Michelangelo Antonioni

L’avventura

L’avventura

Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative on its own terms, L’avventura concerns the enigmatic disappearance of a young woman during a yachting trip off the coast of Sicily, and the search taken up by her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti, in her breakout role). Antonioni’s controversial international sensation is a gorgeously shot tale of modern ennui and spiritual isolation.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1960
  • 143 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #98

Special Features

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Audio commentary featuring film historian Gene Youngblood
  • Olivier Assayas on “L’avventura,” an analysis of the film in three parts
  • Antonioni: Documents and Testimonials, a fifty-eight-minute documentary by Gianfranco Mingozzi from 1966
  • Writings by director Michelangelo Antonioni, read by actor Jack Nicholson, plus Nicholson’s personal recollections of the director
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Antonioni’s statements about the film after its 1960 Cannes Film Festival premiere, and an open letter distributed at the festival

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

DVD Box Set

50 Discs

$650.00

Out Of Print

Special Features

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Audio commentary featuring film historian Gene Youngblood
  • Olivier Assayas on “L’avventura,” an analysis of the film in three parts
  • Antonioni: Documents and Testimonials, a fifty-eight-minute documentary by Gianfranco Mingozzi from 1966
  • Writings by director Michelangelo Antonioni, read by actor Jack Nicholson, plus Nicholson’s personal recollections of the director
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Antonioni’s statements about the film after its 1960 Cannes Film Festival premiere, and an open letter distributed at the festival

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang
L’avventura
Cast
Gabriele Ferzetti
Sandro
Monica Vitti
Claudia
Lea Massari
Anna
Dominique Blanchar
Giulia
Renzo Ricci
Anna's father
James Addams
Corrado
Dorothy De Poliolo
Gloria Perkins
Lelio Luttazzi
Raimondo
Giovanni Petrucci
Young prince
Esmeralda Ruspoli
Patrizia
Credits
Director
Michelangelo Antonioni
Producer
Amato Pennasilico
Screenplay
Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay
Elio Bartolini
Screenplay
Tonino Guerra
Cinematography
Aldo Scavarda
Production design
Piero Poletto
Music
Giovanni Fusco
Editor
Eraldo Da Roma
Assistant director
Jack O'Connell
Costume design
Adriana Berselli
Sound
Claudio Maielli
Production coordinator
Angelo Corso

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L’avventura: Cannes Statement

Features

L’avventura: Cannes Statement
Director Michelangelo Antonioni made these famous remarks at the press conference following the May 1960 Cannes Film Festival premiere of L’avventura. They appear here in a translation published in the spring 1962 issue of the journal Film Culture.…

By Michelangelo Antonioni

— Nov 25, 2014

Explore

Michelangelo Antonioni

Director

Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (including writing the story that was the basis for Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik, and directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating films about bourgeois Italian life Story of a Love Affair and Le amiche), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force in international film. It was also then that he began to typify, alongside such artists as Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, a new European art cinema, expressing a distinctly contemporary ennui. With their stunning visuals, ambiguous narratives, and still relevant focus on modern alienation, Antonioni’s films of this period, all starring Monica Vitti, his lover at the time—L’avventura (famously booed at Cannes for confounding its audience with its longueurs and lack of closure), La notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert—have stood the test of time. And his less iconic later films, like Identification of a Woman, have only grown more compelling and mysterious as the years have passed.

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