When L'Avventura came out in 1960, cinema was undergoing a period of renewal. As Nowell-Smith explains, this was characterised by a rebellion against ‘the false perfection of the studio film’. Film directors acquired a new visibility, as films increasingly displayed ‘open-ended narratives, internal quotation, autobiographical references, first-person statements’, while eschewing gloss and glamour. Although most films released at this time kept to classical styles of composition and narrative form, cultural innovators such as Antonioni began to disrupt the coherence and continuity of space, time and narrative that cinema had previously worked to maintain. The premiere of L'Avventura at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 revealed, however, that the viewing habits of some spectators had not quite caught up with the radical changes that cinema was undergoing. The film was booed by the audience, while Antonioni and lead actress Monica Vitti fled in despair. Spectators seemed to have two related primary grievances. First, the film's ellipses and ‘dead times’, in which nothing is happening that appears to advance the narrative, ensured that the audience, to paraphrase Hamish Ford, saw what they expected to miss, and missed what they expected to see. The slow temporality of the film provoked many negative affects, namely, boredom, frustration, and irritation. Second, the interpretive strategies that were commonly employed by film critics in the 1950s seemed to fail when set against the film's ambiguity and open-endedness.