{"id":36331,"date":"2017-03-23T11:17:14","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T16:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=36331"},"modified":"2019-04-08T12:54:06","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T17:54:06","slug":"going-inside-by-staying-outside-lavventura-on-the-criterion-channel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2017\/03\/23\/going-inside-by-staying-outside-lavventura-on-the-criterion-channel\/","title":{"rendered":"Going inside by staying outside: L’AVVENTURA on the Criterion Channel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Title<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

This month, our entry on FilmStruck\u2019s Criterion Channel is a discussion of L\u2019Avventura<\/em>. This isn\u2019t my favorite Antonioni movie, but it\u2019s one I enjoy and admire\u2014not least because of its striking originality of mise-en-scene. So that\u2019s what I tackle in the Criterion entry.<\/p>\n

The installment is here<\/a>, and if you’re a subscriber \u00a0you can watch it immediately. Otherwise, there’s a chance to sign up. If you’re not aware of FilmStruck, one of the great adventures in modern film culture, you can check on it here<\/a>. (The Twitter feed<\/a> is enjoyable even to non-tweeters like me.) Today, I want to flesh out my entry with some other comments. I hope they’ll \u00a0be of interest even to those who aren’t signed on to\u00a0the FilmStruck enterprise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Two ways of doing deep<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Le<\/a><\/p>\n

Le Amiche<\/strong> (1955).<\/em><\/p>\n

During the 1950s, Antonioni displayed vigorous experimentation in visual style. Like many directors, he embraced the long take, usually in conjunction with camera movement. Within those parameters, he staged his action both laterally and in depth. But depth staging comes in many flavors.<\/p>\n

One is the aggressive deep-focus technique of Welles, with large heads or objects\u00a0very close to the camera in the foreground. Here are two famous instances from Citizen Kane<\/em> (1941).<\/p>\n

\"Kane<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0\"Trophy<\/p>\n

This fairly extreme approach was picked up by some 40s and 50s directors, especially those interested in what came to be called film noir.<\/p>\n

You can find somewhat mild versions of these\u00a0compositions in early Antonioni, especially in cramped surroundings. A bus ride and a necking party in I Vinti<\/em> (1953) bring forth some big foregrounds.<\/p>\n

\"Vinti<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Vinti<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite occasional shots like these, Antonioni’s early work favors an\u00a0alternative approach to depth, the one cultivated by Jean Renoir, Mizoguchi Kenji, William Wyler, and others. That approach doesn’t go for\u00a0Citizen Kane<\/em>\u00a0baroque.\u00a0It keeps the foreground plane fairly distant–say a medium-shot or further–and uses both lateral and fairly deep staging to multiply key points of interest in the shot. Less fancy than the Welles tradition, it allows more naturalistic blocking because it yields more playing space.<\/p>\n

Go back to I Vinti<\/em>, and we’ll find that most shots aren\u2019t as thrusting\u00a0as Welles\u2019 images, largely because of their reliance on real locations and naturalistic lighting. The film tends to\u00a0stages its long takes in mid-range,\u00a0porous compositions. A\u00a0two-minute shot of teenagers lounging at a cafe and plotting a murder is rendered in a gentle diagonal that\u00a0spreads out\u00a0multiple points of interest.<\/p>\n

\"Vinti<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Vinti<\/a><\/p>\n

By the way: Why doesn’t anybody make shots like this any more?<\/p>\n

One advantage is that while the packed Wellesian frame tends to make its actors assume fixed poses, the more open\u00a0frames of the alternative can show more of actors\u2019 bodies and develop gestures and other actorly bits. This happens in the I Vinti<\/em> caf\u00e9 scene, which depends on characters\u2019 changing postures, along with the distraction of the annoying little girl blowing on\u00a0drink straws.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Antonioni\u2019s first feature, the noirish romance Story of a Love Affair<\/em> (1950) makes adroit use of the mid-range foreground. The famous single-shot, 360-rdegree scene between lovers quarreling on a bridge is a paradigm case of how location filming can be made rigorous and purposeful. A complex camera camera movement is coordinated with figures resolutely evading each other in constantly varied medium-shots.<\/p>\n

\"Story<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Story<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Story<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Story<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Story<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Story<\/a><\/p>\n

Le Amiche<\/em> (1955) continues down the same path, with characters alotted\u00a0distinct\u00a0pockets of the frame to expose\u00a0their fleeting reactions.<\/p>\n

