Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film 9789048525232

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface: The Poly-expressive Symphony of Futurist Cinema
Section 1: Joyful Deformation Of The Universe
1. Introduction. The Poetics of Futurist Cinema
2. Speed and Dynamism. Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avant-garde
3. Futurism and Film Theories. Manifesto of Futurist Cinema and Theories in Italy in the 1910-1920s
4. Film Aesthetics Without Films
5. Marinetti’s Tattilismo Revisited. Hand Travels, Tactile Screens, and Touch Cinema in the 21st Century
6. Dance and Futurism in Italian Silent Cinema
7. Futurism and cinema in the 1910s. A reinterpretation starting from McLuhan
8. The Human in the Fetish of the Human. Cuteness in Futurist Cinema, Literature, and Visual Arts
Section 2: Daily Filmed Exercises Designed To Free Us From Logic
9. Yambo on the moon of Verne and Méliès. From La colonia lunare to Un matrimonio interplanetario
10. An Avant-Garde Heritage. Vita futurista
11. Thaïs. A Different Challenge to the Stars
12. Velocità, a Screenplay by F.T. Marinetti. From Futurist Simultaneity to Live Streaming Media
13. Velocità/Vitesse. Filmed Dramas of Objects and ‘avant-garde integrale’
14. From Science to the Marvellous. The Illusion of Movement, Between Chronophotography and Contemporary Cinema
Section 3: Shop Windows Of Filmed Ideas, Events, Types, Objects
Chronology
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

Futurist Cinema

Futurist Cinema Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film

Edited by Rossella Catanese

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Piero Fragola, Florence Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 752 8 e-isbn 978 90 4852 523 2 doi 10.5117/9789089647528 nur 670 © R. Catanese / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7 Preface 9 The Poly-expressive Symphony of Futurist Cinema Rossella Catanese

Section 1  Joyful Deformation Of The Universe 1. Introduction

19

2. Speed and Dynamism

33

3. Futurism and Film Theories

45

4. Film Aesthetics Without Films

57

5. Marinetti’s Tattilismo Revisited

69

6. Dance and Futurism in Italian Silent Cinema

89

The Poetics of Futurist Cinema Giovanni Lista

Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avant-garde Paolo Bertetto

Manifesto of Futurist Cinema and Theories in Italy in the 1910-1920s Valentina Valente

Sabine Schrader

Hand Travels, Tactile Screens, and Touch Cinema in the 21st Century Wanda Strauven

Elisa Uffreduzzi

7. Futurism and cinema in the 1910s

103

8. The Human in the Fetish of the Human

115

A reinterpretation starting from McLuhan Antonio Saccoccio

Cuteness in Futurist Cinema, Literature, and Visual Arts Giancarlo Carpi

Section 2 Daily Filmed Exercises Designed To Free Us From Logic 9. Yambo on the moon of Verne and Méliès

133

10. An Avant-Garde Heritage

147

11. Thaïs

163

12. Velocità, a Screenplay by F.T. Marinetti

181

From La colonia lunare to Un matrimonio interplanetario Denis Lotti

Vita futurista Rossella Catanese

A Different Challenge to the Stars Lucia Re

From Futurist Simultaneity to Live Streaming Media Carolina Fernández Castrillo

13. Velocità/Vitesse 195 Filmed Dramas of Objects and ‘avant-garde integrale’ Rossella Catanese

14. From Science to the Marvellous

The Illusion of Movement, Between Chronophotography and Contemporary Cinema Francesca Veneziano

209

Section 3 Shop Windows Of Filmed Ideas, Events, Types, Objects Chronology 225 Fernando Maramai

