The Controversial Release of "L'Avventura"

I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 film L'Avventura, and noticed something off. Throughout the page, there are indications of the film's seemingly unfettered success, but only a brief mention of its initial condemnation. At its international opening at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the film was booed intensely. This is the only paragraph that mentions the incident:

Released in 1960, the film was booed by members of the audience during its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (Antonioni and Vitti fled the theater); but after a second screening it won the Jury Prize^{[16] [2][3][17]} Gene Youngblood has stated that audience members usually booed during long sequences where nothing happened to further the film's plot, but has asserted that "quite a lot is happening in these scenes."^[9] Youngblood described the trilogy of which L'Avventura is the first component as a "unified statement about the malady of the emotional life in contemporary times."^[18]

I feel this is inadequate and causes the representation of the film's reception, in the article as a whole, to be more one-note than it was in reality. I have added information and added some of the original writing to fully explain, so here is the section I would replace it with.

Despite the film's eventual lionization by film scholars, the film received a harsh reception at its opening at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It is one of the festival's most notorious reactions. According to Vitti, "the screening of Cannes was a real-life drama." From the opening titles, despite the film's serious tone, laughs erupted in a dark theater packed with critics and photographers. Laughs continued through the runtime, joined by boos. Gene Youngblood has stated that audience members usually booed during long sequences where nothing happened to further the film's plot, but has asserted that "quite a lot is happening in these scenes."^[9] Antonioni and Vitti, who claimed she was sobbing, fled the theater. 

The next day, however, the filmmakers were sent a list of signatures from established filmmakers and writers who declared that L'Avventura was the best movie screened at Cannes. After a second screening, the film went on to win the Jury Prize^[16] at the same festival, and went on to international box office success and what has since been described as "hysteria." Youngblood described the trilogy of which L'Avventura is the first component as a "unified statement about the malady of the emotional life in contemporary times."^[17]

Expanding this story emphasizes one of the most controversial events at the world's most famous film festival. The initial reception of the film is as telling as its current prestige, though initially the article gave it little regard. L'Avventura is a bold and daring film that, according to film scholars, changed the landscape and techniques of filmmaking as much as any film that had come before it. Antonioni was a devotee of cinema's history, but never an acolyte. He is a true auteur and an iconoclast, accordingly with his fair share of detractors who may call him cold, boring, posturing, once intellectually chic and now passé.

This is a minor division of people, but it does exist, and the Cannes incident contextualizes that. The incident also calls into question the nature of public, and private, reception of art in general. Are the first audiences, swift to myopic and reactive opinions, your best source of information? Is your first viewing of a movie especially reliable, given how quickly the opinion of L'Avventura changed?

Think about these things as summer film festivals are rounding out and the tsunami of public opinion rushes through the internet.

In-Depth Review of "Amadeus" (1984)

Disclaimer: this review is written for people who have seen the movie. There are spoilers. For reviews like these I like to go into a little more depth and detail and also explore possible interpretations of the film.

I decided to revisit another favorite of mine, Miloš Forman's classic Amadeus, a film released in the late summer of 1984. I wanted to review this film to give a concrete example of the "the steady stream of work from more 'serious' directors unconcerned with box-office statistics [during the summer]," as I wrote on my first post.

The director's cut, the version I watched, is about three hours long. I am a proponent of pith. Nevertheless, to those of you who think this movie too long, I would ask: which scenes would you remove, Your Majesty?

Amadeus is practically perfect—sumptuous, miraculous, and epic. Nevertheless, the film’s intimacy, focused mainly on the mythologized relationship between composers Mozart and Salieri, is most developed. Mozart is prodigious, obviously, but also flouting, boyish, and boorish. Salieri is indignant, jealous, tortured, and tortuous. Amadeus is not a biography about Mozart or Salieri, but is about the complex conflict between these two men of unequal talent and political influence.

