“I make people laugh, which is a great gift, but I live in fear.”

-Monica Vitti (via)

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)

“Directors at that time didn’t want actors to act, especially actresses. They were expected to be pretty. So they told me to stick to the theater. They said, ‘Your nose is too thin.’ My whole family went away to America to live. They couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t go with them. “Maria Luisa,” they said, ‘How can you stay alone in Italy?’ But I used their absence to become an actress. That’s how I became Monica Vitti. When they came back, my parents had to call me Monica. They had to acknowledge what had happened.”

-Monica Vitti née Maria Luisa Ceciarelli, 1986, Interview magazine

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

Monica Vitti & Alain Delon in The Eclipse (1962, 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