Time & Perspective Quote by Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni frames rebellion not as a youthful stunt but as a long, patient recalibration of taste. “Taking liberties” lands with the casual confidence of someone who already knows the rules well enough to violate them surgically. The sly flex is in the time scale: a “long time ago” suggests he was breaking form before it became fashionable, when the penalties were real - puzzled critics, nervous producers, audiences trained to want plots that behave.

The second clause turns autobiography into cultural diagnosis. When he says it’s now “standard practice” to ignore rules, he’s not just claiming influence; he’s describing how avant-garde grammar gets absorbed into the everyday language of cinema. What once read as alienation - dead time, unresolved motivations, attention drifting from “story” to mood, architecture, silence - becomes a toolkit any competent director can reach for. That’s both victory and complication. Antonioni helped legitimize a cinema where atmosphere can be argument, where emptiness can be the point, where the cut doesn’t reassure you but exposes you. Yet standardization also implies dilution: if everyone “ignores the rules,” then rule-breaking risks becoming another set of rules, a checklist of arty tics.

The subtext has a faint, elegant bitterness. He’s reminding you that innovation is expensive, and that the marketplace eventually launders it into convention. In Antonioni’s world, freedom isn’t the absence of constraint; it’s the ability to choose which constraints deserve to survive.