Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI, was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, and short story writer. Best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents"—L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse—Antonioni "redefined the concept of narrative cinema" and challenged traditional approaches to storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large. He produced "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" and rejected action in favor of contemplation, focusing on image and design over character and story. His films defined a "cinema of...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth29 September 1912
CityFerrara, Italy
CountryItaly
I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature.
I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.
But, you know, Cronaca isn't more innovative than what comes after.
A film that can be described in words is not really a film.
I rarely feel the desire to reread a scene the day before the shooting. Sometimes I arrive at the place where the work is to be done and I do not even know what I am going to shoot. This is the system I prefer: to arrive at the moment when shooting is about to begin, absolutely unprepared, virgin. I often ask to be left alone on the spot for fifteen minutes or half an hour and I let my thoughts wander freely.
When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.
The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.
I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.