alienation, and thus most critics have this to be what they are about.' (ibid, p. 3) Yet while treatment of this often misused concept and long-familiar trope as the key to understanding Antonioni's most influential work can easily have the effect of disavowing the films' enormous diversity of thematic suggestion, aesthetic form, and affective power, there are also more precise, historical reasons for its application. In his long 1958 forward to the second edition of Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1 -- as it happens, composed on the eve of post-war film modernism's famous 1959-60 inauguration with L'avventura and select initial works of la Nouvelle Vague -- Henri Lefebvre argues (using the gendered language) that the products of 'modern man' and 'his works function like beings of nature. He must objectify himself... If man has humanized himself, he has done so only by tearing himself apart, dividing himself, fragmenting himself (1991, p. 71). In the main text that follows, written in 1947, Lefebvre reads as if directly addressing the disconnect but also the ambiguous possibility charted in Antonioni's films from the period no matter our critical position or thematic conclusions: 'Man attains his own reality, creates himself through, within and by means of his opposite, his alienation: the inhuman.' (1991, p. 170). Carefully considered in light of Antonioni's idiosyncratic realism, alienation can be one legitimate means to a historically grounded understanding of the films. The problem, I think, occurs if we then jump to a critical conclusion as to what