In one scene, Claudia and Sandro are in a small village; while Sandro goes looking for Anna is a (literally) hole-in-the-wall hotel, Claudia waits for him outside that wall, as the men of the town slowly circle around her, wordlessly staring.This is Antonioni's L'Aventura of 1960. Any extraneous plot or info-providing dialogue has been cut, or, rather, was never there. The easiest thing to say about this film is that it is about ineffability.
But Sandro is an architect and the father of the unhappy Anna is what we'd today call a developer. The landscape of the film is covered with architectural forms. Very few scenes are not framed by the shapes of the built environment. Sandro and Claudia, wandering around what I suppose is Sicily, move in and out of soft- and off-white lines and shadows cast by buildings. They are caught between the old forms and the new. Since Sandro's apartment (which we see briefly at the beginning) is gorgeously modern, in a southern clime kind of way, we assume that Sandro is in favor of the New. But Anna has been lost into the Old. They are in different universes but it doesn't seem to bother Sandro at all. That's perhaps the oddest of the many odd feelings one has watching this film.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
