Daily Inspiration Quote by Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni’s sly brag lands like a paradox: “used my head” but “instinctively.” It’s a neat capsule of how Blow-Up operates - a film that looks coolly intellectual (photography, perception, modern alienation) while behaving like a sensory trap. He’s rejecting the tidy myth that great art is either pure calculation or pure inspiration. For Antonioni, thinking and feeling aren’t opponents; they’re the same instrument played in different registers.

The intent is partly defensive, partly provocative. Blow-Up was received as both art-cinema riddle and swinging-’60s phenomenon, and Antonioni is pushing back against readings that treat it as a coded puzzle with a single solution. “Instinctively” signals his method: he isn’t laying breadcrumbs for the viewer to “solve” a murder; he’s following the logic of attention itself - how a glance becomes fixation, how an image invites interpretation, how certainty collapses under magnification.

Subtext: the director is aligning himself with his protagonist, the fashion photographer who believes the camera can pin reality to the wall. The film humiliates that belief, and so does the quote. Antonioni “uses his head” not to dominate meaning, but to notice where meaning frays. The brain here isn’t a calculator; it’s a sensor.

Context matters: a postwar Italian modernist making an English-language film at the height of London’s media spectacle. Blow-Up is about surfaces that pretend to be depth. Antonioni’s line winks at the audience’s demand for authorial mastery. He claims intelligence, then denies the comfort of control - exactly the movie’s trick.