…that out of the quarrel with others we produce rhetoric, matter for the editorial page, while out of the quarrel with ourselves we create art.

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...

Only the past is real.

People are mysterious, even to themselves.

No one can be the total cure for another person.

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...

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,...

In the end, everything is found to be wanting.

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...

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...