Filmography 241 Marcello Seregni

Index 255

Acknowledgements This book is an edited collection, so it has benefited from all the authors’ contributions. I am very grateful to all of the people who have contributed to the book and I wish to thank them for their kindness and generosity. I wish to acknowledge the keen contribution of (in alphabetical order): Paolo Bertetto, Giancarlo Carpi, Carolina Fernández Castrillo, Giovanni Lista, Denis Lotti, Lucia Re, Antonio Saccoccio, Sabine Schrader, Wanda Strauven, Elisa Uffreduzzi, Valentina Valente, and Francesca Veneziano for their brilliant essays and their patience in reaching publication. I am thankful to Fernando Maramai and Marcello Seregni, who respectively curated the chronology and the filmography included in this collection. Some of the authors are scholars who have been sources of inspiration from the very beginning of this project; some others revealed new and original perspectives. Among them, Wanda Strauven has especially never hesitated to offer excellent suggestions, which I have greatly appreciated. This book would not have been possible without the help of Maryse Elliot, Chantal Nicolaes, Kristi Prins, Jeroen Sondervan, and Nanko van Egmond of Amsterdam University Press; I am also thankful to Thomas Elsaesser for his faith in this project. I wish to thank Marika Di Canio and Zachary Wallace for their translations. I would also like to thank Jan Simane, Alessandro Nova, and Gerhard Wolf of Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Gesellschaft, who allowed me to participate in their unique project Pro Firenze Futurista. A special thanks goes to Lisa Hanstein, who supervised my work and kindly collaborated with my research on Futurism. I must acknowledge Beatrice Occhini (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’), who gave me highly supportive reading and insightful advice, Marco Grifo (Library ‘Mario Gromo’ at Museo Nazionale del Cinema) for his valuable help with bibliographic research, Patrizio Ceccagnoli (University of Kansas) for his guidance on Futurist literature, and art historian Maurizio Scudiero for his kind cooperation with sources and images by Fortunato Depero. I would also like to thank (for their help with images and sources): Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia (Centro Studi Bragaglia); Laurent Mannoni and Stéphane Dabrowski (La Cinémathèque française); Nancy Kauffman (George Eastman Museum); Daniela Currò, Marina Cipriani, Gabriele Antinolfi Mario Militello, and Martina Malandrino (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale); Federica Pirani and Alessandra

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Cappella (Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Museo Nazionale di Arte Contemporanea MACRO); Claudia Gianetto (Museo Nazionale del Cinema); Gabriele Oriani (Fondazione Oriani CDA Centro Diffusione Arte); Michele Lanziger (Museo dell’Aeronautica Gianni Caproni); Maria Grazia Conti (Museo del Novecento); Francesca Duranti (Archivio Gerardo Dottori); Celia Crétien (Galerie Chantal Crousel); and Paolo Vampa (Vampa Productions). Furthermore, I wish to thank the artists Caro Verbeek, Evan Roth and Mehmet Ali Uysal for their own works. I also acknowledge the help that I have received from my friends from the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema, chaired by Elena Dagrada. I extend my gratitude to my beloved colleagues and friends at Sapienza University of Rome and Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute in Florence for the motivating environment that supported me from the nascent idea through the entire editing process. A special thanks goes to Piero Fragola for the cover artwork and to my parents, who have provided constant encouragement.

Preface The Poly-expressive Symphony of Futurist Cinema 1 Rossella Catanese We must liberate film as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and nimbler than all the existing arts. We are convinced that only thus can it attain the poly-expressiveness toward which all the most modern artistic researches are moving. Futurist cinema is creating, precisely today, the poly-expressive symphony that just a year ago we announced in our manifesto Weights, Measures, and Prices of Artistic Genius. The most varied elements will go into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of colour, from the conventional line of prose to wordsin-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In short, it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colours, lines, and forms, a clash of objects and realities thrown together at random. (Marinetti et al. 1916: 230-231)

The history of 20th-century art and culture has been molded by the concept of avant-garde. Avant-garde movements implied a strong spirit of modernization: among these movements, Italian Futurism pursued an astonishing renovation. Founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on 20 February 1909, when he published The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, Futurism gave birth to a new kind of intellectual collective group, and to radical cultural artifacts that shaped new boundaries among the arts, according to a theoretical paradigm highly focused on contemporary society. With their works, the Futurist artists emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence as emerging features of modern needs during the machine age. Big changes affected Italy during the second industrial revolution: Futurism was influenced by some of these technological changes, by interpreting the first steps of industrialization in Italy as an opportunity to turn towards novelty and against an obsolete tradition. According to Marinetti, Futurism is ‘the enthusiastic glorification of scientific discoveries and of the modern mechanism’ (Marinetti 1914: 150); 1

Translated by Marika Di Canio and Zachary Wallace.

