Damodara Das

Dear Srila Prabhupada –

You are the one I pronounce prayers to three times daily and offer food to and dedicate my life too although imperfectly.
You are the one who can unbuckle the straight jacket of my karma and liberate me to a life of holy sanity.
You are the one who always smiled at me whenever we met even though I deserved a good thrashing.
You are the one who sent me to Washington DC and who sustained me as I gave your message to members of Congress.
You are the one who is forever my guiding light and heart opener who plucked me out of the muck of my tendencies.
You are the one who told the BTG staff to get out of our stuffy office and hit the streets with the sparkling Holy Name.
You are the one who wrote me letters that instructed me and sustained me by ever wishing me well.
You are the one who in the early months sat on a makeshift Seat of Vyas and fearlessly administered the straight sauce.
You are the one who sold me your Srimad Bhagwatam 3-volume set which yanked me off my Buddhist train of thought.
You are the one whose 3 Bhagwatams I worship today on my desk altar between the Jagannaths and Radha Krishna.
You are the one whose life sustaining quotes I post every day on two Facebook devotee groups.
You are the one who kindly named DC’s uninstalled bell metal murtis Radha Damodar before they left for the traveling party.
You are the one who then gave us ISKCON’s first Krishna murti Madan Mohan to be joined by a Radharani of your design.
You are the one who is an ocean of mercy and no one can estimate the depth of your inconceivable kindness.
You are the one I left one time but you brought me back and I pray I stay with you forever.
You are the one who even while I was away for four months was always my reference marker and guidepost.
You are the one who gives us all we need to know in your books if only we have the patience to unpack the secrets.
You are the one whose spoken words even in recordings are like honey drops of nectar for the heart.
You are the one who invites us all to sail away with you to the far bank of the River Viraja where pure souls await.
You are the one whose ISKCON is only 56 years old and who knows how much the future will proclaim your greatness.
You are the one who surely stands in the firmament along with Jesus and Buddha as a great liberator.
You are the one who wore a ring given to you by someone so that they would always be in Krishna’s service.
You are the one who was expert in everything as the occasion required a Philosopher a Cook a diligent Treasurer.
You are the one whose instruction to chant Hare Krishna 24 hours daily is embedded in my soul as the rule of my life.
You are the one who wrote me that “English translation of prayers is good” but I still say them as you did.
You are the one who sat under a tree on October 16, 1966 and opened a path for me to an infinite world.
You are the one whose chanting that day gave me a crazy vision that I was riding up an infinite silver ramp.
You are the one whose chanting Hare Krishna made me chant too on an upward ride to ever increasing bliss.
You are the one whose disciple Hayagriva that day gave me a leaflet that said I could Stay High Forever.
You are the one in Tompkins Square Park who gave us a political force that I saw liberating the cosmos.
You are the one whose politics went far beyond the War Resisters League or Liberation Magazine or Dellinger or McReynolds.
You are the one who was the star of my movies and made my camera into an instrument as good as Ganesh’s pen.
You are the one who returned from San Francisco in April 1967 to our airport welcome as seen in my movie “Vaishnavas.”
You are the one who was welcomed by a big crowd including the health food store owner lady we called Mother Nature.
You are the one who was so pleased that we had built you a proper though very simple Vyasasan in your absence.
You are the one who recuperated from your stroke in Long Branch NJ but didn’t stop instructing us how to expand ISKCON.
You are the one who had us wear little Jagannaths on a string around our necks.
You are the one who said my little movie was “very nice” but I noticed you closed your deities’ curtains before I showed it.
You are the one who graciously let me film you the day before you left New York and we feared we’d never see you again.
You are the one who sat on your little space in the rear court building of 26 Second Avenue as I made “Swamiji.”
You are the one who is an ideal subject for meditation as you chant, read, eat, and give instructions in that movie.
You are the one who in “Gurudev” was welcomed at Kennedy Airport in 1969 by an even larger crowd of dancing disciples.
You are the one who made us all leap in ecstasy when you got up and danced with us there.
You are the one who then returned to your apartment at 26 Second Avenue and called it “my old home.”
You are the one who lectured at the 61 Second Avenue temple which used to be P. Blechman and Sons tuxedo rental parlor.
You are the one who I filmed in “Paramhansa” benedicting Boston and Montreal with your angelic presence.
You are the one who waved to me smiling as I bowed down to you while filming you leaving your Montreal apartment.
You are the one who waved to me again as I filmed you at the Montreal airport, thus ensuring my eternal bond to you.
You are the one who did your morning walk on city streets with Jadurani and Goursundar looking every moment the King of Boston.
You are the one who presided at the Glenville Avenue temple in Allston in front of the partition I built with my Dad’s help.
You are the one who thus engaged my father in Krishna’s service by your holy mercy.
You are the one who consented to be in “The Full Nectarine” a short movie by Nayana Bhiram and myself.
You are the one who thereby told a group of devotees and local children about Lord Chaitanya’s taking sannyas.
You are the one whose transcendent presence there in Brooklyn Botanical Gardens made us call it Brooklyn Brindaban.
You are the one whose expansive spirit guided me as I served at Back To Godhead as art director and article writer.
You are the one who saved me I’m sure from destroying myself with my clever fabrications and ingenious degradations.
You are the one to whom I owe any continued propriety or sensibility in my life.
You are the one who said “Everything is Person” and thus obliterated the feeble philosophies of materialists.
You are the one who thus opened a view of the cosmos as composed not of dead stuff but of conscious entities everywhere.
You are the one who rides on the front of the Jagannath cart like a stalwart sea captain braving the storms of Kali Yuga.
You are the one who is our Hero and Deliverer, our Priest and Potentate, yes for my money the King of the World.
You are the one who is always my best friend even though I have denied you three times and even more than that.
You are the one whose mercy reaches down even to an idiot like me who wallows in the mud of self-importance.
You are the one who beckons us home, a beacon of hope and glory for all sentient beings, including me,

