The classic Italian film Martin Scorsese thinks everyone needs to see
One of the best ways Martin Scorsese found to connect with his Italian roots was through the nation’s cinema. The director dedicated an entire series to this very subject with My Voyage to Italy, in which he takes viewers on a trip through the history of Italian cinema, paying particular attention to its bountiful neo-realist period. He continued to sing the praises of directors such as Rossellini, Fellini, and the more insular Michaelangelo Antonioni in a selection of ten must-watches he provided for Criterion some years ago now.
Building on the work of the neo-realist directors, Antonioni bought a more introspective approach to the movement, focusing on how social issues affect the inner lives of the individual rather than society as a whole. Though his first features arrived in the 1950s, it wouldn’t be until the 1960s that he would truly make his name.
This new chapter began with the first film in his Alienation trilogy, 1960’s L’Avventura. Focusing on the search for a young woman who disappeared during a boating trip around the coast of Sicily, this powerful and challenging work redefined the fundamentals of narrative cinema – giving Monica Vitti her breakthrough role in the process.
Scorsese isn’t the first person to sing the film’s praises. As the director told Criterion, there’s hardly a thing to say about L’avventura that hasn’t been said before: “There’s nothing left to say,” he began. “But of course, that’s always a cop-out because it’s never true—there’s always more to say about a film, to see it again is to see it anew, to see it in 2014 as opposed to 1960 is a very different experience, and for some people it will literally be brand-new (to those people, I would say, simply: See it! Now!!). It’s difficult to think of a film that has a more powerful understanding of the way that people are bound to the world around them, by what they see and touch and taste and hear.”
The director continued: “I realise that L’avventura is supposed to be about characters who are ‘alienated’ from their surroundings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioni’s films in general that it more or less shuts down thought. In fact, I see it, more than ever, as a movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving. Visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in every way, it’s one of the great works of cinema.”
If you’re not already convinced, both Scorsese and everyone here at Far Out would urge you to track down a copy of L’avventura as soon as possible. You can get a taste of what to expect below.