\"Gallery<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Model<\/a><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s now a more intricate choreography, as befits a plot with several story lines. A scene gathering the major characters at a cafe\u00a0is a magnificent exercise in the Wyler manner, with heads meticulously spotted across the frame.<\/p>\n

\"Cafe\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Cafe<\/a><\/p>\n

For years I was surprised that L\u2019Avventura<\/em> (1960) and its successors La Notte<\/em> (1961) and L\u2019Eclisse<\/em> (1962) make less use of this sort of precise\u00a0staging in depth. While the director’s\u00a0style remains fluid and rigorously patterned, and powerfully exploits\u00a0urban vistas, it relies more on editing. But looking again\u00a0at L\u2019Avventura<\/em> for the Criterion Channel installment, I became convinced that he was exploring a new way to handle staging\u2014one that built upon his mastery of Renoir-Wyler choreography.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From the back or from the front<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Claudia<\/a><\/p>\n

When a film\u2019s narrative harbors mysteries, they\u2019re often a matter of plot. Something has happened that we don\u2019t fully know about, and the business of the plot is to bring that to light, either in the short term or across the whole movie. In the detective film, there\u2019s a mysterious crime that needs solving, and the clarification will typically come at the climax, when the malefactor (and the motive, and the means) will get revealed. Plot-centered mysteries are easily dismissed as superficial, but the great tradition of literary detection shows that they can be imaginative and gripping, while also exploring literary techniques in sophisticated ways.<\/p>\n

There are also mysteries of character\u2014not just whodunit, but something deeper. A narrative might induce us to ask what makes characters do what they do. This can result in fairly superficial probing, as in many psychoanalytic films of the 1940s, but it can, again, prod the storyteller to exploit some aspects of the medium that engage us. At the limit, mysteries of character can lead the narrative to explore the moods and motives of its people, bringing out contradictions of mind and action. Even a potboiler like Gone Girl<\/em> not only reveals the rage\u00a0bubbling\u00a0beneath Amy\u2019s perfect porcelain surface but explains that anger as a response to the Cool Girl role dictated by yuppie\u00a0culture.<\/p>\n

I usually don\u2019t employ the distinction plot vs. character\u00a0<\/em>when I’m\u00a0thinking about film narratives, but as a first approximation it points up the nuances of L\u2019Avventura<\/em>\u2019s visual strategies. The film has, initially, a clear-cut plot-based mystery: What has led Anna to disappear? Is she dead, or lost, or simply escaping from the situation? This is, in a way, the bait luring us to pursue mysteries of character.<\/p>\n

What, to start, does\u00a0Anna want from her affair with Sandro? She seems alternately flirtatious, cynical, angry, and passionate. And assuming her disappearance wasn\u2019t accidental, what impelled her to leave the party? As for Sandro, what sort of man is he? And why does he, with unseemly haste after Anna\u2019s vanishing, seize Claudia and kiss her violently?<\/p>\n

Claudia, for her part, seems to gradually accept her role as the Anna substitute. We’d expect her to be torn by her betrayal of her friend, and maybe she is, but we can’t be sure. With almost no backstory supplied for these people and no plunge into their inner lives through dreams, voice-over, subjective visions, and the like, we\u2019re forced to read their minds and hearts\u00a0on the basis of what they say and do. This is relentlessly behaviorist cinema.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where visual style kicks in, I think. Antonioni declared his interest in moving the Neorealist impulse from social observation to psychological revelation.<\/p>\n

The neorealism of the postwar period, when reality was what it was, so intensely present, focused on the relationship between characters and reality. What was important was that very relationship, which created a cinema based on \u201csituations.\u201d . . . That\u2019s why, nowadays it\u2019s no longer important to make a film about a man whose bicycle has been stolen. . . . It is important to see what is inside this man whose bicycle was stolen, what are his thoughts, what are his feelings. <\/strong><\/p>\n

How to achieve this psychological penetration? Not through the sort of definite scene structure of a Hollywood film, a crisp slice of action that can be summed up in a story beat.<\/p>\n

I believe it is much more cinematic to try and capture the thoughts of a person through an ordinary visual reaction, rather than enclose them in a sentence. . . . One of my concerns in filming is to follow the characters until I feel it is time to stop. . . When all has been said, when the main scene is over, there are less important moments; and to me, it seems worthwhile to show the character right in these moments, from the back or the front, focusing on a gesture, on an attitude.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Antonioni scenes, critics sometimes say, begin a bit before they start\u00a0and end a bit after they stop.<\/p>\n