a lame man stumbling to your lotus feet, Damodara Das

I have been arrested by the police twice –
both times for practicing civil disobedience.
First, in February 1966, along with other
members of the War Resisters League, I sat
down in the street at the intersection of
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in New York
City. Second, In the spring of 1970, I was
singing – performing Sankirtan – along with
other Krishna devotees on the sidewalk
near the corner of M Street and Wisconsin
Avenue in Washington DC. In the first
instance our group was jailed (briefly). In
the second instance I went by myself
(also briefly). In the four years between
the two arrests I had decided, as Srila
Prabhupad has written, that Sankirtan is
“civil disobedience for the right cause.”

Prayers to Krishna from Skandha Ten of the Shrimad Bhagavata Purana

10.3.13 Prayer of Vasudeva

Now I completely understand Your nature.
You are the Supreme Person, beyond matter.
You are absolute understanding-and-bliss
in its true form, the all-seeing intelligence.

10.10.29 Prayer of Nalakuvera and Manigriva

Krishna, Krishna, O Great Yogi,
You are the original Supreme Person,
both manifest and unmanifest.
Brahmins know You as the form of this universe.

10.14.23 Prayer of Brahma

You are the One, the Primeval Person,
the self-illuminating truth, endless and beginningless,
eternal, indestructible, full of bliss, spotless,
perfect, incomparable, the Nectar beyond all knowing.

10.16.39 Prayer of the Nagapatnis

We bow to the Possessor of all riches,
to the Person who is the Great Soul,
to the shelter and origin of the world,
to the transcendental Supreme Soul.

10.27.19 Prayer of Mother Surabhi

Krishna, Krishna, O Great Yogi,
O very Soul and Origin of the cosmos,
You exist as Master of the worlds
and as our Master, O infallible one.

10.34.16 Prayer of Sudarshana

O God, Great Yogi,
Great Person, Lord of the pure,
Ruler of the rulers of all worlds,
I surrender, take command of me.

10.41.16 Prayer of Akrura

O God of gods, Master of the universe,
who purify those who hear about you and praise You,
O best of the Yadus, subject of the best verses,
Shelter of the people, I bow to You.

10.56.6 Prayer of the Dvarakavasis

Narayana, we bow to You,
holder of the conch,disc, and club,
lotus-eyed Damodara, Govinda,
son of the Yadus!

When Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (b. 1486) wanted to be initiated into sannyas, the order of renunciates, he chose as his guru Keshava Bharati, who was a devotee of Lord Shiva. That was unusual because Chaitanya was a devotee of Lord Krishna.

In fact his followers accept Chaitanya as an incarnation of Krishna. We can find an explanation for his choice of sannyas guru in the pastimes of Krishna.

In a book by Jiva Goswami (b. 1513), Gopal-campu (Uttara-campu 8.10) we read:

“The young brothers Krishna and Balaram decided to go to a teacher and accept him as their guru. They said … ‘The best guru would be a person who is fixed in Brahman and worships Shiva … The great soul Sandipani of a dynasty from Kashi worships Shiva … he lives in Avanti, a place emanating happiness and near a Shiva temple. We should go there.'”

