1. L’avventura

2. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, released 1960
Starring Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti and Lea Massari
First film of trilogy
Antonioni has stated that he "woke up every morning at 3 o'clock in order to be alone and reflect on what I was doing in order to re-load myself against fatigue and a strange form of apathy or absence of will, which often took hold of us all.
Geoff Andrew of Time Out criticized the film, writing that "If it once seemed the ultimate in arty, intellectually chic movie-making, the film now looks all too studied and remote a portrait of emotional sterility."
"It's easy to bash Antonioni as passé. It's harder, I think, to explain the cinematic power of the way his camera watches, and waits, while the people on screen stave off a dreadful loneliness.” Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

3. Reception
"Too shallow to be truly lonely," Pauline Kael wrote, "they are people trying to escape their boredom by reaching out to one another and finding only boredom once again.“
Pauline Kael also named it best film of the year in 1960
It was booed at the Cannes Festival, deemed incomprehensible to European audiences
It would still win the Jury prize
Went on to become an international success, cementing the art- house film in cinema history

4. No Ordinary Picture
Tell me you love me. I love you. Tell me you don't. I don't love you.
Did Claudia love Sandro? Did Sandro love Claudia?
Unconventional narrative
Search for Anna
Conclusion
Pacing
Dialogue
Action
Editing/ long take

5. "The characters are active only in trying to discharge their anxiety: Sex is their sole means of contact.“
Distraction?

6. Mise-en-scene The landscape---the island The dress of the bourgeoisie
The yacht- the water
The void, alienation, existence is fleeting
Aimless, empty, no purpose

7. Malaise, waiting for nothing

8. Phantom boats

9. People at odds with their environment

10. Existentialism /ˌɛɡzɪˈstɛnʃəˌlɪzəm/
noun 1. a modern philosophical movement stressing the importance of personal experience and responsibility and the demands that they make on the individual, who is seen as a free agent in a deterministic and seemingly meaningless universe
A movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, with some forerunners in earlier centuries. Existentialism stresses that people are entirely free and therefore responsible for what they make of themselves. With this responsibility comes a profound anguish or dread. Søren Kierkegaard and Feodor Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus in the twentieth century, were existentialist writers.

11. Oh what an adventure…. What happens?
L'avventura charted a world in which "we make use of an aging morality, of outworn myths, of ancient conventions." The world had changed, yet human beings were trapped by the old standards. Antonioni’s characters, accordingly, can find no meaningful way to relate to each other, finally arriving, as he describes it, "at a sort of reciprocal pity."

12. Switcheroo

13. Antonioni said…
“When I finished L'avventura I was forced to reflect on what it meant."