Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912 - 2007
I am not a theoretician of the cinema. If you ask me what directing is, the first answer that comes into my head is: I don't know. The second: All my opinions on the subject are in my films. Among other things, I am an opponent of any separation of the various phases of the work. Such separation has an exclusively practical value. It is valuable for all those who participate in the work - except for the director, if he happens to be both author and director at once. To speak of directing as one of the phases in this work is to engage in a theoretical discussion which seems to me opposed to that unity of the whole to which every artist is committed during his work. Isn't it during the shooting that the final version of the scenario is arrived at? And, during the shooting, isn't everything automatically brought into question - from the theme to the dialogue itself, the real merit of which is never revealed until it is heard in the mouths of the actors?
– Michelangelo Antonioni
Cahiers du Cinema, October 1960
Labels: Notables
posted by Karen Nelson @ 7:51 PM
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