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, with substantial booing during the screening and an open letter of support signed by major auteur figures including Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022 and is widely considered the foundational work of European modernist cinema's mature period.

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 the foundational Antonioni leading-lady) and her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her across the days that follow — through the broader Sicilian-southern-Italian geography — and slowly drift into each other's emotional orbits without ever finding a satisfactory resolution to the question of where Anna went.

The film is the first instalment of Antonioni's broader trilogy of bourgeois-alienation cinema (followed by La Notte and L'Eclisse), all built around Vitti as the central female figure. The film's commitment to refusing the genre conventions of the disappearance-mystery — to allowing the central question to become structurally subordinate to the slower study of how the people around it actually feel — became continuously consequential in subsequent European art cinema. Aldo Scavarda's photography of the Sicilian and Aeolian landscapes is one of the foundational landscape registers in 1960s cinema.