You might expect from this emphasis on character psychology and the habit of\u00a0lingering on a scene\u2019s resonance would yield few mysteries. Yet what interests me in L\u2019Avventura<\/em> is the way in which it doesn\u2019t<\/em> allow us to \u201csee what is inside\u201d its characters. Perversely, having braked the dramatic momentum in order to probe character, Antonioni goes on to block our access to his people\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n

His visual strategies for doing this are many, and they’re flaunted\u00a0in the film made just before L’Avventura<\/em>. The witholding of character reaction is flamboyant in Il Grido<\/em> (1957), maybe over the top.<\/p>\n

\"Grido<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Grido<\/a><\/p>\n

L’Avventura<\/em>‘s reticent\u00a0pictorial strategies are\u00a0more nuanced and naturalistic, and my FilmStruck contribution tries to chart them. For about the first hour of the film, Antonioni\u00a0lets landscape overwhelms his characters, gives them equivocal facial expressions, refuses the full information of shot\/reverse shot cutting, and at crucial moments simply makes his actors turn from the camera, denying us access to their emotional reactions.<\/p>\n

\"landscape\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"heads<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u2019s just as interesting, the second half of the film selectively returns to\u00a0the techniques that were initially banned. It’s as if these more familiar image schemas–reverse shots, frontal close-ups, more marked facial reactions–have become suitable to the growing romance between Claudia and Sandro. Now the first hour’s stingy attitude toward psychological information is balanced by a greater degree of emotional exposure, especially on Claudia\u2019s part. By\u00a0the very end, the two broad strategies coexist uneasily, and some enigmas remain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

During\u00a0the late 1960s Antonioni changed his style. He turned from deep-focus, wide-angle images to flat telephoto ones, and he began relying on a pan-and-zoom technique. These were partly responses to shooting in color and wider formats, I think, but they also offered the opportunity for a painterly look that he exploited in the films from Red Desert<\/em> (1964) on. Fellini, Bergman, Visconti, and others took a similar path, as I tried to show in this early blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 1960 those developments were yet to come. It seems to me that the style of L\u2019Avventura <\/em>enhances the mysteries of plot and character in a unique and unsettling way. We get a visual surface that entrances us with its measured beauty and teases us with its calm opacity.<\/p>\n

\n

Thanks as usual to Peter Becker, Kim Hendrickson, Grant Delin, and the Criterion team for including us in their FilmStruck enterprise.<\/p>\n

My quotation from Antonioni comes from his essay \u201cMy Experience [1958],\u201d in his book The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema<\/em> (Marsilio, 1996), 7-9.<\/p>\n

The L\u2019Avventura<\/em> discussion on FilmStruck is the fourth in our Criterion Channel series, \u201cObservations on Film Art.\u201d The others are Jeff Smith on the music of Foreign Correspondent<\/em><\/a>, me on Sanshiro Sugata<\/em><\/a>, and Kristin on landscape in Kiarostami<\/a>. Some clip extracts can be found here<\/a> and here<\/a>. \u00a0Jeff has amplified his installment with further comments on this blog<\/a>, and I’ve done the same with Sanshiro<\/em><\/a>\u00a0, as today with L’Avventura<\/em>.\u00a0We introduce our collaboration in this entry<\/a>. The Criterion introduction to us is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For more on Mizoguchi’s approach to depth staging, see this summary entry<\/a>. There’s more on Wyler’s style here.<\/a>\u00a0I compare the two\u00a0directors in this entry on sleeves.<\/a>\u00a0I discuss the broader shift from deep-focus techniques to pan-and-zoom ones in On the History of Film Style<\/em>, Chapter 6.<\/p>\n

\"I<\/a><\/p>\n

I Vinti.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DB here: This month, our entry on FilmStruck\u2019s Criterion Channel is a discussion of L\u2019Avventura. This isn\u2019t my favorite Antonioni movie, but it\u2019s one I enjoy and admire\u2014not least because of its striking originality of mise-en-scene. So that\u2019s what I tackle in the Criterion entry. The installment is here, and if you’re a subscriber \u00a0you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[262,98,5,59,228,99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criterion-channel","category-directors-antonioni","category-film-technique","category-technique-staging","category-filmstruck","category-national-cinemas-italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36331"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41699,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36331\/revisions\/41699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}