L'avventura

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura won the Jury Prize at Cannes 1960 after one of the most contentious festival receptions of any post-war European film: there was heavy booing during the screening, followed by an open letter of support signed by major auteurs including Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson. It entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, and the mature period of European modernist cinema can fairly be said to begin with it.

On a yachting trip to a tiny Aeolian island off the coast of Sicily, a young woman named Anna (Lea Massari) simply disappears. Her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti, in the role that made her Antonioni's defining leading lady) and her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her over the days that follow, across Sicily and the Italian south, and slowly drift into each other's emotional orbit.

It is the first instalment of Antonioni's trilogy of bourgeois alienation (followed by La Notte and L'Eclisse), all three built around Vitti as the central female figure. Its refusal to play by the rules of the disappearance mystery, letting the central question give way to a slower study of how the people around it feel, has shaped European art cinema ever since. Aldo Scavarda's photography of the Sicilian and Aeolian landscapes set the standard for how 1960s cinema would look at landscape.