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therefore, ‘the triumphant progress of science’ (Boccioni et al. 1910: 62) had determined profound changes within humanity; so, through their enthusiasm for the opportunities of expression given by scientific innovations, the artists could become the spokespeople of freedom. The Futurists attempted to make a clean break with history through their provocative attitude; at the same time, this desire to make a tabula rasa of the past meant dealing with questions related to contemporary scientific discoveries. The Futurist tendency to consider aesthetics scientifically and to aestheticize science (Berghaus 2009: 1) was implied by the spirit of the time. Although the Futurist movement had survived through two world wars (and between the wars, Futurism had been profoundly transformed), the beginning of the 20th century could be seen as its main reference. It was an age that had showed productive tensions in science, biology, physics, chemistry, philosophy, and other disciplines; these tensions had affected discoveries, inventions, patents, as well as cinema, an apparatus that implies the flow of time and its contingency (Kittler 1986; Doane 2002). In the 1910s, emerging cinema was a youthful art. This new medium embodied the spirit of dynamism, anticipating Futurism and its new aesthetic criteria. The novelty of this modern technological apparatus, born just at the end of the nineteenth century, constructed a new experience of movement, combined with energies that came from mass culture. Cinema was a device used for the entertainment of a cross-class urban audience and was understood as an industrial process, but, at the same time, it was an aesthetic medium that extended the aesthetic experience towards a new sensibility. In those years, the popularity of cinema overcame the boundaries of social classes and culture, establishing itself as a vital institution of the European 1910s society. The diffusion of cinema is related to the same social and technological conditions emphasized by Futurists, such as urban speed, scientific progress, and civilisation machiniste. The epistemology of movement at the beginning of the 20th century expressed the cultural ‘shock’ experienced by avant-garde artists: at the same time, film technology was co-producing a new perception of reality that included complex relationships within the societal turmoil of an era of world wars and new political balances. The Futurist idolatry for modernity was aware of the potential of cinema: the mechanical device was a technological monstrum, able to manipulate the perceptual system in order to create a new sense of the world. The leitmotif of the mechanized world of the 20th century was its speed, a characteristic feature of modern life. Avant-garde painters were obsessed with capturing the sensation of speed and movement in their work, considering cinema as

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a means of overcoming the static nature of traditional visual arts. Futurist manifesto La cinematografia futurista (The Futurist Cinema) is one of the most meaningful and disruptive theoretical interventions in the realm of cinema proposed by avant-garde art groups: first of all, the ‘poly-expressiveness’, an inter-semiotic approach to art, which expresses the Futurists’ consciousness of power and freedom in a hybrid experience among artistic languages. The aim of this edited collection is to underline the importance of the Futurist experience in cinema, by analysing some of the few titles that have been produced, as well as the manifestos and their further legacy in other artistic movements and in cinema. The scholarly research in the realm of film studies has not often deepened this topic, partly due to the inaccessibility of films: some of the main titles have been lost or either had not been made, as simple projects and screenplays. But their traces and the conceptual work behind them mark the history of experimental film. The chapters refer to various fields of study: cinema theory, film history, avant-garde studies, art history, Italian cultural history, Italian literature, media archaeology, etc. Each essay offers different methodological approaches, in order to explore some specific features of this avant-garde movement through the lenses of the most suitable ways to analyse and to properly interpret the theoretical implications of the films planned and produced by Futurism. The book is divided into three macro-sections: the first one, entitled Joyful Deformation of the Universe, proposes diverse readings of the loud impact of Futurist cinema in an eclectic theoretical landscape. The second section, Daily Filmed Exercises Designed to Free Us from Logic, includes different case studies of some of the few Futurist film titles and a screenplay, analysed with the specific methods required case by case, in chronological order. The third and last section, entitled Shop Windows of Filmed Ideas, Events, Types, Objects, etc., holds some pictures quoted in the essays, a filmography, and a chronology of Futurist artistic and cultural events. Within the section Joyful Deformation of the Universe, the introduction, The Poetics of Futurist Cinema by Giovanni Lista, presents the main lines and features of Futurist cinema, its theoretical background, and its highest expressions. These elaborate a formal yet not formalist approach, coherent with the poetics and the visual forms of their avant-garde movement, theorizing a metropolitan dynamism through the return towards the universe of real things within which contemporary man operates, and showing the intensity of free-wordism through ‘images-in-freedom’. The next chapter, Paolo Bertetto’s Speed and Dynamism: Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avant-garde, introduces a comparison between

