POSTED June 03, 2010

The Criterion Contraption: #98: L’Avventura ⚓

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Lynch must have seen this at a formative age. The difference between 1960 and 2001 is that in 1960, Antonioni still believes that there was an age of authenticity within recent memory. It produced the classical architecture that Sandro is always photographed in front of, and the ruins that appear in L’Avventura’s final images.

By the time Lynch makes Mulholland Dr., the only relic from the golden age is the image of one Margarita Carmen Cansino, post-electrolysis, post-dye-job, post-retouching. […]

No, there never was. I personally don’t believe in golden ages. Some disastrous things may have happened to our culture in the twentieth century, but I think that the last generation with any claim to authenticity were primates. This isn’t a new argument, either: Antonioni isn’t saying anything in L’Avventura that you won’t find in Ecclesiastes. So what matters is execution. L’Avventura is not an entertaining film (how could it be?), but its photography is a frame-by-frame refutation of any argument Antonioni could make about the death of culture. Maybe all he saw to do was catalog wreckage. But what wreckage, and what a catalog.

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