It is recorded in the history of the Cannes Film Festival that on a night in May 1960, audiences booed L’Avventura (The Adventure), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film’s unconventional narrative and its hypnotic visual language unsettled many viewers that evening. Yet during those same days it captivated members of the jury, including Georges Simenon, Grigori Kozintsev, and Henry Miller. The film ultimately received the Jury Prize (Prix du Jury), a special distinction awarded by the festival. The uproar of spectators unfamiliar with this new cinematic language faded into the corridors of history, but the light Antonioni cast from that darkened theater illuminated generations of filmmakers and cinephiles who fell under its spell.
A few years before the release of L’Avventura, Luis Buñuel spoke—whether in an interview or lecture—in praise of mystery. He argued that mystery is the essential core of all art, yet filmmakers often strive to eliminate any disturbance from their works, as though their films were merely extensions of ordinary life. With L’Avventura, Antonioni placed the mystery of modern loneliness before the viewer and allowed anxiety to take hold of the heart.
The film recounts a group excursion to an island off the southern coast of Italy. Anna, played by Lea Massari, and her fiancé Sandro, played by Gabriele Ferzetti, are introduced as the central couple. Yet roughly thirty minutes into the film, Anna suddenly disappears. Claudia—Anna’s close friend, portrayed in a mesmerizing performance by Monica Vitti—moves from the margins of the frame, from long shots and corners of the composition, into the narrative center beside Sandro. Together they become the film’s principal figures.
The world after loss is a new world. It is as if creation begins anew. Returning to 1960 is not enough; we might travel back thirteen billion years to the birth of the universe and the moment of the Big Bang. That creative energy must have produced equal quantities of matter and its counterpart, antimatter. Antimatter possesses the same mass as its corresponding particle but an opposite electric charge. According to the laws of physics, when a particle meets its antiparticle, both annihilate one another, releasing energy in the form of light. And yet we—and our material universe—exist. Beyond the hypothesis of asymmetry between matter and antimatter, another theory suggests an intrinsic difference between them, so that after annihilation a residue remains: that surplus is our material world.
L’Avventura is the story of the collision between absence and presence—and of their mutual destruction. What remains is a surplus: a mysterious bond between those who share a common loss. From the narrow fissure opened by Anna’s disappearance, Sandro and Claudia are drawn toward one another. Their love has a capillary quality. In hydraulics, capillarity refers to a liquid’s ability to move through a narrow space against the force of gravity.
In Antonioni’s L’Avventura, love likewise takes shape as something fluid and malleable, rising through a narrow channel against the gravitational pull that should drag human beings into the depths of solitude. It ascends, briefly, to the summit of intimacy—though its lifespan is scarcely longer than a day and a night. On that spring evening in May, audiences were perhaps seeking a definitive, even tragic resolution; they seemed to demand at least a body from the director. Instead, through his long shots and close-ups, Antonioni had already sown the seeds of an endless bitterness—an unease too profound for the patience of that era’s viewers, and perhaps still beyond the endurance of many today.