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Italian and Russian Futurism in the realm of cinema. In fact, the influence of Italian Futurism on the cinematographic avant-gardes is very strong in the Soviet Union: dynamism, speed, and power are the key words of the affirmation of modernity declaimed by the Futurists. Although Soviet revolutionary cinema shows markable ideological discrepancies, it also shows the same pivotal elements of the Futurist poetics: a revolutionary process, breaking with the past and celebrating what is new. The chapter Futurism and Film Theories: Manifesto of Futurist Cinema and Theories in Italy in the 1910-1920s, by Valentina Valente, is an analysis of the theoretical enunciations from manifestos and other Futurist writings (textual production, as well as of their interviews); the Futurists’ arguments are confirmed by their films and their film-making practices, which show the revolutionary potential of cinema within the prospective development of the arts. Valente demonstrates here that Futurist films, critical texts, and manifestos can be read as truthful theoretical works. Sabine Schrader’s Film Aesthetics Without Films offers a different point of view while discussing the ambiguity in the relation between Futurist arts and cinema: in fact, although Marinetti states that cinema is his favorite medium, film actually plays a peripheral role in his work, some years after the early subversive days. This research uses media studies and literary criticism to demonstrate how the Futurists focus more on the theme of movement within the traditional arts, rather than cinema, in contradictory rhetoric about the machinery. Wanda Strauven, in her Marinetti’s Tattilismo Revisited: Hand Journeys, touchscreens, and Tactile Cinema in the 21st Century, explores an impressive discourse about touchscreens: Strauven proposes a comparison between tactile interfaces and Marinetti’s Tattilismo (or ‘Art of Touch’), while assessing it as a part of a specific experience of hands-on practices. Elisa Uffreduzzi’s Dance and Futurism in Italian Silent Cinema, analyses both filmic and choreographic iconic dance scenes of Italian silent cinema, by examining several examples of dancers and movies and by exposing the cinematographic outcomes of Futurist dance theories. In Futurism and cinema in the 1910s: A reinterpretation Starting from McLuhan, Antonio Saccoccio inquires about the influence of film language on Futurist artists’ sensitivity and imagination through the manifestos, articles, and essays written in the 1910s by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni. The author explains how they anticipated some of the media theories later developed by Marshall McLuhan. Giancarlo Carpi’s The Human in the Fetish of the Human: Cuteness in Futurism Cinema, Literature, and Visual Arts examines the photographic,

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painting, and literary theory output of several Futurist artists (Marinetti, Balla, Depero, and Tato) in relation to the spread – in illustration and advertising – of the stereotype of ‘cuteness’. The rhetorical figure of personification is a key element in visual arts to simplify the iconographic subject, connected to commodity fetishism, which, through ‘cuteness’, reduces the work of art to a fungible object, in an ideal overcoming the human condition. The second section, Daily Filmed Excercises Designed to Free Us from Logic, starts with the chapter entitled Yambo on the Moon of Verne and Méliès. From La colonia lunare to Un matrimonio interplanetario, by Denis Lotti, which proposes a comparative study about Enrico Novelli, aka Yambo, who, in 1908, released the novel La colonia lunare, and, in 1910, directed a film entitled Un matrimonio interplanetario, which anticipates some elements of the Futurist cinema manifesto. The following chapter, An Avant-Garde Heritage:Vita futurista, offers an overview of the performance film Vita futurista (Futurist Life). Although all known copies of the film have been officially declared as lost, it is possible to understand one of the first avant-garde experiences in cinema, through diverse non-filmic sources and without ever having seen the film, in order to reassess the imagery around Futurism and cinema. Lucia Re discusses Thaïs (1916) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia in her chapter Thaïs: A Different Challenge to the Stars. Her analysis combines different approaches in film history, literary criticism, gender studies, and research on spectatorship to observe the use of the literary myth of Thaïs and the D’Annunzian figure of the femme fatale, plus the meta-cinematic character of the film, linked to the futurist vision of technology, which was metaphor for the ‘technological’ war in 1916. Carolina Fernández Castrillo’s chapter is entitled Velocità: From Futurist Simultaneity to Live Streaming Media, and suitably analyses Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s cinematographic script, Velocità (Speed), written between 1917 and 1918. The author underlines how it is the only proof of Marinetti’s interest in cinema. Furthermore, the script states some formulation about the future, significant for the impending development of mass media and technological progress, in order to broaden the means of communication. The chapter Velocità/Vitesse: Filmed Dramas of Objects and ‘avantgarde integrale’ aims to elaborate an analytical interpretation of the film Vitesse by Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero, and Guido Martina (1930), according to a meditation on intertextual and intersemiotic references to futurist painting and sculpture, and to the coeval French avant-garde cinema, between iconology and visual culture.

