Il Mare
Two men and a woman are arranged in various ways on a mostly deserted Capri. Pauline Kael felt able to say that L’AVVENTURA “is, easily, the film of the year” (she means 1961), adding that a “terrible calm hangs over everything in the movie” and that “Antonioni’s space is a kind of vacuum in which people are aimlessly moving – searchers and lost are all the same, disparate, without goals or joy” (Kael, 1965, pp. 134–35). David Shipman later called THE SEA “one of the better of the desolate dramas influenced by L’AVVENTURA”, describing it as “a perfectly crafted chamber piece” (Shipman, 1986, p. 588).
OK, so that’s the context. But, already by 1964, Kael was dealing with the direct fallout of the kind of development of which L’AVVENTURA was a perfect representative (though she doesn’t seem to make the connection). It is worth quoting from her introduction to I Lost It at the Movies at length (18–19). The next three paragraphs are hers:
It’s ten years since Dylan Thomas answered Maya Deren’s call for a new poetry of film with “I’m not at all sure that I want such a thing, myself, as a poetic film. I think films fine as they are, if only they were better!…I like stories, you know – I like to see something going on.” Movies have changed in these ten years, disastrously in the last few years; they have become “cinema.”
At the art-house level, critics and audiences haven’t yet discovered the beauty of indiscriminateness, but there’s a lot of talk about “purely visual content” – which might be called the principle of ineffability. Time calls Resnais’s MURIEL “another absorbing exercise in style.” Dwight Macdonald calls MARIENBAD “‘pure’ cinema, a succession of images enjoyable in themselves.” And Richard Roud, who was responsible (and thus guilty) for the film selection at the New York Film Festivals, goes all the way: films like LA NOTTE, he says, provide an “experience in pure form.”
Once matters reach this plane, it begins to seem almost unclean to raise issues about meaning and content and character, or to question the relevance of a sequence, the quality of a performance. Someone is sure to sneer, “Are you looking for a paraphrasable content? A film, like the poem, is.” Or smile pityingly and remind you that Patroni Griffi had originally intended to call IL MARE “Landscape with Figures”; doesn’t that tell you how you should look at it? It does indeed, and it’s not my idea of a good time. After a few dismal experiences we discover that when we are told to admire a film for its pure form or its structure, it is going to exhibit irritating, confusing, and ostentatious technique, which will, infuriatingly, be all we can discover in it. And if we should mention that we enjoy the dramatic and narrative elements in movies, we are almost certain to be subjected to the contemptuous remark, “Why does cinema have to mean something? Do you expect a work by Bach to mean something?”
End quote. Admittedly, it does look very pretty. But, indeed, nothing whatsoever happens throughout: near the end there is some sex, but that is very far from any kind of revelation, barely being enough, in the general context of the movie, to count as an event. One difference from Antonioni, though, is that it is very clear that Patroni Griffi’s camera is far more interested in the boys than the girl.
OK, so that’s the context. But, already by 1964, Kael was dealing with the direct fallout of the kind of development of which L’AVVENTURA was a perfect representative (though she doesn’t seem to make the connection). It is worth quoting from her introduction to I Lost It at the Movies at length (18–19). The next three paragraphs are hers:
It’s ten years since Dylan Thomas answered Maya Deren’s call for a new poetry of film with “I’m not at all sure that I want such a thing, myself, as a poetic film. I think films fine as they are, if only they were better!…I like stories, you know – I like to see something going on.” Movies have changed in these ten years, disastrously in the last few years; they have become “cinema.”
At the art-house level, critics and audiences haven’t yet discovered the beauty of indiscriminateness, but there’s a lot of talk about “purely visual content” – which might be called the principle of ineffability. Time calls Resnais’s MURIEL “another absorbing exercise in style.” Dwight Macdonald calls MARIENBAD “‘pure’ cinema, a succession of images enjoyable in themselves.” And Richard Roud, who was responsible (and thus guilty) for the film selection at the New York Film Festivals, goes all the way: films like LA NOTTE, he says, provide an “experience in pure form.”
Once matters reach this plane, it begins to seem almost unclean to raise issues about meaning and content and character, or to question the relevance of a sequence, the quality of a performance. Someone is sure to sneer, “Are you looking for a paraphrasable content? A film, like the poem, is.” Or smile pityingly and remind you that Patroni Griffi had originally intended to call IL MARE “Landscape with Figures”; doesn’t that tell you how you should look at it? It does indeed, and it’s not my idea of a good time. After a few dismal experiences we discover that when we are told to admire a film for its pure form or its structure, it is going to exhibit irritating, confusing, and ostentatious technique, which will, infuriatingly, be all we can discover in it. And if we should mention that we enjoy the dramatic and narrative elements in movies, we are almost certain to be subjected to the contemptuous remark, “Why does cinema have to mean something? Do you expect a work by Bach to mean something?”
End quote. Admittedly, it does look very pretty. But, indeed, nothing whatsoever happens throughout: near the end there is some sex, but that is very far from any kind of revelation, barely being enough, in the general context of the movie, to count as an event. One difference from Antonioni, though, is that it is very clear that Patroni Griffi’s camera is far more interested in the boys than the girl.
Mini Review: Two men and a woman are arranged in various ways on a mostly deserted Capri. Admittedly, it does look very pretty. But, indeed, nothing whatsoever happens throughout: near the end there is some sex, but that is very far from any kind of revelation, barely being enough, in the general context of the movie, to count as an event. One difference from Antonioni, though, is that it is very clear that Patroni Griffi’s camera is far more interested in the boys than the girl.
Watch the Trailer