Word: cinema
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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...
...glum, frozen characters were even father removed from Hollywood cinema. The traditional movie hero was an action figure; the Antonioni antihero is inactive, passive, empty. Rich and pretty, he shows how meaningless it is to be a man of means. He in incapacitated by wealth, status and the availability of sex with good-looking people of the opposite sex. The advantages that the world's poor could only dream of have paralyzed...
...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...
...would a Piero della Francesca portrait. The dimensions of the movie screen, Antonioni suggested, have less in common with the stage proscenium than with the frame of a painting. Films are pictures on a wall, and Antonioni was one of the first directors working within the commercial cinema to make museum movies. One didn't watch his films so much as gaze at them - at a duration determined...
...theater but to painting. The combination of these innovations, or affronts, made L'Avventura a precedent-setting movie. So did the fierce debate surrounding it. Indeed, you could say that at that Cannes festival - as the professionals loved or hated, puzzled and argued over this beautiful, forbidding artifact - modernist cinema was born...