So Chaitanya was reprising his decision during his earlier Krishna pastimes to take initiation from a Shiva devotee. Moreover, we read in the book Gaura-ganoddesa-dipika by Kavi Karnapura (b. 1527) that Chaitanya’s sannyas guru Keshava Bharati was indeed a reincarnation of Krishna’s guru Sandipani Muni.

Ordinarily Krishna devotees and Shiva devotees go their separate ways. But Lord Krishna / Lord Chaitanya himself saw fit to bridge the gap. In doing so, he did not alter his personalist message to conform to the Shiva tradition’s impersonal one. Still, he honored the saint from a different teaching even to the extent of taking him as his initiating guru.

If all religious practitioners could adopt that ecumenical spirit, the world would be spared so much trouble.

The rhetoric of spirituality is constructed from a priori statements.
Logic cannot reach to the transcendental autocrat, Bhakti Siddhanta says.
The imago dei stands on its own, as does any other quality of the Deity.
It is not an inference. It is a fact, Bhakti Vedanta says.
Talk of God is more poetry than philosophy.
It is a description of a pre-established state of affairs.
The soul of any individual person exists in that realm and can perceive it.
Atoms that cover the soul or ideas that do likewise are of limited help.
The spiritualist may fashion metaphors from matter to analogize.
But that only gives the impression that religion is an ascending process.
In truth we cannot climb up a ladder to God.
God comes down to us as He is.
The picture of God, the “vision” if you will, awakens the soul.
From then on the soul must battle against body and mind to assert itself.
Ultimately aesthetics carries the day.
God’s body is beautiful and is the essence of beauty.
The spiritual world is a real place and we are essentially part of it.
That is an a priori statement and has its proof in direct experience.
These truths are self evident, the US Constitution says.
Just as a nation is founded on independent facts, so is spirituality.
But of course that’s an analogy and is of limited usefulness.
Direct contact of the soul with God does the trick.
This is accomplished by direct contact with a soul surrendered to God.
Any sincere aspirant will sympathetically vibrate with that pure one.
The pure devotee of God reflects the imago dei.
That person has no purpose other than serving the Original Person.
Association with a pure devotee is the doorway to God.
Coexistent with that person is a method of worship.
The person and the activity of the person come as a unit.
His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is such a person.
He comes to us packaged together with the worship of God’s Name.
To chant names of God is a priori to be in the spiritual world.
That statement stands on its own.
Experience, not logic, is its proof.
It is a fact.

Snatch the moment of devotion.
Catch it and hold it day and night
as a shield against the invasions
of illusions and false egos
that offer you poisoned apples.
Live inside that moment so it’s
not fleeting but cultivated like
a vigorous orchard of divinity
whose fruit nourishes your soul.

As we read about Lord Krishna displaying his pastimes in the village of Vrindaban, we often learn that they are being conducted under the auspices of a goddess named Yoga Maya. She is making it possible for him to accomplish his purposes. Yoga Maya appears first at the time of Krishna’s birth. Later she appears in the form of an elderly lady, Paurnamasi, assisted by Vrinda Devi, the chthonic forest spirit of Vrindaban. In scripture we also read that Krishna’s sister Subhadra is an appearance of Yoga Maya. Narayan Maharaj, in a lecture, stated that Yoga Maya is “a manifestation of Srimati Radhika.” Therefore Radharani, the pleasure potency, the internal spiritual energy and emblem of devotion, manifests herself variously as Yoga Maya, Paurnamasi, and Subhadra – as well as in many other personal forms. She is the feminine aspect of the Godhead. It is said that at the ultimate issue Radha and Krishna are one. In the language of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, they are simultaneously different and not different (bheda-abheda). This is of course a contradiction or a paradox, that is, incomprehensible (acintya). It’s fitting that the nature (tattva) of the ultimate would be beyond our understanding. However it is not beyond our devotion. Love of God is the essence of the philosophy (vada) of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Krishna Consciousness, as presented to the world by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.

But if I were forced to choose who comes first, she’d win the prize. Because she is devotion. The outpouring energy of devotion is the primal generative power, the subject that always moves toward an object. Krishna is the Shaktiman, the possessor of energy, but she is the Shakti energy itself. I would then be forced to say that she manifests him out of herself so he can possess her and she can serve him, thus confirming the essential place of surrender in spiritual life. Indeed, the old traditional greeting among devotees in Vrindaban is “Jai Radhe!” – all glory to her.

In the autumn of 1965, a year before I met Srila Prabhupad and started chanting the Hare Krishna mantra, I attended two concerts by the drone-music pioneer La Monte Young. His powerful offerings reinforced my desire to live a spiritual life. Decades later I composed these pieces. They’re influenced by his use of sustained harmonics, plus Asian overtone singing. Not all employ those methods directly, but all do proceed from what Young has called a “drone state of mind.” Much of their intended interest lies in subtle variations of tone. So small speakers, headphones or earbuds may not deliver a satisfying result.

