[In the following excerpt, Jaehne complains that the home video release of L’avventura strips the film of the aesthetic virtues which made it important when it first appeared in theaters.]

Italian cinema is making a come-back, say popular pundits. Some recent Italian video releases allow us to measure how far they’ve come to get back. Perhaps nothing evokes Italian influence more than Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1960, the same year La dolce vita was presented there. These films heralded an Italian avant-garde that soon became synonymous with European sophistication and so influential that they set young filmmakers of all nationalities to avoiding plotline for decades.

L’avventura was a trend-setter, an existential study of moral decay, that made observing behavior more important than storytelling. The film is about manners and morals as they unfold around a crisis, not about the crisis. A perspective of thirty years, however, prompts us to question the way the film cavalierly banishes Anna (Lea Massari) from the story, after taking pains to make her likable—virtually indispensable. Even now, after thirty years of knowing she’s—Fwoosh!—gone: we watch for her return, wonder how her friends will react and compensate for their betrayals. But now, we ask ourselves, why exactly did she constitute the moral anchor? Wouldn’t Gabriele Ferzetti and her best friend, the arriviste sexpot Monica Vitti, have drifted together anyway, right under Anna’s nose?

These and other theological, sociological, and psychological questions are raised by thoughtfully prolonged shots of the impervious rocky clusters of volcanic islands off the west coast of Sicily, where this fashionable crowd is on a yachting holiday. Unfortunately, the panorama of that unyielding, unforgiving landscape and seascape is diminished on video, so accustomed is the cathode tube to a vast wasteland of a different disorder.

It’s hard today not to be a bit flip about that which was once analyzed, dissected and designated great, when its motor—the developing indifference of friends of the vanished Anna—seems slight, incapable of generating the stomach rumblings of the morally hollow human it was aimed at. It seems rather an excuse for an unguided tour of the best Sicilian sites—ancient, medieval, baroque, and modern. Perhaps critics were more hollow and less touristic in 1960 than today. This denial of nostalgia notwithstanding, L’avventura remains the visual equivalent of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Are video-watchers so literate?