Word: antonioni
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...other viewers, Antonioni - who had come to directing after being a film critic, an assistant director, a screenwriter (he scripted Federico Fellini's solo feature directorial debut, The White Sheik) and the maker of documentary shorts - was the first true modernist in commercial cinema. His pristine imagery and elegant compositions taught viewers to watch a movie, not just see it. Calling L'Avventura "easily, the film of the year," critic Pauline Kael hailed it for demonstrating "that the possibilities for serious, cultivated, personal film expression in the film medium were not yet exhausted." (The next year, she castigated La Notte...
...Bergman's men (and especially his women) might rage against the prevailing gloom; Antonioni's people (and especially his men) sink into it. Their problems are hard to define, and beyond salvation by God, psychoanalysis or madness. They don't cry; they barely have enough energy to shrug. Are they alive at all, or the reduction of humanity to zombies? Long before George Romero, and in chic Rome instead of a Pittsburgh cemetery, Antonioni filmed his own Night of the Living Dead...
...existential blahs that critic Andrew Sarris called "Antoniennui." For audiences unable to get on the director's wavelength or into his measured rhythm, seeing his characters suffer in slow motion was like watching paint dry. Movies were supposed to move, not slouch against a wall, and the pace of Antonioni's movies was a special test for the antsy...
...filmgoer had to be diverted by the beautiful people in an Antonioni cast: stunners like Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and especially Monica Vitti, the director's mistress and muse for five crucial films. These stars helped Antonioni make anxiety glamorous, passivity photogenic, entropy entertaining. You could say he made "boring" interesting...
...limits of fidelity and friendship. The movie's title, which translates as The Adventure, was not a joke; it was an apt appraisal of the intellectual thrills the film would provide for its viewers. Adventure was also the word for the challenges in form and content that Antonioni and other '60s pioneers would bring to '60s cinema. And yet that first, boorish benighted Cannes audience did have a couple of very conventional reasons to be outraged...