A Blanket of Doves

Approaching

B Flat and F

Dances of the Secret Voices

Eternal Body

Flutes of Om

Gaza

Intergalactic Meditation

My You

Night of the Lion

Rama

Soul Call

Under the Moon of Love

Wire Mountain

Thank you.

For many years L’Avventura was my favorite film. This analysis of it I wrote after the glow had worn off somewhat. But I tried to capture my mood of that earlier time, before the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and my involvement in “consciousness raising” of various kinds – psychedelics, pacifism, Buddhism, and ultimately my dedication to the Krishna Consciousness movement. Back in 1961 I was struggling to find in Existentialism a path to spirituality. In Michelangelo Antonioni I’d found a kindred soul.

Backgrounds and Balconies

A Study of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura

Commentary © 2009 Daniel Cooper Clark

Images covered by the Fair Use Doctrine of the US Copyright Act

In the summer of 1961, on a year’s leave of absence from college, I was experimenting with places to live in. After a few months in Boston, I decided my fantasy island of Puerto Rico was next. On arriving in New York some hours before the departure of the flight to San Juan, I noticed that a new Italian film, L’Avventura, had just opened at the Sutton Theater on the East Side.

I’d read about it. The showing time fit into my schedule perfectly.

The film stunned me and frustrated me. It haunted me and gave me a headache. Then, off to Puerto Rico, which never got beyond the fantasy stage for me. So I returned to New York, where I stayed during the rest of my year off, sitting in the Sutton Theater time after time, obsessed with Antonioni’s cinema poem on alienation. But was it really about alienation? If it was, why was it so beautiful? Why were the natural environments so evocative, so conscious? Why were the bored, purposeless characters so interesting to me? Back at school, I wrote a review of it for the college newspaper. My first sentence was, “Going to see L’Avventura has replaced the act of going to church for me.”

In this study I hope to show you why.

As the credits begin, after the studio and distributor logos, Antonioni gets top billing. He’s already had a moderately successful career in Italy, with some international acclaim for his previous film, Il Grido.

The title means “the adventure,” but the Italian also implies a “one night stand” or a “fling.” Immediately there’s a sense of something reckless or improper.

This is the film’s first image. Sorry, no “establishing shot.” In the best neorealist tradition, Antonioni plunges us right into the middle of the action. We are forced to put the movie together for ourselves as it progresses. A young woman, Anna, walks toward the camera. We concentrate on her, and on her annoyed expression. We have no idea that she’s walking out of her family’s villa – it could be any place – any expensive, well-kept, place with traditional architecture, that is. The tone of the film is set. The characters will be in transit within settings of opulence both architectural and natural.

In the film’s second shot, we see Anna’s father, a retired diplomat, standing just outside the villa’s wall. He’s talking with a worker. The class distinction couldn’t be more stark. The diplomat is taller, standing nobly. The worker is shorter, with a more humble posture. However, they’re of one mind regarding the new buildings going up nearby. Anna’s father remarks that the villa used to be surrounded by woods. Now the old order is passing. The modern world is invading. In the distance, in the “vanishing point” of the shot’s Renaissance perspective lines, is the dome of St. Peter’s basilica, designed by that other Michelangelo. The old order, the old morality, is vanishing. Yet it still stands in the background, as if commenting on the foreground. In L’Avventura, the environment is one of the actors – or perhaps the environment is all there is, and the human actors are simply aspects of it. Marx’s economic determinism takes on a cosmic aspect. (Did Antonioni go to a lot of trouble to find this location? Or did it just fall into his lap?)

Scowling, Anna meets her father. She tells him she’s going on a cruise from Rome down to Sicily with some friends, including her fiance, Sandro. Her father voices his displeasure with Sandro, questioning the man’s ability to commit himself to the relationship. Anna doesn’t want him to speak his mind, but he counters that after spending years as a diplomat telling lies, he wants to tell the truth as he sees it. He also complains to Anna that she doesn’t spend enough time with him, leaving him alone. We assume her mother has died, or her parents are divorced. As the title implies, the story line’s major theme is impermanence in human relationships – a lack of commitment in friendship, in love, and in family life.

The next five frame captures are from a single shot, and last just a few seconds. Anna and her father are uncomfortably saying goodbye. The camera position reveals another new building going up, even closer than the ones seen before. A woman is walking by, almost unnoticeably, in the near background.

