Unspoken Cinema

Copyright © by Dan Schneider Some films that are labeled classics, or great films, are not even good films. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless immediately comes to mind. Others, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura , whose title literally means The Adventure , as well as Italian slang for a one night stand, are not necessarily bad, but still only interesting failures, and not worthy of their reputation. L’Avventura was the first in a trilogy of black and white widescreen films Antonioni would make about alienation and personal anomy. The making of such trilogies was the rage at the time in European cinema, and, to an extent, still is. The trilogy was rounded out by La Notte and L'Eclisse in the two following years. When L’Avventura was released in 1960, it was greeted with catcalls at its world premiere, but won a Special Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, and film critics championed it around the world. A few years later, one poll of critics listed it as the thir