened the Messina crowd scene, this swarming that seeks in vain to frame the cops and profit from the media, also reminds us to what extent what is at stake in L’Avventura is nonetheless of value to all, far beyond these limits and definitions. When L’Avventura was released in France, André Labarthe (Cahiers n°110) then Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (Cahiers n°113) used the film to assert that any form of directing is, to a certain extent, a composed ordering of the world. They were right and the film is a magnificent example of this – but it testifies to this and identifies all the more so what is at stake, for possessing in its very core this moment of chaos, this enormous gap.”

Jean-Michel Frodon4

• 1André S. Labarthe, Cahiers du Cinema 112 (October 1960).
• 2Frans van de Staak, “Frans van de Staak Chooses a Scene,” translated by Veva Leye, Sabzian, 8 October 2025. This text was originally published as “De scène van Frans van de Staak” in Dutch film journal Skrien, no. 163 (Dec-Jan 1988-89).
• 3Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, “L’Avventura. The Resus Factor and New Cinema,” translated by Isabelle Dupuis, Cahiers du cinéma n°113, November 1960.
• 4Jean-Michel Frodon, “L'Avventura. The Breach,” translated by Isabelle Dupuis, Cahiers du cinéma n°605, November 2005.