On the Channel: David Bordwell on the Restraint of L’avventura

The premiere screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival was infamously divisive, causing the audience to break out into boos and catcalls. While the film’s opaque characterizations and languorous pacing retain their ability to befuddle uninitiated viewers, these qualities also marked it early on as a path-breaking work of modern European cinema. In the latest installment of Observations on Film Art, a Criterion Channel program in which professors David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith examine formal elements of the medium through the work of great auteurs, Bordwell analyzes the elusive style that would become a trademark of Antonioni’s career. Below, watch an excerpt from the episode, in which Bordwell explores the ways in which the director creates his signature mood of isolation and ennui through meticulous visual compositions and the withholding of narrative information that moviegoers are accustomed to receiving.

from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2mEsGyj