Anna leans over to kiss her father on his cheek, obscuring our view of the woman behind them. A chauffeur is seen, but the frame capture makes him more prominent than the moving image does.

The woman we can’t see is Claudia, a close friend of Anna’s. She’ll be going with Anna on the cruise.

This oblique introduction of Claudia, who will become the film’s main character, happens so quickly that it’s easy to miss her if we’re concentrating on the father and daughter’s drama. For Antonioni, she starts off in the background and never really inhabits the foreground, the jaded world of her companions. Later in the story, Claudia explains that she grew up “sensible – without money.” She retains much of the simple certitude and yet playfulness of her youth. But it would be a mistake to think that L’Avventura is a condemnation of a certain class. The middle class and the poor don’t get off any easier, though they take up less screen time.

As if to underline Claudia’s position as a figure in the background, Antonioni has another woman, also carrying something, emerge in the somewhat more distant background, occupying the same place in the shot that Claudia formerly occupied. Claudia’s identity is already tentative, and will become even more so later.

Bright, playful Claudia and dark, gloomy Anna are driven through “the glory that was Rome” in this film set amidst the magnificent but crumbling architecture and ethics of the past. Claudia’s hand will appear throughout as a lietmotif with varying significations.

They arrive at Sandro’s place, an apartment in an old building whose first floor is an art gallery. Sculptured saints and busy nuns dominate the plaza. The location is steeped in tradition. Dimly perceived, two people look out of two windows. For Antonioni, this placement of extras serves two purposes. First, it casts an air of loneliness over the scene. Second, it makes the windows into eyes, as if the building from the past is watching, and passing judgment, on the present. Sandro, an architect, is conflicted about himself as an artist who loves the exuberant architecture of the past and as a businessman making construction cost estimates in the here and now. Although wealthy, he keeps this romantic bohemian flat as a second home. As with all of Antonioni’s best shots, we are here peering beyond the physical world into a psychological whirlpool.

Before entering Sandro’s apartment, Anna confided to Claudia her uncertainty about her feelings toward Sandro. She was about to give up going on the cruise when Sandro greeted her through his window. He said he’d be right down. Anna then goes up the stairs to his flat, walks in and goes straight to the balcony overlooking the plaza. This is the first of many times the characters take refuge on a balcony – a place neither indoors not outdoors, an equivocal place where one may rest without having to make a final decision.

Sandro’s decor – a contrast of minimalist walls and flamboyant ironwork – reflect his inner duality. Antonioni adopts this contrast of the stark and the ornate as the “look” of his film. (All-white walls were all the rage in Europe during the late 1950s and early 1960s, if the evidence of other films of the period is any indication.)

One good balcony shot deserves another. This one’s on the back of the art gallery. Claudia waits patiently and good-naturedly for Anna and Sandro.

“Perche, perche, perche, perche, eh?” Indeed, that is the question, and Sandro’s inquiry about Anna’s foul mood gets no further reply. Sandro has been trying to lighten her up, which only irritates her all the more. Sandro’s superficial nonchalance about life will carry him through the next couple of days, but will finally give way to a deeper self-disgust.

One floor below the betrothed couple, Claudia muses on their delay.

Cut to this head shot of Anna, also looking upward, but in an almost catatonic boredom, her head listlessly rolling around. Unquestionably one of the cinema’s most loveless love-making scenes.

The perspective lines converge on Claudia, still waiting. She shuts the door. End of the introductory scenes. Two transitional shots follow, as Sandro drives uncomfortably fast to the boat. Combined, the three shots are typical neorealism. Nobody says, “OK guys, let’s drive to the dock where the yacht is waiting for us.” Antonioni cares less about the plotline and more about the poetry – the visual (and aural) dynamics within each shot, and the dialectic between the shots, to use Eisenstein’s term.

The loud car engine is replaced by the distant purring of the boat. We’re off the north coast of Sicily, among the Aeolian islands. In the background is Stromboli, locale of Rossellini’s film of that name, a film distinguished as much for its artistic values as for the controversial extra-marital affair between the director and his star, Ingrid Bergman. Antonioni wrote a script for the neorealist Rossellini in 1942. Stromboli (1950) anticipated L’Avventura‘s theme of alienation and infidelity played out on a stark Aeolian landscape.

The boat wanders around through the Aeolians. In the background is Lisca Bianca, where the film’s story will take a sudden turn. In the foreground is Patrizia, or Lady Patrizia. The yacht is hers. Though her husband is Ettore, a businessman, she’s accompanied on the cruise by Raimundo, her lover. Patrizia’s commment about the loneliness and separation of the islands serves as a transparent reference to the empty spaces separating the film’s characters. Most commentators criticize the characters – other than Claudia – as lacking depth, but they are in fact occasionally capable of sensitivity.

