Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)
“I shot some of Red Desert along a road where half the horizon was filled with the pine trees that still surrounds Ravenna - though they are vanishing fast - while the other half of the skyline was taken up with a long line of factories, chimneys, tanks, grain silos, buildings, machinery. I felt that the skyline filled with things made by man, with those colors, was more beautiful and richer and more exciting for me than the long, green, uniform line of pinewoods, behind which I still sensed empty nature.
…In this film, machines, with their intrigue of power, beauty, and squalor, have an enormous effect and they have taken the place of the natural landscape. But machines are not the cause of the crisis of the anguish that people have been talking about for years. I mean that we must not long for the more primitive times, thinking that they were a more natural landscape for man.”
-Antonioni, quoted in Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews
