L'Avventura: Temporal Adventures: Chapter Two

C HA PT ER TW O
L’Avventura: Temporal Adventures
When L’Avventura came out in 1960, cinema was undergoing a period of

renewal. As Nowell-Smith explains, this was characterised by a rebellion
against ‘the false perfection of the studio film’. Film directors acquired
a new visibility, as films increasingly displayed ‘open-ended narratives,
internal quotation, autobiographical references, first-person statements’,
while eschewing gloss and glamour.1 Although most films released at this
time kept to classical styles of composition and narrative form, cultural
innovators such as Antonioni began to disrupt the coherence and conti-
nuity of space, time and narrative that cinema had previously worked to
maintain.2 The premiere of L’Avventura at the Cannes Film Festival in
1960 revealed, however, that the viewing habits of some spectators had not
quite caught up with the radical changes that cinema was undergoing. The
film was booed by the audience, while Antonioni and lead actress Monica
Vitti fled in despair. Spectators seemed to have two related primary griev-
ances. First, the film’s ellipses and ‘dead times’, in which nothing is hap-
pening that appears to advance the narrative, ensured that the audience,
to paraphrase Hamish Ford, saw what they expected to miss, and missed
what they expected to see.3 The slow temporality of the film provoked
many negative affects, namely, boredom, frustration, and irritation.
Second, the interpretive strategies that were commonly employed by film
critics in the 1950s seemed to fail when set against the film’s ambiguity
and open-endedness.
In L’Avventura, Lea Massari, an actress well known to contemporary
Italian audiences, plays Anna, a girl who disappears during a cruise taken
by a group of wealthy Romans in Sicily. The film follows the relatively
unknown Vitti, playing Anna’s friend Claudia, and Anna’s fiancé Sandro
(Gabriele Ferzetti), who develop a love affair while meandering across
the Sicilian countryside, ostensibly looking for Anna. Anna is last seen
on the rocky, near-deserted island of Lisca Bianca, where the group have
briefly stopped. Sandro and Claudia remain overnight on the island in a
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50 t e m po r a l ity a nd f il m a na l ys is
shepherd’s hut in the hope that she will return. The next morning, Sandro
unexpectedly kisses a shocked Claudia. With their plans disrupted by
Anna’s disappearance, the members of the cruise travel to a villa owned
by their wealthy friends, the Montaldos; Claudia and Sandro, however,
decide to look for Anna independently of each other. Sandro does
attempt to remain with Claudia, but, confused and disturbed, she rejects
him. They are eventually reunited when they both arrive in the town of
Troina. They begin an affair and travel together to Noto on the basis of
a reported sighting of Anna. Without any further news, they rejoin the
other members of the cruise in Taormina, where Claudia catches Sandro
with a prostitute, Gloria Perkins. Anna is never seen again.
What was more disturbing than the disappearance of Anna, who in
the film’s opening scenes seems to be established as the main character,
was that the film did not appear concerned with finding her, leaving, as
Brunette writes, ‘a gaping hole in the film, an invisibility at its centre,
which suggests an elsewhere, a nonplace, that remains forever unavailable
to interpretation and that destroys the dream of full visibility’, a dream
that had been harboured by neo-realism.4 While the radical deployments
of temporal rhythms and the film’s ambiguities of meaning angered some
of the Cannes audience, L’Avventura was immediately recognised as a
masterpiece by the jury panel, which awarded it a Special Jury Prize for ‘a
new movie language and the beauty of its images’. The film was eventually
established as a classic of modern art cinema and for decades afterwards
was regularly listed as one of Sight and Sound’s top ten films.5
Following the disastrous Cannes premiere, Antonioni was encour-
aged to release a statement ‘explaining’ the film, in which he stated that
L’Avventura’s ‘tragedy’ emerged from a fundamental mismatch between
our increasingly scientifically open-minded society and morally anti-
quated attitudes, which reveals itself most clearly in love relationships.
Part of the statement read:
Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical
shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But
this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy,
that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy,
something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but
he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse . . . the tragedy of L’Avventura stems directly
from an erotic impulse of this kind – unhappy, miserable, futile.6
Much critical and theoretical writing on the film is based upon this
statement. William Arrowsmith’s chapter on L’Avventura, for example,
revolves around the idea of the ‘malaise of Eros’ that supposedly plagues
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l’avventura : t e mpo r a l a dv en t u r es 51
the film’s characters.7 The erotic disease, Arrowsmith notes, is most

evident in Sandro’s serial womanising and self-absorption. Arrowsmith
likens Antonioni’s treatment of the disease of Eros as a ‘cool, clinical
diagnosis . . . noting the ensemble of the symptoms – the phenomenology
of the disease – not merely suggesting its ubiquitous operation’.8 Peter
Bondanella also draws on Antonioni’s statement to illuminate the film:
‘When sexuality fails as a means of communication and provides only
physical relief, then, in Antonioni’s terms, Eros is sick.’9
Critical writing on L’Avventura also tends to suggest that the film
reflects the particular preoccupations of its time, such as alienation and
the soullessness of modern bourgeois life. According to Bondanella, for
example, Antonioni displayed an ‘exceptional sensitivity to the philo-
sophical currents of the times’ by portraying ‘modern neurotic, alien-
ated, and guilt-ridden characters whose emotional lives are sterile – or
at least poorly developed’. Bondanella likens Antonioni’s presentation
of ‘existential boredom’ to the writing of Alberto Moravia.10 Connecting
L’Avventura with three films that followed it, also featuring Vitti, La
Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962), and Il Deserto Rosso (1964),11 Seymour
Chatman has similarly argued that the ‘central thematic network’ of this
‘tetralogy’ is ‘the perilous state of our emotional life. Narcissism, egoism,
self-absorption, ennui, distraction, neuroses, existential anxiety . . . these
terms struggle to characterize a life lacking in purpose.’12 Clara Orban
echoes this in her analysis also, claiming that ‘the women in Michelangelo
Antonioni’s films provide desperate proof of the alienation of the city . . .
empty streets, stark urban landscapes, and thin, agitated, unhappy people
represent the anxiety of modern city life’.13
While these readings are praiseworthy for their sensitivity to the films’
historical contexts, interpretations focusing on the alienation and existen-
tial malaise of Antonioni’s characters and their society have become rather
repetitive. This chapter aims to suggest other ways in which the film can
be described or analysed. Specifically, I hope to challenge a particular
characteristic of interpretive frameworks around L’Avventura, namely,
that the mise-en-scène is consistently seen as something to be decoded
to find the appropriate clues or meanings that Antonioni ‘intended’.
Interpretations of Antonioni’s films tend to allow for some ambiguity, but
limit the scope of interpretation by a reliance upon the institutional and
textual presence of the ‘author’. James Stoller, for example, has written
that Antonioni ‘by not commenting, comments’.14 According to Ian
Cameron, who was writing in 1962, the release of L’Avventura created the
impression that it was a film whose technique was so closely moulded to
its author’s intentions that it required the closest concentration for every
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second of its length.15 Every gesture, he continues, ‘has a precise signifi-

cance and every technical device Antonioni can muster is used to help us
see it’.16 For Ned Rifkin, the ‘essence’ of Antonioni’s visual language is
‘the notion that dominant dramatic information can be delivered to the
viewer through a visual mode of sign and symbol’.17 Rifkin’s argument
that Antonioni’s images form a kind of ‘visual language’ relies on the
assertion that the image ‘connotes a matrix of optical data which, when
decoded, can be translated into meaning or a system of content’.18 Ted
Perry echoed this analysis in the 1990s, arguing that Antonioni ‘fills every
frame with his purposes. Density of expression is a truism in Antonioni’s
works . . . everything is determined by the director to serve his artistic
ends’.19
This chapter suggests that the relationship between image and meaning
in L’Avventura is more fluid than the above statements indicate. As
Brunette has written, critical interpretation of Antonioni’s films seems to
be
only arrived at by means of a certain violent epistemological gesture of transcend-

ence, a gesture that moves one quickly and painlessly from the supposedly ‘super-
ficial’ (and certainly confusing) level of the film’s particular, material details to a
‘higher’ more synoptic level where things can be made to cohere.20
A particularly interesting analysis of Antonioni’s films in this respect

was originally given by Roland Barthes in 1980, at a lecture in Bologna.
Barthes spoke of a ‘leakage’ of meaning, ‘which is not the same as its abo-
lition’, and a ‘discomfiture of affect – which escapes the grip of meaning
at the heart of the identity of events’.21 Rather than particular mean-
ings, Barthes finds a ‘vibration’: ‘the object vibrates, to the detriment of
dogma’.22 Barthes here articulates one of the aspects of the film that my
analysis will suggest, namely the way in which images may resonate or
vibrate with affect, rather than necessarily or only put forward meanings
to be interpreted. My main goal in this chapter, however, is to challenge
the particular ways in which Antonioni’s authorial signature is seen to
manifest itself: in flattened, static compositions. Bondanella, for example,
compares Antonioni to a still photographer, his shots marked ‘as surely
as though his signature were affixed to the celluloid’.23 Brunette associ-
ates Antonioni with Manet, ‘who, while remaining intensely naturalistic
in style, also flattens the perspective of his canvas, thus purposely calling
attention to the artificiality of the two-dimensional medium’.24
Such analyses tend to detach images from the temporal flow and move-
ment of the film. My reading of L’Avventura questions whether stillness
and flatness are the most adequate ways of characterising the film’s images.
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This chapter engages with questions of temporality as they relate to mise-

en-scène, pace, and the film’s spaces. In particular, I trace the movements
of, and within, the images as they transform through time and are pre-
sented in depth. Structures of looking and imaging throughout the film, I
argue, have the potential to encourage affective responses in viewers. The
slow pace and lingering rhythms, where time ceases to be subject to strict
narrative development and instead unfolds its own particular concerns,
encourages an attentive awareness of the passage of time through the film.
Depth and Movement

