Cinematic landscapes in Antonioni's L'Avventura

Abstract

The introduction of landscape in film instead of constructed décor allowed radical changes of perception of space in film. In fact, space in film ceases to be conceived as pictorial, theatrical and symbolic, and starts to be explored in all its dimensions. The projected image acquires texture, vividness and depth. Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960) marks a breakthrough in the use of landscape in film. The landscape grounds the image in a space-time dimension inscribing the scene in a complex experiential mode while introducing enigmatic protagonists (elements of the landscape) into the image. The film thus establishes a dialectical relation between body and landscape, where both become parallel agents in the construction of the emotional drama. This cinematic construction of ‘being in the landscape’ makes the film distinctive both in its visual and narrative form. The objective of this article is to analyze a particular site of the film, the scenes shot on Lisca Bianca Island, and explore how the notion of ‘being in the landscape’ conditions and determines the film's narrative structure. The processes of incorporation of the characters in the landscape become a primary element in Antonioni's visual language, serving narrative, dramatic, and thematic functions.

Keywords:

• film geography
• simulacrum
• representation
• enacted landscape

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Journal of Cultural Geography editor Alyson L. Greiner and the article reviewers for their thorough evaluation and helpful comments.

Notes

1. By the 1890s, rural genre and landscape had dominated American painting for almost a century. An example is William Morris Hunt's large oil painting Niagara Falls (1878). It is not surprising, therefore, that early cameramen from the Edison and Lumière Companies turned their movie cameras to subjects they knew would be most welcome. Hence, early ‘moving pictures’ of the falls followed in the panoramic tradition, and awed audiences with the monumentality of these landscapes.

2. Note that the film was not well received by sections of the audience when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 and the film genre with long-take sequences and evanescent plot was later coined as ‘Antoniennui.’ After a second viewing, the film received the Special Jury Prize: “For a New Movie Language and the Beauty of its Images.”

3. Later in the film, Anna's ghostly presence is identified with the camera itself. This is implied in the eerie traveling-shot that advances on Claudia and Sandro along a narrow street as they leave a deserted village. The ghostly presence is a cinematographic construction, but it represents a phenomenon that exists in real life after a person disappears. This ghostly presence is of course detected by the viewers as well as the characters. What the characters feel (the ghostly presence of Anna) is cinematically expressed by the absent presence of the character through fragments of the landscape.

4. Openness refers to the unstable narrative logic, i.e. openness in the narration/interpretation, challenging the viewer to place events or assign them definitive meanings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

El Hadi Jazairy

El Hadi Jazairy is a Doctoral Candidate at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA