Michelangeo Antonioni Quotes

The camera has a mind of its own
its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze
the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears. ~ Frank Lentricchia

Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tells us we must remember. But what makes movies themselves, rather than novels or plays, is something else. What is it if not the film medium itself? The purity of the visual, which lies in the silence of the stilled image. The freeze frame. The deeply, deeply silent image. Like death. The image in itself in its silent purity reaches
it reaches!
for the purity of death. ~ Frank Lentricchia

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

As much as I love Antonioni films, I love the Three Stooges. ~ Joe Carnahan

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

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

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

The films I liked were European films-Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut. ~ Tobe Hooper

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 ... ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

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

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

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

In Blow-up I used my head instinctively! ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

I don't want to direct a movie as good as Antonioni, or Kubrick, or Polanski, or whoever. I want it to be my own. I think I've got the seed of it and, what's more, that I can make movies that are different and informed by my taste. ~ Jack Nicholson

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. ~ Ingmar Bergman

To evoke the classic period of Italian cinema in a little film seemed like a great, fun thing to do. I had relations to that period. I had known Fellini and I had known Antonioni. I had made a movie with Antonioni and I had visited Fellini in his studios. So, it seemed like something worthwhile doing. You bring yourself to that mythical cinema. ~ Wim Wenders

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us
this is his metaphysical wager
is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life. ~ Frank Lentricchia

But, you know, Cronaca isn't more innovative than what comes after. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home. ~ Paul Auster

No one can be the total cure for another person. ~ Frank Lentricchia

I watched L'eclisse [1962] with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti. Changed my world. What a glamorous and modern film. This is what a genius is - the thing of a genius. The dresses, the tiny heels, the Cardin look, the boys dressed up as Italian gigolos - it was divine, very modern. [ Michelangelo] Antonioni, I loved and I realized: how modern. ~ Manolo Blahnik

You cannot penetrate events with reportage. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

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

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

She didn't like weepy films. She liked to
quote D. H. Lawrence : "Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself
of feelings you haven't really got." Hers were grim European films
- Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman - films where everybody
died or wished they had. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

I want to die, stripped, by myself, of all fantasies. That's the goal. I want to feel what is real, at the end, and only what is real. Grip fiercely with my eyes all that is around me
the people of my intimate life, the objects in the room, without the evasions of fantasies. ~ Frank Lentricchia

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

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

Only the past is real. ~ Frank Lentricchia

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

I'm in the process of trying to organize my DVDs into some kind of order and it's taking me weeks. I have everything from obscure 'Antonioni' to 'Terminator Salvation.' ~ Michael Weatherly

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. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

There is no such thing as art," he said. "There is only this painting, this piece of music, that sculpture. And it either resonates with you or it doesn't." He paused for a moment and then added, "There is no such thing as art, there are only works."
... In those two moments, Antonioni taught me something profound. ~ Herbie Hancock

Take the road to contradiction, it'll lead you, I promise, to the palace of wisdom. ~ Frank Lentricchia

Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it. ~ Frank Lentricchia

'La Notte' is my favorite of the Antonioni pictures and my favorite work of the master cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo, who also shot '8 1/2' for Fellini. ~ Jake Paltrow