In his monograph on Antonioni, Chatman expresses what he believes are
the primary characteristics of Antonioni’s images, flatness and stillness,
by drawing upon art historian William Worringer to explain Antonioni’s
‘cool’ mise-en-scène. Worringer, according to Chatman, distinguished
between the two ‘polar impulses’ of art. The organic mode projects
empathy and is deeply focused, so that ‘our eyes delight in caressing
the surfaces and depths’ of an image, ‘and hence in experiencing objects
in the round’.25 This ‘flourishes in periods of psychological harmony’.
The abstract mode signifies the point at which people feel discomfort
at outside phenomena, a ‘spiritual dread’ of open spaces. ‘The pure and
regular geometry of abstract cartography then presents an attractive way
of controlling, allaying and sublimating that anxiety.’26 In applying this
to Antonioni, Chatman writes that ‘seeking whatever certainties it can
find, all the camera is sure of is the regularity of plane geometry. In such
moments, the screen ceases to be a window looking into deep space and
becomes a nearby surface of uncertain expanse against which the charac-
ters are flattened.’27 The rendering of a flat, surface composition is linked
by Chatman to the inability of the characters to ‘grasp’ things, to have
meaningful contact with their surroundings: ‘the absence of contour and
dimension makes imaginative as well as real touching difficult’.28 The
ways in which ‘characters are frequently pinned to walls’, writes Chatman,
‘suggest moral or psychological entrapment, unbridgeable alienation’,
although Chatman does warn against an overly simplified symbolisation.29
Chatman locates moments of graphic composition in L’Avventura that
‘constitute a focused, intentional, and daring abstract painting right in the
middle of a commercial feature film’.30 Such frames are worth enlarging
and exhibiting as independent works of art;
they make us want to stop the film so we can gaze at greater leisure. The ongoing
narrative is, I suppose, thereby impaired, but only if we insist on conventional ways
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of watching films. In defence of Antonioni’s style, one might argue that the movie
audience can and should develop something of the art lover’s capacity to appreciate
beautiful visual composition for its own sake.31
While Chatman seems to have developed this art lover’s desire to gaze
upon still images, one could argue that an appreciation of cinematic move-
ment and temporal flow is less well in evidence. Depth is by no means
ignored by Chatman, but Antonioni’s use of depth is compared to still
images, the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, rather than to moving images
that unfold in time.32 While I agree that touching and grasping are impor-
tant, both for the film’s themes and for an understanding of the mise-en-
scène in ways that I outline below, my formulation of this in relation to
L’Avventura is rather different. The emphasis upon flatness, surface and
abstraction in writing on Antonioni tends to obscure the strategies of
depth and the film’s fluid mobility. In L’Avventura, very few scenes are
arranged as flattened compositions. Instead, the film continually empha-
sises a process of relativising in depth; that is, foreground and background
are continuously placed in positions of perspectival relativity. We can see
this in operation in one of the film’s key locations, Lisca Bianca, which
is continually framed against other islands in the background. Locations
such as the top of the church tower in Noto also seem to provide an ideal
opportunity for depth perspectives to be distinguished: the town is built on
sloping ground, and the architecture is terraced, presenting an extensive,
multilayered space. The film thus seems to continually urge us to think
about the relationship between foreground and background, presenting
the possibility of glimpsed but impenetrable and thus unknown spaces.
We are encouraged to consider depth compositionally and thematically, as
an ungraspable space that Anna has disappeared into.
The downplaying of the film’s movements through time can be seen in
the emphasis upon how characters in Antonioni’s films frequently seem
to be framed in windows and doorways, something often associated with
moments of self-reflexivity or an erotic objectification of women. For
Forgacs, for example, framed or reflected shots of Antonioni’s actresses,
‘because they are not obviously subordinated or functional to narrative,
become similar to still photographs’, alluding to ‘fashion photographs,
pin-ups, and advertising’.33 In the very opening sequence of L’Avventura,
argues Brunette, the camera attempts to ‘flatten [Anna] against the
background’, moving so that she appears to remain stationary, and thus
turning her into ‘an objet d’art, something to be looked at’.34 However,
if we look at this sequence paying greater attention to its movement and
temporal progress, we can discover different ways of describing it. In the
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very first shot, Anna has already emerged from the villa and is walking
towards the camera, which swivels to keep her in shot, moving as she
moves, and then appears to back away from her as she comes towards it. In
the background behind her is a hedge, a wall and trees, at differing depths,
such that the landscape does not appear flat, but rather terraced and tex-
tured. Nor does Anna appear stationary; rather, she is immediately shown
in decisive movement. It is true that she stands framed for a moment in a
doorway, but if we reinsert this moment into the film’s temporal context,
what stands out about it is its diegetic import: Anna seems to be steeling
herself to continue, perhaps in a reaction to the voice of her father, who is
heard on the soundtrack at that point.
The first time we see her, then, Anna is crossing from one threshold
to another, emerging from the depths of her home into another exterior,
the walled garden, and then into another space, the open field in front of
the house. As Rohdie has written, ‘one of the effects of the scene . . . is
to upset perceptions: you believe something to be one thing only to find
that it is quite another and this in turn is subject to a further revision and
change of perspective as spaces enclose other spaces and become further
modified’.35 The way in which the scene draws out her movements in time
allows for such revisions to be made.
The opening sequence of the film can be seen to introduce two impor-
tant characteristics of the film’s composition that will henceforth recur.
First, the textured nature of L’Avventura’s backgrounds. Even if, for
example, characters are framed against walls, these tend to be textured and
detailed rather than blank. The wall that Claudia is framed against in the
railway station waiting room is seen at a slight angle and visibly worn by
time and use. When Sandro and Claudia are framed together against a wall
in Noto, the ripped remnants of posters that had been pasted on it stand
out from, and add a tactile element to, the background. This shot ends in
a gentle dissolve which literally renders this surface fluid in movement.
Decayed and dilapidated stone walls recur throughout the film, from the
Roman square that Sandro’s apartment overlooks, to the old stone tower
in the film’s final shot; geometry is thus textured rather than necessarily
forming an abstract surface. Second, the opening introduces us to the way
in which events, or micro-events, occur on thresholds or between spaces,
such as the kiss between Sandro and Claudia that changes the direction of
the narrative. On a threshold, characters are neither wholly in one space
nor another, but in a state of limbo, an indeterminate state that also has
temporal dimensions. There is a moment, for example, when Sandro
imperfectly pulls the curtains together before getting into bed with Anna.
In the space between the curtains, Claudia can be seen on the street below,
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a framing that anticipates a time when Claudia will ‘replace’ Anna as

Sandro’s lover. The characters are frequently seen moving through transi-
tional spaces, rather than framed in static compositions, such as the several
corridors (at the Montaldo villa, at Taormina) that Claudia runs through,
and the train, also suggestive of an elongated corridor. Sometimes even
the frame itself struggles to contain the bodies of the characters, who
appear at the extreme edges of it, with some limbs in the frame and others
out. Their body parts move in and out of the frame in a seemingly random
flux. For example, when Claudia wakes up at sunset in the shepherd’s hut
on the island, she appears at the very edge of the visibility that the frame
only pretends to contain.
Depth, movement and flux are also vital, but rather neglected, char-
acteristics of L’Avventura’s close-ups. As I suggested in Chapter 1, a
tendency to extricate a particular moment from a film in film theory
in general can be seen most readily in the discourse on the close-up.
As Doane has written, close-ups have been seen to invite a desire for a
‘moment of possession in which the image is extracted, whatever the nar-
rative rationalisation may be, from the flow of the story’.36 The close-up
‘detaches itself from the rest of the film to draw attention to one important
thing’; it provides film’s ‘most fully developed form of the moment’ and
its ‘closest analogy to the frame around the painting, to the frozen instant
memorialised by the photograph’.37 For Chatman, Antonioni’s close-ups
seem to function precisely in this way, being in his view an example of
the ‘flat, abstract style’ used by the director. Antonioni’s extreme and
fragmented close-ups, however, seem to refuse this tendency to flatten
and still motion, refusing extractability from the flow of time. Instead,
long-held close-ups slow down the pace of the film and draw attention to
microscopic changes of facial expression. Reinserting the close-ups within
a temporal flow and acknowledging their movement in duration allows for
a more variegated sense of L’Avventura’s images.
We can take a scene from near the beginning of the film as an example.
Claudia and Anna have set out from Anna’s home to meet Sandro at
his apartment in Rome before the cruise. Getting out of her car, Anna
attempts to explain to Claudia her dissatisfaction with Sandro, and even
seems to be at the point of abandoning the planned cruise. When Sandro
calls to her from the window, however, she enters his apartment, looking
at him disdainfully. Without a word, she begins to undress and they move
to the bed, leaving Claudia to wait outside. As they make love, Anna’s
face is presented in close-up, which falls in and out of the frame with the
movement of her head. Her eyes largely remain fixed on a point beyond
the frame. The camera’s intense focus on her face seems to invite us to
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question her motives and behaviour. Her face may appear as a surface,
but the extension of the image through time seems to draw attention
to something beyond this surface. As Doane has argued in relation to
early cinema, ‘behind the perfect, seamless face, the unwavering stare,
it is impossible not to project thought, emotion, although the face gives
no indication of either’.38 The shot appears to bring the face up close,
providing what Doane calls ‘an intense phenomenological experience of
presence’,39 yet it also continually retracts this intimacy. As it develops
through duration, the sequence performs precisely that which cannot be
grasped or possessed. As Anna’s face falls in and out of frame, a window in
the background is revealed which, as it is out of focus, emerges as a blurred
rectangle of light. This area becomes something deep within the image
which is unavailable either to vision or to touch, something which forever
falls away into depth. While the discourse on the close-up ‘seems to exem-
plify a desire to stop the film, to grab hold of something that can be taken
away’,40 this sequence not only presents Anna as a character who cannot be
grasped (she will soon disappear), but also cinematically performs a refusal
to abstract itself from temporality and from depth.
Antonioni frequently presents surfaces and depths within the same
shot. When Claudia, passing time at the Montaldo villa and waiting for
Sandro, hears a car arriving, she runs out on to the balcony to see who it
is. The camera briefly follows her progress across the room, then stops
just at the threshold of the glass door leading on to the balcony. This
door splits the composition in half; on one side, we are presented with the
flat, dark surface of the wall of the room, and on the other, the vast white
balcony. Lines of perspective converge at the corner of the balcony, where
Claudia stands looking out over the driveway. The dynamic oppositions
in this composition activate a powerful resonance. The harsh lines of the
balcony, for example, are juxtaposed with the softer, shadowed outlines
of hills and trees in the distance. Claudia, furthermore, is never shown as
a static figure, and the starkness of the balcony’s lines and shades draws
the movement of her body to the fore as she runs to and from the corner.
The composition, again, is shown at a slight angle, such that even the flat
surface in the foreground is granted perspective. This surface is also one
that is heavily textured, consisting of a panelled, decorated wooden display
cabinet with intricate sculpted figurines on top of it. The glass panel in the
middle of the screen presents yet another ‘terrace’ of textured possibility.
The composition encourages both what Marks has called optical visuality
and haptic looking; the former perceiving ‘distinct forms in deep space’,
the latter moving ‘over the surface of the object . . . not to distinguish
form so much as to discern texture’.41 The presentation of optic and
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haptic modes simultaneously within one shot invites a fascinated look at

the image. By being presented in a single shot rather than in succession, a
movement is activated between the two modes.
Another significant series of close-ups in the film also activate an oscil-
lation between tactile surface and ungraspable depth, between texture
and incorporeality. After visiting a deserted Sicilian town in the search
for Anna, a sudden cut shows us Claudia being held up in Sandro’s arms,
laughing into the sky. This slight perceptual shock carries a sense of
uneasiness over into the duration of the sequence, as the lovers are shown
kissing on the ground in close-up. Both Claudia and the camera seem to
attempt to grasp something as closely as possible: Claudia repeats ‘mine,
mine, mine’ while kissing Sandro, and the camera moves so close to their
faces that sometimes only parts of their facial features are present on the
screen. This sequence resonates powerfully with a kind of hapticity in
which the surface of the screen appeals to the sense of touch. The textures
of their hair, the grass, the lines on Sandro’s face and their hands touch-
ing each other, resonate through the extreme close-ups. Touching and
grasping are depicted, thematised, and enacted, performed by the camera.
Because Claudia and Sandro are continually in movement, there is little
sense of this being a static stilled image; instead, the sequence enacts a
process in which these various textures come to the fore in duration. The
affective power of the close-up seems to destabilise a sense of detached
stillness. As Deleuze has written, the close-up image is ‘difficult to define,
because it is felt rather than conceived: it concerns what is new in the
experience, what is fresh, fleeting and nevertheless eternal’.42 The affect
of the close-up contains an element of the temporal and the incorporeal: it
enacts not an immediate bodily sensation or idea, but ‘a possible sensation,
feeling or idea’ which extends in time.43 According to Stern, furthermore,
‘affect derives its force not merely from the immediacy of touch but from
the capacity of the object to elude the voracious grasp of the moment (and
the narrative), to reverberate beyond the frame, to generate ideas within
a cultural landscape not circumscribed by the diegesis’.44 The close-up
can also draw attention to that from which it is extracted, alluding to what
it has failed to capture. It is this tension between distance and closeness,
intimacy and ungraspability that the close-ups perform in this sequence as
they extend in time.
While not denying the critical consensus that many of the shots would
function beautifully as photographs, it is important not to repress the
way in which Antonioni’s compositions are always in flux and move-
ment, such that geometrical arrangements modulate in duration and tend
to liquefy static lines. This modulation also serves to make the human
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figures, especially Claudia, stand out more powerfully in their expressive