Amadeus’s style is romantic and opulent, congruous with the foundational and original music of the actual Amadeus Mozart. His delicately structured, blissful pieces with occasional symphonic eruptions are mirrored in the film. Nearly every frame is decadent, its fundamental scenes are taut and well-crafted, and its dramatic payoffs are stirring. The movie was universally acclaimed, winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Moreover, its two leads—F. Murray Abraham as Salieri and Tom Hulce as Mozart—were both nominated for Best Actor. Even more incredibly, Abraham won the award, despite surely splitting some of those votes with Hulce.

In film circles, the Mozart character in Amadeus is seen too often as a prop that exists merely to challenge our narrator, Salieri. Salieri is the main character, yes, but the Mozart character develops irrespective of Salieri. If Amadeus were indeed a eponymous biography, it would work nearly as well, because of how developed the Mozart character is. The genius’s relationship with his oppressive father is key. From an extremely young age, Mozart has been trained (“like a monkey”) to please his father through phenomenal music. Even when he is in another city or is dead, his son Mozart feels compelled to please him further. (This, along with Salieri’s view of him, could support a Mozart-as-Jesus interpretation.)

His father is also, throughout the film, seen as a personification of death. This adds to Mozart’s motivation in two ways: his grief, after his father’s death, drives him to write his darkest music; and he is compelled to create everlasting work, even on his deathbed, that will live beyond his own death through posterity.

Antonio Salieri, usually seen as Amadeus's main character, idolizes Mozart from a young age and longs to be a similarly great composer. Salieri maintains that he wanted to create music in order to sing the word of God, but it is easily discerned that this is a mere pretense, that what Salieri truly wants is fame and admiration and, most of all, talent that can be used for political gain. When Mozart comes to Vienna and proves Salieri to be comparatively mediocre, Salieri feels divinely punished—directly even, since he thinks Mozart to be “the voice of God.” (“Amadeus” literally translates to “love of God.”) Because of this direct connection between Mozart and God from Salieri’s perspective it is the relationship between Salieri and the Almighty that is central to Amadeus.

Through the rest of the film, Salieri is awe-struck by the miraculous work of Mozart, and effectively undercuts him at every turn. “Through my influence, I saw to it Don Giovanni was played only five times in Vienna. But, in secret, I went to every one of those five, worshipping sounds I alone seemed to hear.” The movie’s resolution nears once Salieri, dressed in the father’s deathly costume, urges Mozart to write a requiem mass, which Salieri plans to perform at Mozart’s funeral once he kills him. He would steal God’s voice to spite Him.

This task, combined with financial trouble and continual grief, finally drives Mozart to his death. Ironically, due to Salieri’s consistent sabotages, Mozart’s funeral was trifling—he was buried in a pauper’s mass grave—so even if Salieri’s plan had succeeded his performance of the poignant requiem would have gone unheard. In Amadeus, Antonio Salieri willfully challenges the manifestation of God as well as God himself. Understandably, the patron saint of mediocrity failed on both counts.

Well, there it is.

The History of the Summer Blockbuster

A blockbuster is defined, basically, as a movie with a high budget that is heavily marketed by a major studio whose main purpose is to make money. They are usually fast-paced and action-heavy, oftentimes transforming into cultural phenomena. The term "blockbuster" originates from World War II, describing aerial bombs capable of destroying an entire city block. These movies seek the same kind of impact.

All my life, every summer, American blockbusters dominated the box office. A few recent examples are Spiderman 2 (June, 2004), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (June, 2009) Toy Story 3 (June, 2010), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (June, 2011), and Despicable Me 2 (July, 2013). Nevertheless, this staunchly established trend did not always exist. In fact, studios once saw summers as dead air. Sure, movies were always an escape from the ceaseless sun, but studios usually held off on their biggest projects (blockbusters) during the summer.

There is one film most responsible for this massive shift in the industry: Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Inspecting the film's release, one can see how similar it is to the summer blockbusters of today. The film grossed over $7 million over the first weekend, Universal Studios spent nearly $2 million promoting the film, and its tone was action-heavy and suspenseful, with some comic relief.

