WATCH PARTY: L'avventura (1960) Michelangelo Antonioni @ Richard Tucker Library

One of the best swerves in cinema history, by a director who was more into "the logic of the spirit" than your normal-ass logic. :)

RUNTIME: 143 minutes

SYNOPSIS (via Criterion): 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.

BLURBS:
"I was a college student when I saw 'L'Avventura' for the first of many times, and it changed my life. It was the first (and to my mind remains the definitive) film about the diminishing attention span of a modern world. Decades before the term attention deficit disorder was popularized, it codified an emerging cultural malaise." - Stephen Holden, The New York Times

"LʼAvventura is, easily, the film of the year. A terrible calm hangs over everything in the movie; Antonioniʼs space is a kind of vacuum in which people are aimlessly moving — search­ers and lost are all the same, disparate, without goals or joy." - Pauline Kael

"I did not much connect with the film when I saw it first–how could I, at 18? These people were bored by a lifestyle beyond my wildest dreams. Only recently, seeing it again, did I realize how much clarity and passion Antonioni brought to the film’s silent cry of despair." - Roger Ebert