and fluid physicality. Where strong compositional lines are present, they
often emphasise the soft outlines of the human figures through juxtapo-
sition. In an early scene, for example, when Claudia is waiting for Anna
and Sandro, we see a composition made up of the criss-crossing wooden
beams of a ceiling, with the camera tilted upwards so that the angle of the
ceiling recedes into the distance rather than forming a purely flat surface.
Claudia’s head, moving from side to side, gradually enters the frame, her
face growing bigger until it almost fills the screen, and disrupts the geo-
metrical construction of the mise-en-scène with her presence. As Jennifer
Barker has argued in relation to Antonioni’s films, the presence of the
physical body may threaten non-compliance with, even subversion of,
a film’s organised systems of composition.45 The force of these ‘bodily
irruptions’, to use Barker’s term, is also echoed diegetically: when pros-
titute Gloria Perkins arrives in a small Sicilian town, she causes a riot in
which hundreds of men stream on to the streets and jostle for a look at
her. Her naked flesh is shown beneath a tear in her skirt, as though the
sensuousness of the body has ruptured the fabric. This scene seems to
present a deliberately excessive eruption of bodily excitation, which is also
frequently pushed to the fore compositionally.
While Antonioni’s compositions are often compared to paintings,
paintings themselves appear at several points in L’Avventura. They are
frequently, however, set in opposition to, or at least distinguished from,
the film’s own temporal presentation of experience in depth. In Rome,
Claudia wanders through an art gallery where two groups of visitors
are examining two different paintings. An immediate diegetic relativity
is established between them which echoes that established between the
movement of cinema and the still frame of painting. The members of the
first group are elegantly dressed and offer pretentious praise (in English)
of the painting in front of them. The second group consists of Italian men
who joke about the painter’s brush with starvation. The scene is composed
so that the two groups are on opposite sides of a wall, which we see only
from the side (thus the paintings themselves are seen only obliquely).
As Claudia walks between the two groups, the camera appears to track
through this wall, performing the movement and temporal duration that
sets it apart from stilled and flattened surfaces. Modernist painting is again
introduced in a scene that takes place at the Montaldo villa. The studio of a
young resident painter is full of geometrical compositions of nude women
traced across blank backgrounds. As the painter pursues Giulia, one of
the members of the cruise, the camera circles around this small space with
graceful balletic movements, dynamising and activating it. Claudia, in the
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meantime, becomes absorbed by the landscape seen through the window,

which presents a perfect vista of differently shaded hills in a perspective of
depth. In this scene movements and modes of looking through time and
space seem to be explicitly set apart from the kind of static and flattened
compositions which so often serve as a comparison to Antonioni’s frames.
When asked about the relationship between cinema and painting,
Antonioni stated that
while for the painter it is a matter of uncovering a static reality, or at most a rhythm
that can be held in a single image, for a director the problem is to catch a reality
which is never static, which is always moving towards and away from a moment of
crystallization.46
This description of moving towards and away from crystallisation echoes a

fluidity in cinema that I trace throughout this book in relation to meaning,
symbol, and composition. With regards to Antonioni’s images in particu-
lar, we can read the relationship between cinema and painting alongside
Peucker’s argument that, from the earliest days of cinema, films have often
deliberately contrasted themselves to static painting through, for example,
cinematic movement that attempts to ‘outdo painting’, or to ‘bring it to
life’.47 We can see this in operation again in a scene in Taormina towards
the end of the film. At a crowded hotel, a woman stands with her back to
us looking at a painting. The scene is tightly framed so that we see only
the back of her head. Sandro enters the frame in close-up, as the camera
refocuses slightly to clarify the outline of his face. There begins a grace-
fully choreographed series of movements as Sandro and the woman, who
is very similar to the woman in the painting, turn their heads towards and
away from each other several times in turn. The static frame of the paint-
ing becomes the backdrop against which the movements of the characters
and the subtle refocusing of the camera are activated.
Arguably, static compositions or isolated moments belong less to the
experience of L’Avventura in its duration than to the way in which we are
likely to remember it after viewing. That is, particular moments isolated
in critical discourse and discussed as a stilled, static composition are more
suited to our memory of the film than to our experience of it in duration.
As Klinger has argued, films store themselves in memory most effectively
in the form of affecting images. We often remember particular scenes and
objects with more intensity than story details or narrative significance.48
This seems to be especially true of close-ups. According to Doane, close-
ups become ‘one of our most potent memories of the cinema’.49 As scenes
from films become detached in memory, the duration of the film drops
away. As Burgin writes, ‘what was once a film in a movie theater . . . is
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now a kernel of psychical representations, a fleeting association of discrete

elements . . . the more the film is distanced in memory, the more the
binding effect of the narrative is loosened. The sequence breaks apart.’50
It is significant, in this context, that cinephilia, the passionate engage-
ment with film’s privileged moments, has been seen as a ‘collecting activ-
ity’. As Willemen writes, in cinephilic experience discrete objects and
moments are serialised in the viewer’s mind into collections: ‘the moment
of cinephilia has to do with the serialisation of moments of revelation’.51
With the development of DVD technologies that allow the viewer to lit-
erally collect cinephilic moments, the experience of cinephilia has been
transformed. Although Sontag proclaimed that the introduction of DVDs
suggested that cinephilia was dead, Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener
have argued that it has reinvented itself with new technologies.52 In their
opinion, the term should not be restricted to its historical context as part
of the discourse of Cahiers du Cinéma, but rather seen in the more general
sense of a universal phenomenon in which the film experience invokes
feelings of intense pleasure and rapture.53 In writing of being able to lit-
erally still the moving image with DVD technology, Mulvey echoes the
comparison of cinephilic moments with collected or found objects: ‘like
personal objet trouvés, such scenes can be played and replayed, on the
threshold between cinephilia and fandom’.54
New practices of cinephilia have reinscribed the emphasis upon the
momentary in film. DVD technologies have been seen to be more con-
ducive to stopping the film than allowing it to continue uninterrupted.
Mulvey, for example, develops the idea that the moment of stillness
within the moving image creates a ‘pensive spectator’ who can reflect
on the cinema, re-creating the resonance of the still photograph.55 With
the digital possibilities of the medium, the image itself can be frozen
and subjected to a repetition or return that was not possible with earlier
viewing conditions. As the ‘new stillness is enhanced by the weight that
the cinema’s past has acquired with passing time,’ Mulvey writes, ‘its
significance goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time,
its passing, and how it is represented or preserved’.56 Indexing a film into
chapters allows access to cinephilic moments, such that the films acquire a
‘quasi-museum-like status’.57
What also needs to be acknowledged, however, is that being able to
replay films such as L’Avventura also provides us with greater access to
the film’s temporal flow. The viewer is now presented with the possibility
of embedding the affective moments that our memories serialise back into
the temporal context from which they emerged. It thus opens up new pos-
sibilities for writing on temporality in film. There is a sense in which, as
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Burgin writes, when we write of our memories of the film we betray them
– either by taming them into symbolic meanings and interpretations, or
by not recognising the affective networks that made them stand out in the
first place.58 Stern and Kouvaros begin the introduction to their book on
cinema and performance with an anecdote that would ring true for many
film critics: you see a scene which affects you, write about it, and then,
upon re-watching it realise that your description of it is inaccurate.59 The
possibility of watching sequences repeatedly, then, ‘opens up the pos-
sibility (and the challenge) of a more ostensive and demonstrative mode
of description’.60 In the duration of L’Avventura, images and textures are
not easily extricable and flattened into an aestheticised surface, but rather
resonate affectively through time and in movement. In memory, however,
the duration of our experience, the temporal modulations that images,
thoughts and affects undertake, may drop away. Being granted access
to the film’s duration through video and DVD can be seen as a way to
reinsert these images into temporal flow.
Looking and Imaging

Critical writing on L’Avventura frequently mentions a coldness that seems
to emanate from the film, and/or a distance inherent in our experience of
it. According to Rifkin, for example, Antonioni maintains an emotional
distance from his characters so that we do not feel their tragedies but
rather observe them as representative of mankind’s tragic condition.61
‘Antonioni’s “coldness” ’, he continues, ‘involves a technique of objecti-
fying people into “things”.’62 For Bert Cardullo, Antonioni’s films tend
to preclude ‘simple emotional involvement on our part’ in favour of a
‘contemplative distance’.63 In interview, Pierre Billard commented on the
‘dark, cold mood’ of Antonioni’s films.64 Viewing the film is sometimes
assumed to be an anxious process of estrangement, suggested in Ford’s
comment that ‘ontological violence . . . remains the central affective expe-
rience of a film like L’Avventura’.65 Glen Norton suggests a similar relation
of distance in the viewing experience of the film, writing, ‘the difficulty of
communication . . . mirrors the difficulty the viewer has in comprehend-
ing Antonioni’s own cinematic language, a language which communicates
the alienation and fragmentation of modern life’.66 My view of the film
differs from such assumptions, and emphasises two related characteristics:
the way in which the editing might involve us intimately in the particular
ways of seeing represented by the female lead, and the potentially affective
process of cinematic imaging that the film’s editing and cinematography
perform.
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It has been frequently noted in critical writing on L’Avventura that

Claudia plays the part of witness; she is frequently shown simply observ-
ing, and we observe alongside her. As Nowell-Smith writes, ‘Claudia
observes, and her observation becomes the film’s focus.’67 In some critical
writing, however, Claudia’s look is subordinated to an auterist system of
values. Claudia, writes Chatman, ‘assume[s] the additional narrative task
of mediating our vision’, but is also given the function of ‘freighting it with
the unspoken values of the implied author’.68 Commenting on the scene
in which Claudia visits the art gallery, Brunette writes that: ‘Antonioni
is clearly instructing us in “proper” interpretive procedures.’69 Claudia’s
looking prepares the audience to understand the film, ‘these images are
heavy, weighted, and seemingly full of clues . . . ’; at this point, Brunette
registers a tapering off of meaning, ‘ . . . but clues toward what solution?’70
It is interesting that, while presenting the centrality of Claudia to the
film, actual identification with her is rarely acknowledged. This may in
part be an extension of the fact that identification in general with the
characters from Antonioni’s films of this period is rarely considered a
possible viewing experience. The barring of identification for many critics
is not so much a question of characterisation but rather is inherent in the
very structures of looking that the film presents. Rather than employing a
classic point-of-view structure in which we see Claudia looking, and then
what she is looking at, she tends to be included in the same frame as what
she sees, frequently with her back to the camera, as though combining a
shot/reverse-shot in one take. According to Cameron, while in certain
respects our experience is paralleled with that of the characters, we are
‘discouraged’ from identifying with them through this structuring of our
vision.
We are shown what the characters see and learn what they learn, but without iden-
tifying with them, so that our appreciation of their feelings must be primarily intel-
lectual. We are therefore more conscious than the characters of the meaning of their
behavior (as we would not be if we started identifying with them). This places us
in a position to correlate our observations of all the characters and reach the general
conclusions which Antonioni expects us to draw.71
In relation to L’Avventura’s Claudia, I am not convinced that shots in