Studio executives took notice of this surprisingly massive success, and began to model their releases after it. Two years later, in late May, the ultimate blockbuster franchise was launched by 20th Century Fox: Star Wars. Its release resembled Jaws's and its success was even greater, ultimately grossing almost $800 million. It is the formulaic success of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg—who also directed summer hits Raiders of the Lost Ark (launching the Indiana Jones franchise)—that set the precedent for the kind of movies you're likely to see this summer.

My Favorite Film of Last Summer: "The Florida Project"

While my next post will discuss the history and current climate of summer blockbusters, here I'd like to talk about a different kind of film: the summer indie. My favorite film released last summer had a budget of merely $2 million, released not by a major studio but by A24, an independent studio that's only been around for five years. That film is The Florida Project, first screened at the Cannes Film Festival in the middle of May.

First of all, The Florida Project is sooo Florida. I've spent a good amount of time there, and I've never seen a film capture its troubles and gaudy dilapidation so well. Yet, it isn't exclusively a Floridian story. In fact, these kind of stories are told all the time, though rarely with such grace. For those of you who have seen Truffaut's The 400 Blows, imagine relentless garishness instead of black-and-white—and kids who actually deserved to go to jail. And like that movie, The Florida Project does a masterful job of showing kids as they really are—from making up rules to stupid games and getting angry when their friend breaks them to kind of genius ideas like candy forks. These kids understand their situation, their poverty more than anyone thinks. 

The child star is Moonee, a deviant six-year-old who runs wild all summer through the only overrun motel her mother Halley can afford. To Moonee and friends, it is a theme park. Sean Baker handles these characters with amazing empathy and compassion—sensitively portraying the plight of poverty across America set beside the insensitive who can never comprehend. (The most clear example of this is when the new motel manager refuses Halley at the door with no regard for her safety or even her dignity.) With this understanding, there aren’t gaudy scenes of melodramatic despair that panhandle for pity. 

Even the token crying-in-the-bathroom scene is understated and quickly cut away from. The difficulty Moonnee and Halley face and the monotony of poverty isn’t lost on Baker, but neither is an honest assessment of them. Like the motel manager Bobby, he loves them but holds them accountable, and doesn’t shy away from showing Halley’s irresponsibility as a parent or her prostitution, even if she’s forced into it. This isn't a sermon or an admonition; this is a portrait of a few lives.

The probably abstract ending reveals the heart of The Florida Project: kids dealing with impossibly difficult circumstances just by being kids.

Mi Blog es su Blog: Welcome to This Summer of Film!

Hello, readers! I'm Ben Elliott. (My middle name is Scott, so I guess B.S. Elliott could be my pen name.) Through this blog I intend to update and educate you on the developments in film during this summer.

This blog will be equally shaped for those who see movies as a lighthearted pastime and those who see film as a serious art form. I want to explore more recreational films in a complex way, while exploring complex films in a way that is recreational to read. The "summer blockbuster," spawned by Steven Spielberg's 1975 smash hit Jaws, has continued to become more and more prominent. Deadpool 2, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Ocean's 8, and Incredibles 2 have already taken advantage of those summer seats. (You'll notice that all of these are either a sequel or a re-make, a trend I will explore in the future.) With these timely blockbusters also comes the steady stream of work from more "serious" directors unconcerned with box-office statistics.

While being from and currently living in the United States certainly skews my perspective, I will try my best to be cognizant of film's developments throughout the world. Subtitles are going out of fashion, fast, but to limit one's scope to merely American film is a grave mistake. The history of film is an interwoven pattern of international innovation: William Kennedy Dickson, of Scotland, is considered the true "father of film," inventing the early motion picture camera; Alfred Hitchcock (England), Orson Welles (America), Robert Bresson (France), Sergei Eisenstein (Soviet Union), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), and Akira Kurosawa (Japan) are among the most influential directors of all time. The United States is still the largest film industry in the world economically, but countries like China, the United Kingdom, Japan, and India do not lag far behind.

Of course, I cannot keep up with everything. But casting a wide net such as this leads to a better catch, and I encourage you to apply the same philosophy not only in the movies you watch but in the life you live. I look forward to what I will catch, to the movies I will see, and to the readers I'll interact with.

Until next time.