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The last chapter, From Science to the Marvellous: the Illusion of Movement, Between Chronophotography and Contemporary Cinema by Francesca Veneziano, deepens a path that links Marinetti’s texts, Anton Gulio Bragaglia’s photodynamics, Etienne Jules-Marey’s research, and Paolo Gioli’s technical and formal experiments, as sources of a history of the experimental research on mechanical reproduction of movement. This history summarizes a convergence on the same research, traced between antithetical positions and historical periods, from pre-cinema to contemporary Italian experimental films. In the last section, Shop Windows of Filmed Ideas, Events, Types, Objects, etc., there is a detailed filmography, edited by Marcello Seregni. The section also includes a chronology of Futurist artworks, manifestos, and more, provided by Fernando Maramai. Furthermore, the last part of the book is dedicated to the indexes.

References Berghaus, G. (2009), Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. Boccioni, U., C. Carrà, L. Russolo, G. Balla, & G. Severini (1910), ‘Manifesto dei pittori futuristi’, Direzione del Movimento futurista, translated as ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 62-64. Brunetta, G. P. (2009), ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Cinematic Universe: The Futurist Word’, in G. P. Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-first Century, 54-57. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crispolti, E. (1969), Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo. Trapani: Celebes. Doane, M.A. (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive. Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press. Fernández Castrillo, C. (2013), ‘Rethinking Interdisciplinarity: Futurist Cinema as Metamedium’, in S. Storchi & E. Adamowicz (eds.), Back to the Futurists: Avant-gardes 1909-2009, 272-283. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Gazzola, G. (2011), Futurismo: Impact and Legacy. Stony Brook, New York: Forum Italicum Publishing. Kittler, F. (1986), Grammophon, Film, Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, translated as Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lista, G. (2010), Il cinema futurista. Genoa: Le Mani.

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Marinetti, F. T. (1914), Lettera aperta al futurista Mac Delmarle, translated as An Open Letter to the Futurist Mac Delmarle, in G. Berghaus (eds.) (2006), Critical Writings. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla & R. Chiti (1916), ‘La cinematografia futurista’, L’Italia Futurista, (I) 1: 1, translated as ‘The Futurist Cinema’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism: An Anthology, 229-232. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Sainati, A. (ed.) (2012), Cento anni di idee futuriste nel cinema. Pisa: ETS.

About the author Rossella Catanese (editor) is Adjunct Professor of Italian Cinema and Society at Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute (University of North Carolina – Florence branch). She took her PhD at Sapienza University of Rome, where she has worked as tutor for an academic master in Digital Audiovisual Restoration. Her publications concern issues of film restoration, media archaeology, archival films and film history, with a focus on 1910s and 1920s Avant-garde cinema and archival films.

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Fortunato Depero, cover for the magazine Movie Makers (1929). Courtesy of Archivio Depero. All rights are reserved.

Section 1 Joyful Deformation Of The Universe

1. Introduction The Poetics of Futurist Cinema 1 Giovanni Lista Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch01 Abstract The Futurists were able to find a fruitful compatibility with the expressive possibilities of cinematographic language. Due to this, they were able to give light to a Futurist dimension of cinema, elaborating this with a formal, but not formalistic, approach perfectly adherent to the poetry and aesthetics found in their avant-garde movement. They identified an ontologic specificity of the medium that was absolutely original: cinema as an autonomous aesthetic form, a self-explanatory expression of art, not subject to the logical system of the phenomenal world. Keywords: Futurism, Avant-garde, Aesthetics, Art Criticism

Of the two regimes of the visible, Futurism refuses narrative order and appraises the iconic-performative, conceiving cinema as a system of expression built on the visual signifier of the image, and on its self-referential power. In this way, Futurism invests cinema as a metalinguistic system by its very nature. Therefore, Futurist cinema, albeit unconsciously, is a work on the main characteristics of the system of visibility and on the conditions of the possibility of representation. These conditions of possibility are the forms themselves, of perceiving: subjectivity, space, and time – the Kantian categories of perception – that art has always elaborated, both separately and indirectly, and that, in cinema, are, instead, unified. In so doing, Futurist cinema catches the qualitative margin in cinematographic language that makes it a form of artistic expression, or rather, it gives itself, not as a communicative system that brings out copies of reality, but, rather, as an 1

Translated by Marika Di Canio and Zachary Wallace.

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Giovanni Lista

alteration of the set of images provided by the latter, re-articulating and reworking the semantics within a system of iconic symbols put together so as to restore the perceptual dynamics of individual vision. In other words, as in ‘pictorial dynamism’ and then in ‘plastic dynamism’, Umberto Boccioni tried to find an aesthetic-formal equivalent able to convey the phenomenal datum filtered through the subjectivity of perception. Similarly, Futurist cinema looks for a dynamo-genic performance of ongoing life and a cinematographic shape of the energetic flow in evolution. Choosing an anti-narrative aesthetic and aiming towards the ontological quality of a language based on self-referentiality of the image, Futurist cinema recognizes and puts into shape a theoretical vision, authentically modern. Namely Futurist cinema, firstly and beyond the stories told, gives us back our own act of looking and, at the same time, thinking in images. In other words, cinema was, for Futurists, the test bench for a fundamental approach to the domain of images in the inter-referential and connective work of the various levels of conscience. In this direction, the radicalism of their interpretation of Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire, led them to anticipate the most daring ideas of Marshall McLuhan. The Futurist cinematographic screen is the assigned place in which the supremacy of the image is celebrated as ephemeral and transient datum, in constant movement between subjective conscience and the perception of reality. Therefore, on the homogenous backdrop of the project to destroy the system of traditional representation that the European avant-gardes share, the specificity of Futurist cinematographic research is mainly based on two axes. Firstly, it resides in the direct transfer of the most significant themes of the Futurist mythology of modernity, from the poetics of pictorial dynamism to cinematographic aesthetic. Secondly, it manifests itself in the ways through which the anti-naturalistic Futurist approach is cinematographically reinterpreted, condensing it in precise linguistic choices, articulated at the formal and operative level. Compared to the research of Expressionism, Surrealism, Dada, cinéma pur, and the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, the identity of Futurist experimentation acquires concreteness around formal, thematic, and linguistic elements, such as the object, the mythology of the metropolis, or the editing, which can also be identified for the expressive originality with which they are dealt.2 In the fibrillating and pulsating scene of Carlo D. Carrà, Umberto Bocci­ oni and Gino Severini’s paintings, the urban imagination is a positive, 2 For a proposal of thematic cataloguing of the Futurist cinematographic production, see Lista, 2008.