which we see her observing only, or necessarily, encourage us to intel-
lectualise her behaviour. Instead, the film creates a powerful sense of being
with Claudia by both keeping her in view and creating a particular pace
of observation. The film fluidly moves towards and away from her way of
looking. While she looks, wandering through the art gallery or looking at
the landscape out of a window, we partly share the duration of her look,
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and are thus drawn close to her experience of time. As Perez points out,
‘this suspensive time, in no hurry to move ahead to the next thing, often
gives us the sense of our sharing with the characters an unabridged inter-
val in the passage of their lives’.72 I agree with Perez that experiencing
this time alongside the characters, particularly if it seems to be a moment
inconsequential to any but themselves, may heighten ‘the sense of our
sharing a personal, private experience’, something that may encourage an
intimate sense of closeness to the characters.73 The camera both gives her
space and remains close to her through time.
If Claudia slows down to look at things in the diegetic world, the film
will also slow down in presenting its images to viewers. Once again we
can consider Claudia’s movements in Rome. As she walks through the art
gallery, the camera moves also, tracking her and keeping her in frame, but
remaining on the other side of the wall. It both mimics her movement,
and moves away from her way of looking. Three separate shots in which
Claudia is seen looking are themselves preceded by a moment in which
viewers simply look on to the film’s spaces. That is, there is a pause before
she appears on screen. For example, we are presented with the exterior of
a building; Claudia is then shown walking into this shot and looking up at
the window above her. A similar pattern is repeated in the next shot; the
view of criss-crossing ceiling beams that I mentioned earlier. Again, she
walks into this shot and is shown looking. Claudia is seen closing a door
upon the corridor leading into Sandro’s apartment building; a transitional
space that is for now presented only as a future possibility, a threshold that
is being indicated but that she is not yet crossing. In each of these three
shots, the camera is already present at the location in which she will appear,
waiting for her. The film slows its pace of observation as Claudia does. It
pauses the narrative, as she pauses her movements, to observe, as though
encouraging viewers to look at things in the way Claudia might. Following
Claudia’s impassioned plea to Sandro to leave her alone on the train, the
film cuts to a view of the sea from the moving train, then back to Claudia
as she emerges into the train’s corridor. The film does not imply that this
shot is from her perspective, but is, rather, structured as though to mimic
the way in which she might look at the diegetic environment. Once again,
we are presented with a relation of both closeness and distance: this is not
Claudia’s point of view, but the camera lingers on the coastal scene in the
way that she has been seen lingering to look at the landscape.
The association between Claudia’s looking and our own look at the film
can only be taken so far, however, as L’Avventura frequently emphasises
the difference between human vision and the aesthetic imaging process
that cinema is capable of. As Colebrook has argued, art can disrupt our
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natural perception and ‘free’ affect from a world of coherent bodies, pre-
senting itself as a power and process of becoming.74 Cinema can present
a mode of seeing that is not attached to the human eye, and can thus
dislodge affects from their recognised and expected origins.75 According
to Colebrook, ‘the material of the film, or elements of its aesthetic com-
position, is not something we see “through” to grasp reality, we see
“seeing” ’.76 This can be an exhilarating experience. The film continually
presents particular details or major aesthetic and narrative moments that
even after several viewings seem paradoxically unexpected. In Deleuzian
terms, we might think of the film as opposed to his definition of ‘common
sense’ which ‘organises the world according to fixed identities and stable
spatial and temporal coordinates’.77 Implicit in the notion of common
sense is the model of thought as a form of recognition, a unified per-
spective and stable object: ‘thought’s goal in a world of recognition and
representation is to eliminate problems and find solutions, to pass from
non-knowledge to knowledge . . . a process with a definite beginning and
ending’.78 The ‘dynamic unfolding of the world’, however, ‘is a process
that escapes common sense and defies its set categories. That process is a
ceaseless becoming in which things perpetually metamorphose into some-
thing else and thereby elude identification and specification.’79 This seems
to me an apt way of considering a film that continually disrupts a coherent
presentation of time and space, encouraging us not to recognise the film’s
presentation of time and space as similar to the way we live it every day,
but to see it as a new spatio-temporal configuration.
One of the ways in which aesthetic creativity is emphasised is through
what Deleuze has termed ‘aberrant’ editing practices, shifts of perspective
or scale which disrupt a cinematic construction based on natural percep-
tion, performing instead a creative imaging process. From a contemporary
perspective, perhaps, L’Avventura’s aberrant editing practices are not as
obvious or offensive as they may have seemed to some viewers upon the
film’s release. It is possible, rather, to speak of a continual process in which
the film presents unusual framings and movements that seem to pull away
from issues of characterisation or narrative, and human centres of vision.
As Nowell-Smith has written, ‘camera movements and editing are in a
constant process of flux . . . events unfold from a series of camera posi-
tions, all of which uncover new details of a scene but none of which con-
forms to a stable narrative logic enabling the spectator to place events and
assign them unequivocal meanings’.80 Antonioni’s sequences suggest new
perceptual possibilities which Flaxman, following Deleuze, sees as part of
the project of modern cinema: creating irregularities and heterogeneous
durations. ‘Such images’, writes Flaxman, ‘induce the imagination itself
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to take a trip’, in a process in which the presentation of images disrupts

conventional patterns and de-emphasises the meaningful or symbolic in
favour of the affective.81
L’Avventura’s editing simmers with creative energy, establishing
editing patterns and then breaking them with surprising framings. When
Claudia waits on a bench at a railway station on her way to the Montaldo
villa, for example, she is approached by Sandro, who wants to remain with
her. They have an emotionally tense exchange, in which their distraught
expressions are illuminated and emphasised. The camera focuses first on
Claudia before cutting to Sandro, who is visibly distressed at Claudia’s
insistence that he leave. The camera follows Sandro as he stands up,
lingering on his expression for several seconds before he turns around
abruptly to face Claudia. The film then cuts to Claudia, as though in a
reverse shot following Sandro’s perception. The framing of Claudia,
however, differs significantly from that rendered previously: she is seen at
the left-hand corner of the frame, occupying less than a quarter of it, while
the rest is taken up by the wall of the station.
This unexpected framing disrupts the usual symmetry of the shot-
reverse-shot structure in a moment of deviation and difference. The
film’s final sequence can also be seen in this manner. Claudia, having
discovered Sandro with the prostitute Gloria Perkins, runs out of the
hotel in Taormina to a deserted piazza. Sandro follows her there, sits on a
bench, and begins to weep. The film cuts several times from close-ups to
mid-shots. In the final such oscillation, Claudia’s hand is seen in close-up,
hovering around Sandro’s head and eventually coming down to stroke his
hair in time to the climax of the musical score. There is then a cut from
this close-up to a long-shot, when the couple are suddenly shown in the
foreground of an astonishing composition. Once again, the frame has
been split in half: one side is taken up with the decaying stone wall of a
house and its protruding balcony, the other shows a vast panorama of the
sea with a snow-covered volcano in the distance. Brunette posits a self-
reflexivity in this composition, which apparently unmasks the camera and
strips it of its power.82 The shot, he writes, has a ‘stylised effect that is so
self-reflexively powerful that it removes us forcibly (if only momentarily)
from the story and reminds us that we are participating in a self-conscious
work of art whose relation with reality is heavily conventionalised’.83 I
agree that this is a moment in which the film’s aesthetic force surfaces
powerfully, but not necessarily with the description of this moment in
terms of self-reflexive unmasking, which conveys little of the affective res-
onance of the sequence. The aesthetic and the narrative elements are not
necessarily divorced (such that we are ‘removed’ from the story); rather,
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the ambiguous ending of the film’s narrative, the questions that remain
over Claudia and Sandro’s future, is given an even greater affective power
through the aesthetic rendering of the moment.
L’Avventura invites a relation of fascination to its processes of cinematic
imaging, which become visible rather than transparent; it is the cinematic
techniques, as much as what they portray, that invite an affective reaction.
In his commentary for the Criterion Collection DVD, Gene Youngblood,
for example, enthuses over Antonioni’s ‘beautiful dissolves’, especially
that which literally wipes Anna off the screen for the last time.84 This
dissolve cinematically renders her disappearance as vague and indeter-
minate as it is narratively. Antonioni’s dissolves render space and time
fluid, as though continually escaping from critical desires to fasten rigid
interpretations on to them.
In another example, a shot of Claudia standing under an archway at the
Montaldo villa dissolves on to a shot of an unknown woman’s face. The
shape of the archway modulates through the dissolve into the shape of
the face, which we soon learn belongs to the chemist’s wife from Troina.
According to Brunette, by beginning the scene with the wife’s face in
close-up before we know who she is, Antonioni ‘mean[t] to articulate
an emotion and suggest a theme even before placing the situation narra-
tively’.85 It is difficult to pin down, however, what this theme or emotion
might be. The close-up, floating free from narrative fixation, presents
itself to us before we can interpret it. Instead, we could see it as a moment
of indeterminacy that demands our attention. Rohdie sees this moment as
an example of a scene that simply compels and fascinates before it ‘means’
or ‘narratively’ functions.86 The dissolve effects a transition between two
spaces and scenes, and the unanchored close-up enacts a dissolution of
narrative placement.
While the film’s figures lend themselves to be ‘placed in a scene, in a
drama’, they also, as Rohdie writes, ‘come to have a life of their own, as
images, and to become a source of fascination without the need for a nar-
rative anchor’. Displaying his sensitivity to the flow of the film’s duration,
he also emphasises that, ‘at the same time, and it is the reason for the fas-
cination, the narrative and the figures are never completely lost, are poised
to return and resume shape’.87 In the scene above, we are soon directed
back towards narrative concerns as Sandro questions the chemist about
Anna’s disappearance. In L’Avventura, affects may be evoked through
cinematic rendering, but sometimes, it seems, thematic concerns are also
‘poised to return’; affect and theme may emerge together.
This can be demonstrated with reference to a sequence in which
Claudia and Sandro are shown leaving a deserted town near Noto. The
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camera observes them from an alleyway off a square, in which their car is
parked. When the couple discover the town, the camera is already present,
filming from the top of a building so that we see them entering the square
from above. Sandro and Claudia are surprised and disturbed to find the
town deserted, and wonder whether Anna could have passed through
there. Claudia is distressed upon realising that what she thought was
another town in the distance is in fact a cemetery, and asks Sandro if they
can leave. Claudia and Sandro are framed in long-shot in the square; the
camera watches from a passageway in shadow. As they enter the car and
drive away, the camera tracks forward slowly for several seconds, moving
towards the space they have vacated. The gliding movement of the camera
departs from usual or ‘natural’ lines of vision; at these moments, as
Durgnat has argued, ‘the spectator becomes vaguely conscious of a certain
uneasiness, or of exhilaration’.88 The camera movement constitutes a
moment of utter ambiguity, injecting uncertainty into the scene. It cannot
be explained with reference to what the director intended, for Antonioni
himself has stated that ‘this is the most ambiguous shot in the whole film.
I think it is impossible to explain. I don’t know why I wanted it.’89
While it may not have an explanation, it certainly has a peculiar reso-
nance which is elongated by the duration of the shot and its temporal place-
ment within the narrative. By the time the camera begins its movement,
both Anna and the idea of mortality are diegetically introduced (through
the search and through the cemetery). The inexplicable presence of the
camera and its gliding advance bring to mind the possibility of Anna’s
ghostly presence. This shot invites us to re-evaluate the camera placement
at the beginning of the scene, reinforcing the sense that someone – not
merely ‘the camera’ – was already present there, waiting for the characters
to arrive. The sequence enacts an ambiguity that is not unlike the structure
of the moment of anamorphosis as described by Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek,
anamorphosis designates a small supplementary feature in the image that
sticks out and does not make sense within the frame: ‘the same situations,
the same events that, till then, have been perceived as perfectly ordinary,
acquire an air of strangeness’.90 Such points of anamorphosis, which
‘open up the abyss of the search for meaning’, break open the ground of
established, familiar signification, and plunge the viewer into the depths
of a realm of total ambiguity.91 While Žižek conceives of this moment as
a ‘point’, however, it clearly has a temporal dimension; it activates the
viewer’s memory and requires a revision of what we have seen.
Significantly, Žižek does not see this as a moment of self-reflexive
alienation from the film. Instead, the moment of anamorphosis under-
mines our position as ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ observers, implicating us in
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what we observe. Anamorphosis indicates the point at which the observer