Sandro lets newspaper pages loose into the boat’s wake. Their aimless, disconnected fluttering upsets Claudia.

Stopping for a swim.

Aimless, disconnected fluttering…

Anna has brought the swimming to an abrupt halt by pretending to see a shark. She confesses to Claudia. Antonioni’s female characters have deep connections, and wisdom, not shared by his men. Most of his earlier feature films – Cronaca di un amore, La signora senza camelie, Le amiche – were considered to be “women’s films.”

The party disembarks for an interlude on the island. Anna and Sandro quarrel. Here we see a dissolve from the last shot we’ll see of Anna to a shot of the rocks and the sea. She’s dissolving into the background, never to be seen again. We are only 26 minutes into a 143 minute movie, and the woman who has been the main character vanishes.

Meanwhile, Claudia enjoys the simple pleasures.

A storm is coming up. They must return to the boat and continue down to port in Sicily. But where’s Anna?

As they search for Anna, the grand, ancient power of the island asserts itself, sometimes ominous, sometimes beautiful.

The island’s rugged, timeless dignity, with its insistent presence, supports the absence that occupies the thoughts of the wandering searchers, and the absence of any meaningful connections between them.

With her hand, Claudia tries to right a broken stem, but it can’t be fixed.

Claudia pushes herself up after lying down on the rocks searching a crevasse below.

“Anna!” Even the rocks cry out her name. The entire creation calls out in despair, feeling the absence. This is not a “pathetic fallacy,” where an artist makes the outer world express human feelings. It’s the other way around. What we have here is closer to what Sartre called the “nausea,” the vertiginous descent into a cosmic meaninglessness, wherein Claudia and the others would be particular expressions of a general, universal miasma. Or it may be that Antonioni, no matter how darkly, is beginning to reach out to an ecological consciousness that understands the interdependence of all entities. He certainly never makes the jump from existentialism to more recent movements such as eco-ethics, neopaganism, or multicultural Goddess worship. A few hints (unintended, no doubt) find their way in, however.

Claudia, Sandro and Corraldo stay the night, sheltering from the rain in a little stone hut. Claudia wakes at sunrise.

The shirt she’d been wearing is wet. She looks in her bag for another, and finds a shirt of Anna’s that Anna had put there the day before. It’s dry. She puts it on, thus beginning her gradual transition into the place, into the identity, once occupied by Anna…and beyond.

The Goddess worshipped at dawn by Sandro.

She slips. He grabs her hand. Their eyes meet. Anna has been gone for less than a day. Or is she here now, in the shifting persona of Claudia? Sandro is drifting, as usual, attaching no importance to anything but what the world puts in front of him at any moment. But is not Claudia also affected by a similar aimlessness?

The boating party prepares to leave Lisca Bianca. Sandro will continue the search on Lipari, the main Aeolian island, and on the Sicilian mainland. Claudia will conduct her own search. The others will go on to the Sicilian villa where the Montaldos, friends of Patrizia and Ettore, reside. Sandro confronts Claudia on the yacht. She nervously submits to his embrace. Her hand clutches his, then pushes his hand away. They both are plunged into confusion.

A police contingent has arrived by boat and helicopter. As they get ready to leave, the officer in charge turns to see the old fisherman who lives in the stone hut on the island, sitting as if he’s part of the cliffs. The officer looks at him with curiosity, then turns away nervously. Another judgment passed on by the ancient background.

A carefully posed group shot of the yachting party, minus Claudia, looking gloomy after their junket has been ruined by the strange disappearance of Anna. From the left, Sandro, Raimundo, Patrizia, Giulia and Corrado. The Lisca Bianca section of the film has lasted 37 minutes, during which “nothing happens” except a transition of emotional states, and a smooth flow of images of primeval beauty. This is an abstract, almost purely pictorial cinema (and aural cinema, where the music, the natural sounds, the voices combine to create an added layer of depth).

In Lipari, Sandro leaves the police station, once an aristocrat’s villa.

Claudia and Sandro meet at the train station in Milazzo, on the mainland. She implores him to stop trying to forge a relationship with her.

Yet she admits to Sandro she does have strong feelings of affection for him – lamenting the ease with which she can betray her friendship with Anna, who after all has only been gone for a day, and could turn up any time soon. Antonioni’s vivid pictorial style makes the viewer also lose a sense of time and place, creating images that stand on their own in a present-time of their own. Somehow it seems that time doesn’t matter. We’re in an art gallery, away from the real world of mores and social responsibilty. The shifting locations, from Rome to Lisca Bianca, to Lipari, to Milazzo, and now on to several places in Sicily, slide smoothly one to another without any map provided. We’re content to simply observe each image in its own right, to enjoy the artful compositions and transitions, with no more concern about plot than we would have while listening to a symphony. Perhaps for this apparently amoral aestheticism, when the film premiered at Cannes on May 15, 1960, many in the audience violently reacted to it.

