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
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.
A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.
A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.
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.
We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.
A film that can be described in words is not really a film.
When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.