is already involved in the film, ‘the point from which the picture itself
looks back at us’.92 Žižek’s words echo Benjamin’s, and Marks’s, writing
on the aura, specifically the characteristic that Marks identifies in objects
or images that seem to ‘look back at us’. Aura, she writes, ‘is the sense
an object gives that it can speak to us of the past, without ever letting us
completely decipher it’.93 While we are here dealing with a movement
rather than an object, it is a movement that not only creatively performs
a machinic departure from natural perception, but also alludes to the
mystery of the film’s past: the disappearance of Anna. The longer the
shot is held, the more intense the uncertain affect of its movement grows.
Deleuze may have had this sequence in mind in his general description of
the film. In L’Avventura, he argues, the absent woman, Anna, ‘causes an
interminable gaze to weigh on the couple – which gives them the continual
feeling of being spied on, and which explains the lack of coordination of
their objective movements, when they flee whilst pretending to look for
her’.94 Placing the scene in its temporal context, then, suggests how the
lurking of the camera and its process of imaging may intertwine with a
more comprehensive and contextualised awareness. The image presents
a certain modulation between a diegetic resonance and a cinematographic
performance, an awareness of seeing ‘through’ the perception of the
camera as well as of seeing ‘imaging’ itself.
In sum, then, there are several ways in which we might challenge the
assumption that viewing the film involves a sense of alienation or coldness.
Klinger has suggested that, rather than experiencing an emotional identi-
fication with a character in a film, viewers can affectively align themselves
with a particular way of looking, perceiving and presenting the world. As
I do, viewers may sense an affinity with the slow pace of observation that
both Claudia and the film perform; to cite Klinger, viewers ‘may find the
allusion to the organisation of experience compelling’.95 Groves has also
noted that the affective rapport we may feel with a film is not necessarily
dependent upon any object or character, rather, ‘we are influenced by a
kind of rhetoric through which we discover our identity in certain texts
but not others’, the success of which depends upon each viewer’s ‘sug-
gestibility’.96 It may be the creative, aesthetic performance of the film itself
that draws viewers towards it.
Temporalised Space
Much of the critical writing on L’Avventura’s landscapes is focused upon
an interpretation of the locations as metaphors, symbols or metonymies.
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For Cameron, the island of Lisca Bianca is a ‘symbol of barrenness’;

for Rifkin it is a ‘metaphor’, though he does not specify for what. For
Chatman, landscapes are objective correlatives which ‘represent charac-
ters’ states of mind’.97 Schwarzer sees the volcano in L’Avventura as ‘a
symbol of humanity’s connection to lasting meaning’.98 This tendency
toward symbolisation may stem partly from the sense that the images
exceed whatever narrative purposes may hover around them; accounting
for the appearance of certain spaces through narrative means is simply not
enough to explain their affective power. According to Brunette, Italian
writer Lorenzo Cuccu best summed up the idea that the source of the
symbolic tendency ‘lies in the overwhelming pressure that the director
can put on visual images, [citing Cuccu] “the problematic and dynamic
tension internal to an image that cannot be reduced to being a mere illus-
trative function of the story”.’99 However, symbolic interpretations tend
to abstract space from its presentation in time, again suggesting images
that are static and flattened, detached from depth, reconfigured in and
through the interpretative process as a still frame.
L’Avventura’s landscapes are also frequently presented in terms that
stress their negative affects or associations. In Durgnat’s view, for
example, the film presents ‘one broad, flat landscape after another [that]
drags itself wearily up the long, slow haul to the horizon. Limp roads lead
the eye to clutters of irrelevant shacks . . . the perspectives are a web of
emptiness’.100 Arrowsmith points to the immensity and violence of the
spaces that the characters find themselves in. On Lisca Bianca, ‘man’ is
‘dwarfed and humbled by the environing vastness . . . no longer centre
stage but surrounded by a violence he cannot ignore, a mystery he cannot
explain’.101 Arrowsmith certainly has a point – the hints of violence in the
landscape emerge in the shark that Anna pretends to see, the boulders that
tumble down into the ocean, the twister at sea, and the ocean itself, with its
rushing waves and threat of annihilation. For Deleuze, Antonioni’s spaces
are prime examples of the any-space-whatever, of disconnected space, ‘the
connection of the parts of space is not given, because it can come about
only from the subjective point of view of a character who is, nevertheless,
absent, or has even disappeared, not simply out of frame, but passed into
the void’.102 As the spaces lose their homogeneity and metrical relations,
however, they can also become a ‘pure locus of the possible’ which is rich
in potential affects. Viewers, furthermore, can personalise these spaces;
anonymous spaces can become intimate for the viewer.
There are other ways of describing the spaces of L’Avventura than
stressing their emptiness or violence. The spaces are also, for example,
those of sensuous travel, of a continual revelation of new spaces to
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explore. This is presented on a thematic level throughout the film. The

characters set out from Rome, viewing Sandro’s apartment on the Tiber
along the way, for a Mediterranean cruise amongst the small rocky islands
marooned in a vast expanse of sea off Sicily. ‘One pull to involvement in
an Antonioni film’, as Perez writes, ‘is his keen documentary sense.103
L’Avventura is no exception: Antonioni films dolphins playing in the
water, and slowly manipulates the camera over immense rock formations
and the vast expanse of the sea. Claudia and Sandro travel by train and
by car across a rural area of Sicily, where tourism is continuously kept as
a diegetic reminder. When the couple stop at a railway station, a poster
advertising the Sicilian tourism industry is clearly visible in the back-
ground. In Noto, Sandro complains about the lack of respect shown to
him as a ‘tourist’. The police station Sandro visits is located in an ancient
villa, and the camera explicitly draws attention to the frescoes which cover
the walls, panning upwards and lingering on the textures of the marble.
Claudia and Sandro’s sightseeing tour in Noto culminates in the scaling
of a church bell tower, which provides a panoramic view of the terraced
architectural landscape. Claudia and Sandro are partly, and inescapably,
tourists.
The shots taken from moving vehicles throughout the film explicitly
make this touristic gaze available to viewers. Scenes in which the charac-
ters are driving or being driven are often filmed from within the car, as it
moves towards a horizon which is presented as a depth opening in front
of the viewer. There are also shots of the rocky island from the cruise boat
(one of these moves up and down as though emphasising its physical situ-
ation), and from the window of the train, as the coastline unfolds alongside
it. As Bruno writes, changes in shot heights, angles and speeds ensure that
‘travel culture is written on the techniques of filmic observation’.104 In this
aesthetics of touristic practice, ‘architectural space becomes framed for
view and offers itself for consumption as traveled space’.105 The diegetic
and cinematographic presentation of a ‘touristic gaze’ invites a sort of
relationship to the filmed landscape which is more intimate than has been
allowed for in most interpretive or aesthetic criticism on Antonioni. Bruno
can be placed on the opposite side of the spectrum from writers such as
Cameron, Rifkin and Chatman, arguing for a consideration of space as a
depth that viewers can imagine moving through. According to Bruno, a
viewer can inscribe him (or her)self into a film by imagining themselves
residing inside it, thus ‘tangibly map[ping] oneself within it’.106 There is,
she argues, a ‘mobile dynamics involved in the act of viewing films, even
if the spectator is seemingly static. The (im)mobile spectator moves across
an imaginary path, traversing multiple sites and times’.107
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The space that the characters traverse throughout L’Avventura is

one that is inflected with varying temporal associations. In the opening
sequence, the dome of an old cathedral is shown on one side of the
frame, and encroaching modern housing developments on the other. The
opening dialogue between Anna and her father contains several different
temporal statements, a continual battle to establish the supremacy of one
time over another. For example, seeing Anna, her father states, ‘I thought
you were already on the high seas’, to which Anna replies, ‘Not yet.’ Her
father continues, ‘Isn’t it fashionable anymore to put on a sailor’s cap with
the name of the yacht?’, to which Anna replies that it is no longer thus.
Their journey to Sicily can also be construed as a journey into a place with
different temporal characteristics, which was rather a stereotype at the
time of the film’s release.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Sicily was frequently seen in Italian culture and
writing as a remnant of the primitive. The ‘problem of the Mezzogiorno’
in the 1960s was that southerners were seen to adhere to an essentially dif-
ferent conception of the world than northerners.108 As journalist Oriana
Fallaci quipped, ‘The South. That’s another planet.’109 In the films of
this era, then, the South became ‘the ideal site in which to explore the
changing manners and mores of a new society’. It provided an essential
‘backwardness’ and cultural distance from modernity.110 This is con-
tinually and explicitly brought to our attention in the film through, for
example, the over-emphasised, animalistic sexuality of the men, the town
dweller in Noto who mispronounces and denounces the bikini, and the
island’s decrepit inhabitant and its buried ancient town. According to
Arrowsmith, the movement away from the modern Roman housing devel-
opments, with which the film opens, to the Sicilian landscape, can be seen
not only as a voyage toward the ‘immensities of space’, but also as ‘a trip
backward into time, into geologic time’.111
As in much Italian cinema, L’Avventura continually presents Italy as a
country ‘overloaded with traces of the past’,112 in the ancient pots rising
up from the depths of Lisca Bianca, the police station with its marble
and murals, and the architectural splendour of Noto. Layers of time are
created in the image and announced through dialogue; Raimondo, for
example, questions how man could ever have been an inhabitant of the
seas, while Sandro bemoans the state of contemporary architecture in
relation to the beautiful buildings of the past. The space of L’Avventura
is one in which remnants of the past persist alongside the present. We
can see this in relation to a Bergsonian notion of duration which, as Lim
explains, implies the ‘survival of the past’, ‘an ever-accumulating onto-
logical memory that is wholly, automatically and ceaselessly preserved’.113
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Lim links together Bergson and Chakrabarty in their ‘insistence that older
modes of being are never entirely surmounted’. The latter ‘reveals that the
charge of anachronism – the claim that something out of kilter with the
present really belongs to a superseded past – is a gesture of temporal exclu-
sion’.114 The world of L’Avventura indeed seems to be one that refuses
temporal exclusion, instead focusing on the coexistence of various tempo-
ral strata. Although writing in a different context, Andreas Huyssen sees
the ‘turn towards the residues of ancestral cultures and local traditions,
the privileging of the non-synchronous and heterogeneous’ as a reaction
to the accelerated pace of modernity, ‘an attempt to break out of the swirl-
ing empty space of the everyday present and to claim a sense of time and
memory’.115 This strikes me as an interesting gloss on both L’Avventura’s
spatial journey from urban Rome to rural Sicily and on its slow temporal
rhythms, as though reclaiming both a space and a time for close, unhur-
ried observation. Tarkovsky’s Mirror, as I argue in Chapter 3, performs a
similar desire to slow down time and allow for the play of memory.
The use of depth in L’Avventura presents particular possibilities for
describing the interrelation of space and time. It is useful at this point
to consider Deleuze’s writing on the effect of presenting space in depth.
Images presented in depth are, according to Deleuze, fundamentally
related to memory and time. Depth of field explores a ‘region of past’
within the frame rather than presenting a chronological succession of
time through editing. This continuity of duration ensures that ‘unbri-
dled depth is of time and no longer of space’.116 Time’s subordination to
movement is reversed, and temporality appears directly for itself. Depth
in the image, then, becomes less a function of presenting a spatial realism,
encouraging a sense of inhabitation, than of activating a ‘function of
remembering, of temporalisation: not exactly a recollection but an “invita-
tion to recollect” ’.117 In Bazin’s influential analysis pitting depth against
montage, he argued that depth encourages a greater contribution on the
part of the spectator to the meaning of the images unfolding before them.
Thus needing to exercise personal choice when deciding what part of the
frame to look at, ‘it is from [the viewer’s] attention and [their] will that the
meaning of the image in part derives’.118Although most critics have given
priority to Bazin’s spatial configurations, Rosen emphasises that tempo-
rality is central to his concept of cinematic depth. Our eyes search out
the points that interest us in an image composed in depth, ‘introduc[ing]
a sort of temporalisation on a second level by analysis of the space of a
reality, itself evolving in time’.119
As Deleuze explains, the evocation of memory can be shown in the act
of occurring: images are presented in depth when there is a need for the
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characters to recall. In this situation, searching overcomes the charac-