The waves also despair. The world despairs. “Existence is suffering,” said the Buddha.

On the other hand, here is the woman who calls herself Gloria Perkins. Sandro watches with amusement as she dishes out a plate of tripe to the reporters in Messina, where she’s caused a street riot of sex-mad Sicilians who’ve been crowding around her roaring their lust. Her giddy eroticism (a rip in her sheath exposes her undergarments) punctuates the film’s somber passages.

At the Montaldo’s villa – the woman on the right is “The Princess” – Claudia is furious at herself for loving Sandro, and furious at Sandro for possibly being the cause of Anna’s disappearance.

When the conversation turns to light-hearted cynicism about Anna and Sandro, Giulia invokes the Deity with prayerful palms. But immediately afterward, she hits on the Princess’ grandson and they grapple frenetically upstairs in his art studio, much to the displeasure of Claudia. That’s Ettore, to the right of Patrizia. Raimundo is off making inquiries about Anna. Most critics refer to these people as the “idle rich,” but Ettore and Corrado are busily involved in a commercial venture that also involves Sandro. So it seems that the cruise is not at all an aimless time-waster, but in fact a means to an end, if rather an elegant way of going about it. The actual situation is that the men are interested in money, and the women are interested in people. Antonioni prefers the feminine approach to life.

Moods do change – anger fades away as contentment and simple pleasures take center stage – those lovely hands. Then Claudia hears a car arriving.

She runs out onto a large balcony. In the shadows, a monk and some peasants are frozen in a scene from the past. Below, there is no news of Anna. This shot is a masterful use of deep focus and balanced lighting. An observant critic has noted that Claudia looks like a figurine herself.

Back inside, Claudia tries on a wig. “You look like someone else,” says Patrizia. Claudia’s transformation into Anna continues. Though the new concept of the impermanence of personal identity is troubling to us, we must attempt to find within it the source of a new ethics.

She goes downstairs. The others are going to Taormina. The building witnesses the wanderings of the wealthy through the eyes of a maid on a balcony. The maid’s elevated position reverses the standard hierarchy of the classes.

Claudia and Sandro drive around Sicily, following leads that lead nowhere. Love overtakes them. Claudia is rapturous. Suddenly, it’s Hollywood!

For the moment, Anna is forgotten.

But again, remembered. Claudia is ashamed of what she’s doing. “E assurdo,” she days. “It’s absurd.” Sandro responds, “It’s good that it’s absurd. It means we can’t do anything about it.” Typically, he settles into his lack of direction, his accomodation with insignificance. The word “absurd” – a signpost of postwar existentialism – is used here by Antonioni in full recognition of its import. The world is fundamentally irrational, disordered, and meaningless. There are two responses. Kierkegaard offers hope, in a leap of transcendence to the spiritual. Camus offers no hope, finding meaning in a purely individual ethic within a cosmic absurdity. Claudia’s remorse will take her to a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, at least a faith in goodness if not quite God. Sandro’s resignation is a corruption of the Camusian hero’s stance. His acceptance of the absurd fails to engender a personal ethic, and he is ruined.

Are the men going to break out in an operatic chorus of condemnation? In Noto, that explosion of baroque architecture, the plaza of the Church of Saints Salvatore and Monastero becomes a stage for a morality play. Claudia’s sin attracts them, like the smell of a bitch in heat. No realism here!

The men silently accuse her. But is this a Catholic allegory, or a Communist one? Do the men represent the proletariat, and Claudia the owner class? Look at the background. To the left of Claudia, a sign for a socialist political party. To the right, a capitalist advertisement. She’s at the center of the conflict. Or maybe Antonioni is reprising the scenes in Stromboli where the interloper Ingrid Bergman is surrounded by glaring islanders. As with so many of the film’s images, we are observing here not a physical event, but a psychological state. Sandro arrives and the men disperse.

Against a backdrop of the Cathedral of Noto (the Duomo), Sandro, the very picture of the modern urban man, waxes nostalgic about his early enthusiasm for the extravagance of architecture gone by. But now, his youthful idealism shunned, he’s grown rich off giving estimates for others’ projects. What is the use of trying to build the way they used to, for hundreds of years, he says. Today, things don’t last.

