Philip Lopate on L'avventura

Philip Lopate has some interesting insights* into one of my all-time favourite films:

It was the movie I had been preparing for, for it came at the right time in my development. As a child, I had wanted only action movies. Dialogues and story set-ups bored me; I waited for that moment when the knife was hurled through the air. My awakening in adolescence to the art of film consisted precisely in overcoming this impatience. Over-compensating, perhaps, I now loved a cinema that dawdled; that lingered. Antonioni had a way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape. With his detachment from the human drama and his tactful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced me to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique. Of course the story held me, too, with its bitter world-weary disillusioned tone. The adolescent wants to touch the bottom, to know the worst. His soul craves sardonic disenchantment.

My soul craves disenchantment too. Does that mean I am still an adolescent? :)

Previous post on L'Eclisse here.

*From Google Print of his book Getting Personal: Selected Writings