ters’ ability to act; seeing takes the place of action. Rather than logically
linked movements in space, characters enact anomalies of movement, ‘a
trampling, a to-and-fro’.120 The sequence on Lisca Bianca in which the
characters search for Anna can to some extent illustrate Deleuze’s under-
standing of depth. Viewers do not see Anna leaving the island, either as
the event occurs or through flashbacks. Instead, we watch the characters
as they search for her, tracing her possible trajectories of movement. To
appropriate Deleuze’s words, the characters enact an ‘actual effort of
evocation’; they attempt to ‘summon’ her up, exploring ‘virtual zones of
past, to find, choose, and bring [her] back’.121 As Deleuze writes, depth
can thus become ‘a function of remembering, a figure of temporalisation.
It then gives rise to all kinds of adventures of the memory, which are not
so much psychological accidents as misadventures of time, disturbances of
its constitution’.122
These misadventures of time and memory are, however, prima-
rily restricted by Deleuze to the experiences of the figures on screen
rather than to possible viewing experiences. Deleuze entertains the
possibility that when we read, look at a painting or watch a ‘show’, we
ourselves weave between levels of temporality and thus ‘extract a non-
chronological time’.123 Watching a film is, notably, not mentioned.
Ultimately for Deleuze, it is the screen, not the viewer, that enacts these
temporal adventures, ‘the screen itself is the cerebral membrane where
immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the
future’.124 The Lisca Bianca sequence, however, demonstrates how images
in depth can also invite viewers to recollect. Shooting the scenes in depth
ensures that all the characters are in focus in their relative positions on
the island. As Anna and Sandro make a final effort to communicate, for
example, the small figures of Giulia and Corrado are seen in sharp focus
in the background, suggesting that what we have seen of their failed rela-
tionship may remain present to our minds as we watch the other couple.125
During the search for Anna, the characters are once again presented in
various configurations among the rocks, recalling scenes preceding the
disappearance. While the characters search the space, however, viewers
are invited to search their memories in time, encouraged to recall our last
glimpse of Anna. As the landscape is presented in perfect depth, the pos-
sible past of her traversal of it may emerge in efforts of recollection. One
could compare this scene to the ending of L’Eclisse. Throughout the film,
Vittoria (Vitti) and Piero (Alain Delon) are seen in a variety of locations
in Milan as their romance develops. Towards the end of the film, they
arrange to meet the following day – however, only the camera turns up.
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The film then displays several shots of the spaces where we had seen them
previously, spaces that they are now absent from. Although depth is not
as significant in this sequence, it shares with the Lisca Bianca scene an
insistence upon involving viewers’ memories. As Perez has written, ‘We
share with the camera a recollection of the lovers through a beholding of
things associated with them, things that for the camera, for us, carry their
memory and at the same time point up their absence.’126
Filmed landscapes are apprehended through duration, and our per-
ceptions of them are dependent upon memory. Bergson has written that
‘however brief we suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a
certain duration, and involves consequently an effort of memory which
prolongs one into another a plurality of moments’.127 The landscape of
Lisca Bianca is formed from an accumulation of images persisting in
memory. As Jean-Clet Martin writes, ‘every landscape is a virtual con-
struction in relation to a memory able to stock piles of images in all their
encroachments upon each other’.128 Rather than facilitating this process,
however, the landscape sequences are edited so as to disrupt a coherent
sense of space. In the long sequence on the island, it is difficult to anchor
the frequent pans over the rocks to individual characters. Shots of charac-
ters gazing on the landscape are sometimes followed by shots of rocks that
they could be looking at, or by what may seem to be a completely differ-
ent location; this shot may itself be followed by a view that shows us the
same character moving across the landscape, or someone different, leaving
us with little sense of where the rocks are in relation to them or to other
features of the island. At times, characters are framed so that we do not see
the land under their feet at all; they seem then, to be moving over an abyss.
A holistic landscape constructed out of all these fragments, a coherent
setting that we may picture in our minds, is jeopardised. This does not
necessarily mean, however, that we are kept at an aloof distance by the
compositions; instead, viewers can be seen to be intimately involved in
thickening perception with memory. According to Martin, landscape thus
becomes ‘something volatile that undoes itself with the rapidity of move-
ment and the successive shifting of perspectives’, allowing us to conceive
of point of view as ‘more on the side of “memory” than “matter” ’, that
is, as extending in time rather than only occurring in space.129 A possi-
ble effect of this effort of recollection is that the images of the landscape
will resonate in memory long after the film itself has ended. The visual
arrangement of the landscape in memory is a part of the temporal process
of interacting with a film. Burgin has written that films may come to
be deeply imbricated in our memories, until it can be difficult to tell a
memory of a film from a memory of a ‘real’ experience.130 For Rosenbaum,
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the landscapes of L’Avventura may ‘haunt our memory like sites with
highly personal associations from our own pasts’.131 This description of
L’Avventura’s impact is far removed from the frameworks of distance and
alienation cited previously.
Pace and Rhythm

Antonioni began making films, initially documentaries, when neo-realism
was flourishing in Italy. As Nowell-Smith points out, Antonioni had
‘always stood aloof from neo-realism and even when he agreed with its
methods or objectives (the preference for location shooting, for example),
he did so for different reasons’.132 What is striking about the way in
which Antonioni’s relationship to neo-realism is discussed is the frequent
emphasis upon time as the differentiating factor. Antonioni stated that
neo-realism ‘attracted attention to the relationship existing between the
character and surrounding reality . . . now, however, when for better or
worse reality has been normalised once again, it seems to me more inter-
esting to examine what remains in the characters from their past experi-
ences’.133 Deleuze emphasises this temporal difference when describing
Antonioni’s movement away from neo-realism; Antonioni, he argues,
replaces the neo-realist quest of movement ‘with a specific weight of time
operating inside characters and excavating them from within’.134
This stress on what remains from past experiences, the remnants and
traces of the past, and how they work through the present, could be seen to
shape the narrative structure as a whole. One could speculate that a more
conventional narrative might begin by exploring Anna and Sandro’s rela-
tionship. In the middle she may disappear and be searched for, and in the
end she would be found, dead or alive. L’Avventura, however, gives the
impression that everything important for Anna has already happened –
what we see is what remains, a character struggling to come to terms with
her experience, and then presumably deciding that she cannot continue on
in the same way. Seen in this manner, the film starts too late and continues
past the point at which it ‘should’ have ended. Claudia and Sandro are
left to deal with the aftermath. Of course, this analogy can only go so far.
Through this process of pastness operating within the characters, a new
beginning is formed for a new relationship.
Both Deleuze and Rodowick describe the kind of temporality that
operates through Antonioni’s characters as one of waiting. According to
Deleuze, the body ‘contains the before and the after, tiredness and waiting
. . . even despair are the attitudes of the body . . . the body as revealer of
the deadline’.135 For Rodowick, L’Avventura’s ‘ironic title points to spaces
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where any decidable action or interpretation has evaporated, leaving char-

acters who wait, who witness only the passing of time as duration’.136 This
kind of waiting can be glimpsed on the basic level of narrative. From its
opening scenes, L’Avventura presents characters who are always waiting;
Anna for Claudia at the film’s beginning, Claudia for Anna and Sandro,
Anna for Sandro to express something definite about their relationship,
Claudia for Sandro when they are separated, and both Claudia and Sandro
are in some sense waiting for Anna, or her body, to reappear. At the film’s
conclusion, Claudia waits for Sandro; too tired to go to dinner, she goes to
bed instead, while Sandro frolics downstairs with Gloria. The duration of
waiting appears excruciating to her, and she attempts to pass the time by
spatialising it: looking at the clock face, counting the seconds, and writing
down numbers on an open magazine. Lim’s formulation of Bergsonian
duration comes to mind: ‘while we wait impatiently, we become (some-
what painfully) aware not only of our own duration but of the multiple
durations outside our own’.137 Like the philosopher waiting for sugar
to melt, the time Claudia has to wait is not a mathematical, measured
time, but coincides with her impatience; she must submerge her desire to
rhythms that do not coincide with her own.138 It is through such times of
waiting that the operations of duration can come to the fore. As Elizabeth
Grosz writes,
duration is experienced most incontrovertibly in the phenomenon of waiting.