On the Cathedral’s bell tower, Sandro tells Claudia she’s different from any woman he’s ever known, because she wants to see everything clearly. Impulsively, he asks her to marry him. She reacts confusedly, and implores the divine powers to give her insight. She tugs on the rope – the bell rings out.

They delight in the ringing, and in hearing answering rings from another campanile. Claudia is positioned so that a television antenna – a contemporary communication device – springs up out of her head. That is her world, not the world of the church bells of the past. Antonioni is struggling to find a language appropriate for the fast-moving era of electronics – a language, an aesthetics, an ethics.

Atop the cathedral, a moment of worship. The divine feminine gives her blessing.

In their hotel room in Noto, Claudia is rapturously in love. She sings along with a popular song heard from outside, trying to convince Sandro not to leave for a walk around town.

But he leaves.

On the Cathedral steps, looking at a drawing started by a young artist, Sandro swings his key chain closer and closer to the ink bottle, finally knocking it over and ruining the artwork. Envy, often considered the worst of the seven deadly sins, drags him down. Sandro has reached rock bottom.

Angry and frustrated, he returns to the hotel room, proceeding immediately to the balcony, where he can hover in his dark mood.

He attempts to force himself on Claudia, who resists his aggressive manipulation. Denying his anger, he pretends it’s all OK, making the mistake of calling their relationship “una avventura nuova” (thus supplying the movie with a title). Claudia is unnerved by his flippancy.

They drive to Taormina and check into the San Domenico Palace Hotel. Patrizia and Ettore have arrived before them. Giulia and Corrado are absent without explanation. The hotel is a converted monastery – yet another evocation of Catholicism, this time with Saint Dominic in the background, invisibly observing. As Claudia talks with Patrizia, Sandro strolls around. The woman who calls herself Gloria Perkins is there. Their eyes meet. They look at each other for too long a time.

Claudia and Sandro get settled in their hotel room. Claudia wants to rest. Sandro wants to walk around. For hours through the night, she waits for him to return. She makes faces in a mirror. She reads a magazine. The article is about a woman, pictured in multiple mirror images of herself, who is playing the role of the actress Jean Harlow. Claudia is playing the role of Anna in Sandro’s life, and it disturbs her.

In the grey light of dawn, Claudia takes refuge on a balcony, in the pose of a supplicant.

Nowhere to go but the room’s other balcony. But she gets dressed and searches for Sandro through the hotel.

To her horror, she discovers him sunk into an even deeper chaos of absurdity among the disordered chairs.

She runs out of the hotel, through the streets, to a tilted balcony-like terrace before a ruined church.

The wind rustles the weeping branches and blows her hair.

The building and Claudia weep in despair at the impermanence.

Sandro follows her. He slowly walks by her and slumps down on a bench, utterly defeated, also weeping. Is there any hope for him?

She doesn’t leave him. She moves toward him. But what is her intention? Will she shake him – hit him – choke him?

Her hand makes its ultimate gesture. She pities him – she forgives him. She gently caresses him. She sees herself in him. She also has been unfaithful, to her friend. We are all the same. None of us is perfect. Our hope lies in forgiveness, when there is no reason to hope. This is the image of the saint, of the Madonna, who sees only the sacred within. But it is a Madonna without a church, without a tradition, a tentative step toward a new ethic.

In the film’s last shot, she looks out across the landscape to Mount Etna, the Sicilian volcano that always gives birth to new fire and echoes the shape of Lisca Bianca. She and Sandro are in the clear, beyond the blank dead wall, even beyond the balconies, though still on their own raised railinged terrace. We are left suspended with them in this moment of shared grief.

There is no question that no one, no matter how jaded, would be able to stop asking, “Where’s Anna?” right up through to the end, and I would expect Claudia and Sandro to keep asking it. The enigma of absence hangs over the film. It, more than the “lives of the idle rich” that some viewers cluck at, is responsible for L’Avventura‘s emptiness. Yes, it is empty. There is a hole, and it never gets filled. But the hole is simply there, and cannot be explained. It’s mechanical, impartially built into the construction of the script. It stands on its own, not as a function of any character’s psychology. It’s part of the world. The world is not perfect. It’s flawed. It has holes, and people sometimes fall through them and are never seen again. We try to blame each other, but no one of us caused it or can fix it. Our only intelligent course of action is to forgive each other and learn to live well in the presence of the holes, the voids, the emptiness, the absurd. For Kierkegaard, Camus, and Antonioni, it is the absurd which gives life its meaning. The absurd, the chaos, what I call the Infinite Potentiality, is the ultimate background against which we live out our lives, here on the balcony between birth and death.