Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.

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.

The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.

In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!

You cannot penetrate events with reportage.

I think people talk too much; that's the truth of the matter. I do. I don't believe in words. People use too many words and usually wrongly. I am sure that in the distant future people will talk much less and in a more essential way. If people talk a lot less, they will be happier. Don't ask me why.

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing ...

I always mistrust everything I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.

I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

A film that can be described in words is not really a film.

I don't want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society ... these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.

The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development- whether psychological or material- one must pass on to the actual realization.

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.

Normally, however, I try to avoid repetitions of any shot.