Waiting is the subjective experience that perhaps best exemplifies the coexistence of
a multiplicity of durations, durations both my own and outside of me, which may,
by chance, coalesce to form a ‘convenient’ rhythm or coincidence, or may delay me
and make me wait.139
From one perspective, the film also makes the viewer wait; for each
sequence to integrate itself into a narrative, for the narrative to reach its
expected conclusions, for causes to have effects. This sense of waiting for
something to happen is connected to the phenomenon of so-called ‘temps
morte’, or ‘dead times’. The term is often associated with Antonioni’s
statement that he preferred his actors’ performances when they had
stopped acting, ‘when everything has been said, when the scene appears
to be finished, there is what comes afterwards. It seems to me important
to show the character, back and front, just at that moment – a gesture or
an attitude that illuminates all that has happened, and what results from
it.’140 However, the term is associated more generally with other types of
apparently ‘empty’ moments: when the characters have left the frame or
before they have entered it, or when there is nothing of narrative interest
in the scene, yet the camera lingers on the space. As Nowell-Smith writes,
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this stretching out of the scenes provides ‘a sense of indefinite time, rather
than time defined by action’.141
These are moments in L’Avventura when the narrative and its drama
seems to be pulling away. One such moment occurs after Sandro and
Claudia’s passionate conversation at the station, where she refuses to allow
him to accompany her. On the platform, Sandro is shown looking after the
train for a moment, before running after it. The camera remains where it
was, registering in long-shot the fact that Sandro just makes the train. For
a few seconds we watch the train, the characters, and the narrative centre
pulling away from us, as we are left behind on the station platform, for a
moment abandoned. There is then a cut to the interior of the train and
the feeling is dispelled. It was partly these ‘dead times’ that the Cannes
audience were reacting to with anger and impatience; according to Ford,
a scene in which Claudia runs down the length of the hotel corridor in
Taormina brought shouts of ‘Cut, cut!’.142
As the name suggests, dead times have often been associated with a
kind of attack on the viewer’s centred subjectivity. Ford, for example,
has written that L’Avventura causes anxiety not only through its narra-
tive decentring, but also because of duration’s ‘destabilising of essence’.
The slow movement of time, he writes, hollows out subjects and their
agency, showing us a devastating temporal reality that radically challenges
our thought, disabling action and escaping our desire for control. These
moments ‘inflict fissures onto the diegesis (perhaps even terminally), sev-
ering narrative control, killing our desired centering of human presence,
destroying the subject’s ontological confidence in itself – and, of course,
coldly reminding us of our own enforced personal telos’.143 Not only,
however, does this seem rather a lot of responsibility for film sequences to
carry, it is also misleading to equate a radical temporality with a negative
affect, to define L’Avventura’s temporal progression in terms of violence,
coldness, and severance. Although Ford does not make this explicit, his
writing gives the sense that temporality can only be seen as a threatening
force, echoing early writing on cinema and critical desires to escape from
temporal flux.
From another perspective, however, viewers may not necessarily be
waiting for something else to happen, but attending to the slow fluctua-
tion of the image before them. One of the important consequences of the
‘dead times’ is that they allow us to pay attention to the modulations of
the image through time. They may provoke an impatience or boredom in
some viewers, and in others, a calm sense of patient observation, entirely
at ease with allowing the temporal development of the images to progress
at their own pace. As Chatman writes, we are encouraged to examine
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space away from the ‘immediate exigencies of plot’, allowing us time for
sensing, if not fully understanding, its ‘odd value’.144 The ‘dead times’
create a particular pace for the film and give it its slow temporal rhythms.
We are invited to pay attention to things that might ordinarily escape us.
Movement and aesthetic awareness is something that emerges from, and
takes place in, duration, precisely through these ‘dead times’. With each
long take, as Schliesser writes, ‘we are quietly swept up by the sooth-
ing yet humbling force of this vision, encouraged to ponder the stillness
and mystery of what would ordinarily pass as mundane’.145 Allowing the
viewer this time to notice and observe slows the pace of the film. As indi-
cated previously, this also aligns the viewer with Claudia’s way of looking.
She, too, slows down to look at things, such as the landscape outside the
painter’s studio, and the rising sun on the island and in the resort at the
film’s ending.
Throughout the film, scenes of drama are balanced with moments
of observation that move away from human concerns. For example, in
the moment that I have already mentioned, after Claudia’s passionate
exclamations on the train with Sandro, the camera cuts to shots from the
moving train, of rolling surf and sea, seen in glorious movement. When
Claudia is weeping on the piazza at the film’s ending, there is time for a
shot, visually and aurally resonant, of the leaves of a tree rustling in the
wind. As Rohdie has written, if the narrative can be seen to ‘die’ at all in
such moments, then the duration of the film allows a new interest to take
hold: in textures, the light and tone of things, compositional frames, and
a ‘shimmering’ between figure and ground. As these transform through
duration, they can provide the spectator with ‘the most intense, exquisite
joy’.146 For viewers inclined to do so, the slow temporality allows for a
pleasurable wallowing in the images and their transformations through
time, their aesthetic compositions as well as the textures, landscapes,
characters and objects depicted within the frame.
A languid pace is also created by the frequent use of slow dissolves in
between scenes, such that even moments of action and movement, such
as the journey from Rome to Sicily, seem slowed down. In this sequence,
there is a dissolve from a shot of Claudia to an open stretch of road; we hear
a roaring engine sound before a car bursts on to the road from off-screen
and passes off-screen again. A cut shows us the car’s occupants: Claudia,
Anna, who is looking displeased with Sandro’s dangerous driving, and the
reckless Sandro. The film then fades to black, introducing a moment of
pause before fading back on to a changed landscape: a wide vista of sea and
sky with a volcanic island in the background. A small boat can be glimpsed
in the foreground, its engine noise marking a continuance with the sound
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of the car heard beforehand. While these are moments of action and travel,
the dissolves and fades inject a slowness into the journey; even the fact
that the seascape is presented in long-shot, which does not indicate how
fast the boat in the foreground is moving, adds to this effect.
Of course, L’Avventura’s rhythms are not always languid. As Perez
notes, ‘drawing things out and cutting them short is the distinctive
Antonioni rhythm. Lingering and interruptive, suspensive and ellipti-
cal, a crisp deliberate pace, a restless, syncopated movement of unhur-
ried attention.’147 Straight cuts can propel us into the next scene, into
an unexpected filmed space, such as the cut from the slowly moving
camera in the deserted town visited by Sandro and Claudia, to the image
of the couple in a field. As Biro has written, ‘ellipsis can be a wonderful
trigger to “jump” to new or amazing paths, bringing about freshness and
astonishment, satisfying the spectator’s hunger for enjoying surprise’.148
The scene in the field introduces an interesting moment of temporal
disjunction, as well as being a beautiful example of the more linger-
ing temporal rhythms of the film. After the cut, Sandro and Claudia
move away from the camera, which continues to register the stunning
landscape – a rolling hill, a vast sea, a clear sky – for a moment, before
cutting to a close-up of Sandro and Claudia as they kiss. Several close-
ups are alternated for approximately two minutes. The hum of the waves
can be heard throughout this close-up sequence, and at the final shot
of Claudia’s face its volume slightly increases. The sound is transposed
onto the sound of a train, aurally covering over a visual cut which shows
a train on the right-hand side of the screen in long-shot. The camera
pans as it follows the progress of the train across the landscape, again
revealing an expanse of grass and rock in the foreground, and the vast sea
with Mount Etna visible in the background. There is then a cut showing
Claudia and Sandro in mid-shot lying on the hillside. The sound of the
train approaching is audible for several seconds before we see it passing
at the top left of the screen.
There have been various approximations of what effect this sequence
might have. According to Brunette, it presents a ‘mini-alienation effect
of the Brechtian variety’.149 Brunette’s explanation of the effect of this
sequence as one of alienation depends upon the viewer ascribing the first
passage of the train to the viewpoint of the couple, ‘we motivate the shot
by ascribing it, generally, to the point of view of Claudia and Sandro’.150
When it passes them, then, it seems as though it is passing for a second
time, and we have to retrospectively de-ascribe this shot. As much as I am
interested in retrospective revisions, there are other ways of describing
this sequence. I agree that the scenes may be disorientating. However,
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what these shots also perform is a loosening of temporal chronology, thus

elongating the film’s pace. In between each shot – of the kiss to the train,
of the train to the couple – uncertain ellipses are taking place. The shot
is disjunctive because the link between the train and the couple on the
hillside seems to be temporally tight, thus when the shot of them lying
down appears, I assume that the train has already passed. A train may have
passed before the camera, however, but not yet before the couple. This
temporal disjunction creates a sense that time has escaped, which reso-
nates as the train moves off-screen. The disjunction in the edits echoes
diegetic concerns: the train passing the couple is a signal for Sandro, who
says: ‘It is late’, recognising that time has slipped away from them.
In the above example, the soundtrack is the source of both a continuity
– from waves to train, which draws out a similar rhythm – and a discon-
tinuity – the train, sounding closer this time and finally bursting through
the visual image. It is important to note the possible effects that the use
of music also has on the pace and rhythm of particular scenes, despite
Antonioni’s frequent pronouncements explaining his distaste for music
in films: ‘Every time I have music in films it means a terrible sacrifice for
me. In my opinion, the image is not enriched but rather is interrupted,
even, I’d dare to say, vulgarised.’151 After the stirring, energetic rhythms
of the credit sequence music, played on bass and mandolins, the first piece
of music enters the soundtrack when the characters are looking for Anna
on Lisca Bianca. After the dissolve that wipes Anna away, the sound of
the sea seems to increase; a sound both exhilarating and threatening. The
music itself begins as we see Claudia, with Corrado and Giulia following
close behind, emerge into long-shot with the mass of the rocky island piled
high before them. The music was to encompass several temporal associa-
tions; Antonioni asked his composer Giovanni Fusco for a jazz score if
jazz had been written in classical Greece.152 The double bass and wind
instruments, and dissonant rhythms of the piece, add a sense of whimsy
to the search, as though, at this point, the characters were not really taking
it seriously.
The music does not particularly accord with the choreography of the
movements of the characters entering and exiting the frame, nor does
it match the cuts in the editing. It is as though several distinct temporal
rhythms were being overlaid onto one another. The rhythm of the music
and that of the frame seem to unsettle each other in turn. The dissonance
also points to a gap, a mismatch, to something out of kilter in the narrative.
Another somewhat dissonant use of music occurs just after Sandro and
Claudia arrive at their hotel room in Taormina. Claudia begins to undress
and kneels down to look in her suitcase. At a relatively low volume, the
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credit music from the opening of the film begins to play. It continues as
Sandro helps Claudia into bed, tells her that he loves her (and, jokingly,
that he doesn’t). The re-playing of the credit music here has an odd effect,
for it relates back to the beginning of the film, and encourages us to realise
how much change the relentless passage of time has wrought.
The music also has an interesting effect on two scenes of waiting. In
the first, Claudia is at the Montaldo villa, trying on rings and holding
them up to the light. The music, consisting of the staccato sounds of the
clarinet, flute, French horn and strings, gives the scene a restless, impa-
tient feel.153 This seems to accord with the type of waiting being experi-
enced by Claudia; she is not simply passing time idly, she is waiting for
something definite, namely Sandro. The temporal rhythm of the waiting
is announced as different partly through the music. In Taormina, after
Sandro has gone downstairs, Claudia is shown in bed; we first see a close-
up of her hand against a white pillow. Similar music to that used in the
island sequence recurs here, but with lower, even more ominous, tones.
The music seems to match her frame of mind, heightening momentarily,
for example, when she finds one of Sandro’s shirts and presses it to her
body. In this sequence, the continuity of the music helps to condense
the hours of waiting that the sequence depicts. At the beginning of the
sequence, the clock strikes one, soon after it strikes three, and then
Claudia is seen emerging on to the balcony at dawn. Within the sequence,
it is the editing that is discontinuous. Straight cuts interject into the action
in a disjunctive way. For example, a shot shows Claudia beginning to lie
down; cutting into this action, the next shot shows her lying on the bed;
from a shot of her face while she is counting the time, a straight cut shows
us the balcony door that she enters. The film suggests that the rhythms of
waiting are both disjunctive, flitting from one activity that seems to ‘fill’
the time to a seemingly endless stretch of emptiness, and continuous, an
elongated duration, suggested through the continuity of the music.
L’Avventura Today
L’Avventura is a film with the powerful potential to evoke affects, ranging
from anger, frustration and boredom to adoration and exhilaration.
Reviews and critical essays abound in personal statements of deep attrac-
tion to it. Youngblood explains that when he met Monica Vitti for the
first time he told her that ‘L’Avventura changed my life’.154 Nowell-Smith
recalls his experience of seeing the film for the first time, ‘for two and a
half hours I sat spellbound in the cinema . . . no film before or since has
ever made such an impression on me as L’Avventura did on that occa-
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sion’.155 His reaction may have been ‘extreme’, he continues, ‘but it was
not – I soon discovered – untypical. I still meet people who remember it
in much the same way.’156
The twenty-first-century context for viewing the film is naturally very
different from the context of seeing the film upon its release. Nowell-
Smith suggests that, while the film shocked audiences originally, ‘the film
now comes gift-wrapped. It can move but it can no longer shock’.157 The
viewer of L’Avventura today, he writes, is likely to be more prepared for
seeing an art-house classic, perhaps at a film retrospective, as part of a film
course, or through watching a specifically packaged DVD.158 Some of the
techniques of the film, such as the ellipses and slow rhythms, may be more
familiar to viewers through the work of other filmmakers whose careers
largely developed after 1960 (for example, Tarkovsky, Kieślowski, or Bela
Tarr). On the other hand, viewing the film today may be imbued with
a certain nostalgia for some of the films of the past; for their now rather
quaint emphasis upon bourgeois modernity, for their gorgeous costumes,
for their slow duration or affective compositions. Writing of the ‘effect of
new technologies on cinema that has now aged’, Mulvey has written that
there is a ‘different kind of voyeurism at stake when the future looks back
with greedy fascination at the past and details suddenly lose their mar-
ginal status and acquire the aura that passing time bequeaths to the most
ordinary objects’.159 Watching L’Avventura today might be seen to project
a kind of gaze of re-enchantment upon its world. Ford suggests that an
encounter with this film may be even stranger today than in 1960, despite
Antonioni’s enormous influence on other filmmakers: ‘L’Avventura’s
own temporality as a text is now quite odd – reaching forward to us like
science-fiction from an exotic “modernist” past, as we in our new century
debate the transforming role the moving image has played in re-making
time and space.’160
Nowell-Smith has concluded that the film cannot be entirely ‘new’
for viewers today. While it is obviously true that the historical context in
which contemporary viewers watch the film is very different from that of
the early 1960s, even with the caveat that viewing conditions vary greatly
within any given period, every encounter with a film is, in some senses of
the word, ‘new’, a new adventure. Here I directly echo Antonioni’s state-
ment that ‘every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adven-
ture’.161 It is perhaps a truism that, even on repeat screenings, viewers
will respond differently to films as well as make new discoveries amongst
their images and significances. L’Avventura seems particularly to encour-
age this through the ambiguity and richness of its images, and the con-
tinual creative innovativeness displayed in its cinematography and editing
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practices. Despite this, however, particular readings of the film that

