Jeanne Moreau in La Notte (1961, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

“We are saddled with a culture that hasn’t advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. “

-Michelangelo Antonioni, 1969

(via)

Jeanne Moreau in La Notte (1961, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Patti Smith: I’m still pretty dumb about girl stuff. For a while I said, “Ah, girls are stupid.” But after seeing all these Jeanne Moreau movies, I think being a girl is where it’s at. Like when I’m about thirty-five I’m gonna start wearing black cocktail dresses and become a real cunt.

Penthouse: Do you get a kick out of being sexy?

Smith: I guess I like it. Actually, the only time I ever tried to cultivate being sexy was when I read Peyton Place. I was about sixteen and I read that this guy’s watching this woman walk and he can tell she’s a good fuck by the way she walks. It’s a whole passage. He’s telling Allison McKenzie, “I know you’re a virgin.” And she says, “Well, how?” And he says, “I can tell by the way you walk.” And I thought, Uh-oh, everybody knows! I was ashamed to be a virgin, so I tried to cultivate a fucked walk. I tried to figure out what it looked like. I figured I’d watch any hot woman I could. I mean, look at Jeanne Moreau. You watch her walk across the street on the screen and you know she’s had at least a hundred men.

-excerpted from 1976 Penthouse interview by Nick Tosches

Monica Vitti in L’avventura (1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Monica Vitti’s photogenic existential despair via L’Avventura (1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (Hulton Archive/Getty)

Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

Blow-up (1966, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

“You knew you were in the presence of a great man with Antonioni; he was an auteur supreme. He wanted everything exactly right. We had also heard how particular he was about colours. I’m colour-blind so I can’t tell, but he was supposed to have sprayed the grass at Greenwich Park because he wasn’t happy about the green. He was even said to have changed the colour of the marijuana in Blow-Up because he thought it was the wrong shade.

I have never had such close coaching from any other director, and many actors wouldn’t stand for it. Finally, on take 13: ‘Cut. Print. Good. Peter, come with me.’ So he took me off set and said to me, ‘Peter, I understand. You wish to show the world what a fine actor you are.’ He got that right. ‘When you work with other directors you give them your performance and they film it. Not with me, Peter. You see I have chosen you for how you look. I have chosen all your clothes. If I move my camera six inches, I would ask you to do that line in a different way.’

Upon this, he put his arms around me and held me close to him and said, ‘Peter, believe in me. Trust me. I am not God, but I am Michelangelo Antonioni.’

-Peter Bowles on the making of Blow-up (via)

Monica Vitti & Alain Delon in The Eclipse (1962, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

Marcello Mastroianni & Jeanne Moreau in La Notte (1961, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

Jeanne Moreau in La Notte (1961, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

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

Blow-up (1966, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)