SOURCE: “Homevideo,” in Cineaste, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1990, p. 60.

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...