Quote

Neorealism taught us to follow the characters with the camera, allowing each shot its own real interior time. Well, I became tired of all this I could no longer stand real time. In order to function, a shot must show only what is useful.

Michelangelo Antonioni

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Michelangelo Antonioni
Age: 94 †
Born: 1912
Born: September 29
Died: 2007
Died: July 30
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
An-tung-ni-ao-ni
Time
Show
Tired
Interior
Shows
Function
Interiors
Order
Became
Allowing
Character
Characters
Camera
Wells
Follow
Useful
Well
Longer
Shot
Must
Taught
Cameras
Real
Stand
Shots

More quotes by Michelangelo Antonioni

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Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
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The struggle for life is not only the material and economic one. Comfort is no protection from anxiety.
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I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.
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I've always dreamed of getting to know the women of other countries better. When I was a boy, I remember, I used to get angry at the thought that I did not know German or American or Swedish women.
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The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.
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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.
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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...
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I read somewhere that happiness is like the bluebird of Maeterlinck: Try to catch it and it loses its color. It's like trying to hold water in your hands. The more you squeeze it, the more the water runs away.
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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.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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A woman's sex appeal is an inner matter. It stems from her mental make-up, basically. It's an attitude, not just a question of her physical features - that arrogant quality in a woman's femininity. Otherwise, all beautiful women would have sex appeal, which is not so.
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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.
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All I know is that we are loaded down with old and stale stuff - habits, customs, old attitudes already dead and gone.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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I've never had a method of working. I change according to circumstances I don't employ any particular technique or style. I make films instinctively, more with my belly than with my brain.
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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
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I didn't like university life much at Bologna. The subjects I studied - economics and business administration - didn't interest me. I wanted to make films. I was glad when I was graduated. Yet it's odd on graduation day, I was overcome with a terrible sadness. I realized that my youth was over and now the struggle had begun.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. That's why I make films, not iceboxes.
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I've made films about the middle classes because I know them best. Everyone talks about what he knows best.
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I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn't try to find out more, because then there's the danger that he'll become his own director.
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A film that can be described in words is not really a film.
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Normally, however, I try to avoid repetitions of any shot.
Michelangelo Antonioni