emphasise distance and alienation in the narrative and themes, and flat-
ness and stillness in the mise-en-scène, continue to be repeated in critical
writing. Through tracing the operation of time in narrative, composition,
and editing, this chapter has suggested a different critical configuration,
one which foregrounds intimacy, fluidity, and affect.
Notes
1. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, L’Avventura (London: BFI Publishing, 1997),

p. 11.
2. Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies 1939–1990 (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 140.
3. Hamish Ford, ‘Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Deleuze’s Time-image’, Senses
of Cinema, 28 (2003), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/l_
avventura_deleuze.html.
4. Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. 31.
5. In 1962 L’Avventura was in second place on the list; in 1972 at number 5; in
1982 at number 7; in 1992 it did not appear. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing
Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 308.
6. Michelangelo Antonioni, ‘Cannes Statement’, in Seymour Chatman and
Guido Fink (eds), L’Avventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director (New
Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers Films in Print, 1989), pp. 178–9.
7. William Arrowsmith, Antonioni: The Poet of Images (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p. 31.
8. Ibid., p. 32.
9. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1983),
p. 212.
10. Ibid., p. 211.
11. La Notte, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy/France: Nepifilm,
1961. L’Eclisse, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy/France:
Cineriz, 1962. Il Desserto Rosso, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Italy/France: Film Duemila, 1964.
12. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni: or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985), p. 55. See also Bondanella, p. 211.
13. Clara Orban, ‘Antonioni’s Women, Lost in the City’, Modern Language
Studies, 31.2 (2001), p. 11.
14. James Stoller, ‘Antonioni’s La Notte: Dissolution of Love’, in Pierre
Leprohon (ed.), Michelangelo Antonioni: An Introduction (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1963), p. 173.
15. Ian Cameron, ‘Michelangelo Antonioni’, Film Quarterly, 16.1 (1962),
p. 1.
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16. Ibid., p. 5.
17. Ned Rifkin, Antonioni’s Visual Language (Michigan: UMI Research Press,
1982), p. 14.
18. Ibid., p. 15.
19. Ted Perry, ‘Introduction’, in William Arrowsmith, Antonioni, p. 11.
20. Brunette, The Films, p. 3.
21. Roland Barthes, ‘Cher Antonioni’, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, L’Avventura
(London: BFI Publishing, 1997), p. 65.
22. Ibid., p. 66.
23. Bondanella, Italian Cinema, p. 213.
25. Chatman, Antonioni: or, the Surface of the World, p. 118.
26. Ibid., p. 118.
27. Ibid., p. 119.
28. Ibid., p. 121.
29. Ibid., p. 119.
30. Ibid., p. 127.
31. Ibid., pp. 114–15.
32. Ibid., p. 115.
33. David Forgacs, ‘Antonioni: Space, Place, Sexuality’, in Myrto
Konstantarakos (ed.), Spaces in European Cinema (Exeter: Intellect, 2000),
p. 101.
35. Sam Rohdie, Antonioni (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), p. 97.
36. Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 163–4.
37. Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998), p. 45.
38. Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’,
Differences, 14.3 (2003), p. 104.
39. Ibid., p. 94.
40. Ibid., p. 97.
41. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000), p. 162.
42. Gilles Deleuze , Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Continuum,
2005), p. 100.
43. Ibid., p. 100.
44. Lesley Stern, ‘Paths That Wind Through the Thicket of Things’, Critical
Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), p. 354.
45. Jennifer M. Barker, ‘Bodily Irruptions: The Corporeal Assault on
Ethnographic Narration’, Cinema Journal, 34. 3 (1995), p. 58.
46. Cited in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews (Jackson:
University Press of Mississipi, 2008), pp. 153–4.
47. Brigitte Peucker, Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 62.
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48. Barbara Klinger,‘The Art Film, Affect, and the Female Viewer: The Piano
Revisited’, Screen, 47.1 (2006), p. 21.
49. Doane, ‘Close-Up’, p. 108.
50. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 67–8.
51. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film
Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 233.
52. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, ‘Down with Cinephilia? Long Live
Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures’, in Marijke de Valck and
Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp. 12–13.
53. Ibid., p. 11.
54. Mulvey, Death, p. 167.
55. Ibid., p. 186.
56. Ibid., p. 22.
57. Ibid., p. 27.
58. Burgin, The Remembered Film, p. 16.
59. Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros, ‘Descriptive Acts: Introduction’, in
Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (eds), Falling For You: Essays on Cinema
and Performance (Sydney: Power Publications, 1999), p. 1.
60. Ibid., p. 17.
61. Rifkin, Antonioni’s Visual Language, p. 7.
62. Ibid., p. 12.
63. Cardullo, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. xii.
64. Ibid., 64.
65. Ford, ‘Antonioni’s L’Avventura’.
66. Glen Norton, ‘Antonioni’s Modernist Language’, [no date], http://www.
geocities.com/Hollywood/3781/antonioni.html
67. Nowell-Smith, L’Avventura, p. 40.
69. Brunette, p. 45.
70. Ibid.
71. Cameron, ‘Michelangelo Antonioni’, p. 23.
72. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 370.
73. Ibid., p. 370.
74. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 39–40.
75. Ibid., p. 23.
76. Ibid., p. 32.
77. Deleuze cited by Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics
and Aesthetics (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), p. 55.
78. Ibid., p. 59.
79. Ibid., p. 55.
80. Nowell-Smith, L’Avventura’, p. 46.
81. Gregory Flaxman, ‘Cinema Year Zero’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The
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Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 104.
83. Ibid., p. 39.
84. Gene Youngblood, Criterion Collection DVD Audio Commentary,
L’Avventura, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy/France: Cino
del Duca Produzioni, 1960.
86. Rohdie, Antonioni, p. 66.
87. Ibid., p. 65.
88. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (London: Faber & Faber, 1967),
p. 56.
89. Antonioni cited by Rifkin, p. 74.
90. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997),
p. 88.
91. Ibid., p. 91.
92. Ibid., p. 91.
93. Marks, Skin, p. 81.
94. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 8.
95. Klinger, ‘The Art Film’, p. 36.
96. Tim Groves,‘Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification’,
Screening the Past, 20 (2006), http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthe
past/20/entranced.html.
97. Cameron, ‘Michelangelo Antonioni’, p. 11; Rifkin, Antonioni’s Visual
Language, p. 19, Chatman, Antonioni: or, the Surface of the World, p. 90.
98. Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘The Consuming Landscape: Architecture in the
Films of Michelangelo Antonioni’, in Mark Lamster (ed.), Architecture and
Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), p. 200.
100. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings, p. 109.
101. Arrowsmith, Antonioni, p. 35.
103. Perez, The Material Ghost, p. 379.
104. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film
(New York: Verso, 2002), p. 62.
105. Ibid., p. 62.
106. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, p. 36.
107. Ibid., p. 56.
108. Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002), p. 47.
109. Fallaci cited by Restivo, The Cinema, p. 47.
110. Restivo, The Cinema, p. 47.
111. Arrowsmith, Antonioni, p. 37.
112. Restivo, The Cinema, p. 5.
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113. Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal
Critique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 15.
114. Ibid., p. 15.
115. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 28.
117. Ibid., p. 105.
118. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 2005), p. 36.
119. Philip Rosen, ‘History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology
in Bazin’, in Ivone Marguiles (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays in Corporeal
Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 55.
121. Ibid., p. 107.
122. Ibid., p. 107.
123. Ibid., p. 119.
124. Ibid., p. 121.
125. Youngblood, Criterion Collection DVD Audio Commentary.
127. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 25.
128. Jean-Clet Martin, ‘Of Images and Worlds: Toward A Geology of the
Cinema’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press,
2000), p. 66.
129. Ibid, p. 64.
130. Burgin, The Remembered Film, p. 15.
131. Rosenbaum, Placing Movies, p. 313.
133. Cited by Bondanella, Italian Cinema, p. 108.
134. Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 22–3.
135. Ibid., p. 182.
136. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 13.
137. Lim, Translating Time, p. 67.
138. To appropriate Grosz’s words, Nick of Time, p. 198.
139. Ibid., p. 197.
140. Antonioni cited by Chatman, p. 126.
143. Ibid.
145. John Schliesser, ‘Antonioni’s Heideggerian Swerve’, Literature Film
Quarterly, 26.4 (1998), pp. 278–87 (p. 280).
146. Rohdie, Antonioni, p. 139.
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148. Yvette Biro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 76.
150. Ibid., p. 40.
151. Antonioni cited in Cardullo, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 141.
153. Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink (eds), L’Avventura: Michelangelo
Antonioni, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989),
p. 105.
154. Youngblood, DVD Commentary.
156. Ibid., p. 10.
157. Ibid., p. 9.
158. Ibid., p. 10.
159. Mulvey, Death, p. 192.
161. Antonioni cited by Arrowsmith, p. 31.
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L'Avventura: Temporal Adventures: Chapter Two

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C HA PT ER TW O

L’Avventura: Temporal Adventures

When L’Avventura came out in 1960, cinema was undergoing a period of

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the film’s characters.7 The erotic disease, Arrowsmith notes, is most

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second of its length.15 Every gesture, he continues, ‘has a precise signifi-

only arrived at by means of a certain violent epistemological gesture of transcend-

A particularly interesting analysis of Antonioni’s films in this respect

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This chapter engages with questions of temporality as they relate to mise-

Depth and Movement

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a framing that anticipates a time when Claudia will ‘replace’ Anna as

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haptic modes simultaneously within one shot invites a fascinated look at

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figures, especially Claudia, stand out more powerfully in their expressive

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meantime, becomes absorbed by the landscape seen through the window,

This description of moving towards and away from crystallisation echoes a

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now a kernel of psychical representations, a fleeting association of discrete

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Looking and Imaging

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It has been frequently noted in critical writing on L’Avventura that

In relation to L’Avventura’s Claudia, I am not convinced that shots in

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to take a trip’, in a process in which the presentation of images disrupts

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what we observe. Anamorphosis indicates the point at which the observer

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For Cameron, the island of Lisca Bianca is a ‘symbol of barrenness’;

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explore. This is presented on a thematic level throughout the film. The

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The space that the characters traverse throughout L’Avventura is

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characters to recall. In this situation, searching overcomes the charac-

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Pace and Rhythm

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where any decidable action or interpretation has evaporated, leaving char-

duration is experienced most incontrovertibly in the phenomenon of waiting.

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