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
Michelangelo Antonioni quotes about
Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.
Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
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.
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.
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.
Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.
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.