L’Avventura: Emotions, engagement and inconclusiveness of an experimental plot

This article examines Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura offering a new discussion of its narrative value, exploring the role of emotions and cognition in narrative, and their interaction. We believe the results of this study could reshape the current understanding of the film’s main aesthetic properties. We agree with some of the main characteristics outlined previously by scholars and critics, regarding not only the film’s plot structure but also its main stylistic features. In our view, the different hypotheses that spectators may be encouraged to formulate while watching the film are central to their aesthetic and critical experience. Our analysis of the whole set of narrative disruptions points to the conclusion that films achieves a convergence and interaction between the elicitation of active aesthetic reflection and the elicitation of active social reflection in a way that had never been done before