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polyhedral, and throbbing universe, gifted with explosive and invasive dynamizing energy. The metropolis, which represents the visual metaphor of the whole Futurist ideological system, subverts all the conceptions of the metropolitan scenery that have come one after another since the middle of the nineteenth century. In other words, the Futurist metropolis becomes dynamo-genic form, overflowing discharge of energy in evolution, dissolved and conveyed in the cinematographic image. The Futurist exaltation of the modern city already occurs in the f ilm Mondo Baldoria, shot in 1914 by Aldo Molinari, adapting Aldo Palazzeschi’s Futurist manifesto Il Controdolore. The urban theme is also present in the third sequence of Vita futurista (1916), the characters are filmed while sitting at Caffè Ristorante La Loggia in Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, during a social ritual typical of urban life. In the unreleased film, Velocità, Marinetti introduces the themes of the ‘galvanized city’ and of ‘Futurist Venice’. Even the tenth scene, entitled La città futurista fra cento anni, is conceived by Marinetti as an ‘extraordinarily accelerated vision’ of big workshops, banks, metallic cranes, cars, airplanes, airships with big electrical projectors, neon advertising signs, visions of the frantic haste of work and of the crowd’s movement. The city is emphasized as a living and animated organism, which metabolizes forms of modernity with each of its own vital pulsations. From a thematic horizon, the Futurist mythology of the metropolis becomes a real dynamo-genic form and an aesthetic principle of film writing. In a later phase, the film Velocità/Vitesse (1930) directed by Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, and Pippo Oriani opens on an ecstatic and miniaturized vision of the modern metropolis of the future. Corrado D’Errico realizes Stramilano (1929), filming a whole work-day and mundane amusement in the modern industrial capital. The harmonious character of the Futurist metropolitan imaginary can be found again in the so called ‘urban symphonies’, realized during the 1920s, somewhere between avant-garde and documentary cinema. This branch includes New York the Magnificient (1921), Manhatta (1921) by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, Rien que les heures (1930) by Alberto Cavalcanti, Berlin - Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) by Walter Ruttmann, etc. In merit of the aesthetic role of the city, a direct line is established, in particular, between Futurist cinematographic theory and the ‘kine-eye’ (kinoglaz) of Dziga Vertov. For both, the exclusive material of film writing is reality in movement, purged of any expressive literary or theatrical residual and of every modality of semantic production that naturalistic cinema inherits from other expressive fields. Like Futurists, Vertov locates, in the dynamism intrinsic to reality, the latest ontology of the cinematographic medium. In

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his films as well, reality ‘caught off guard’ is never rough material recorded in a vitalistic or naturalistic way, but a form of aesthetic, because cinema constantly carries out a semantic transformation of reality. Instead, the futuristic imaginary of the megalopolis, where Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang is set, represents a significant experience of contamination between mythology and Futurist metropolitan imaginary on the one hand, and Expressionist form and mood on the other. The other important Futurist theme related to the mythology of modernity is the destruction of the human figure, which is realized in several ways, from the image of the robot to the ‘drama of objects’. The playful Futurist robot, which recurs in the 1920s in the ‘mechanical ballets’ of Paladini, Pannaggi, Depero, and Prampolini, expresses the liberating image of a surmounting anguish. Futurists are, though, in sync with the initial fragment of Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924), which combines the figurative homage to the character of Charlot with the mechanized vision of the anthropomorphic image, animating an assemblage and gives life to a ballet of the character in a definitively puppet-like way. The reduction of the human figure to a body of mechanical actions returns, in a less exacerbated sense, in Entr’acte (1924) by René Clair, which maintains a frail and irrational narrative line. The Futurist anti-humanism is revealed as well through ‘the metonymic narration’, which limits the filmic image to just the extremities of the human body, with an approach that is complementary to the image of the robot, because it reduces the human being itself to a physiological machine, although now it is a matter of mere animal kinetics, not openly identified with the movement of a mechanical gear. The image of man is denied in its integrity and in its organic coherence, removed from the logical-narrative function, reified and reduced to pure kinetic object. The repetitive and mechanical movements of the arms and legs, or of only hands and feet, becomes the only catalytic principle of the framing that, therefore, reveals all that is predictable, being reactive and archaic, in the dynamics of the human machine. The film La storia di Lulù (1910), realized by Arrigo Frusta right after the birth of Futurism, suppresses the narrative mimetic axis and designates the development of action only to the legs of the female protagonist. By the exclusion of the head and face, location of the logical-rational activities, and with the overuse of the lower part of the body, less noble and more linked to physical and instinctive materiality of existence, the characters, and therefore the actions, are completely de-psychologized and dehumanized. The expressive dimension of the individual is reduced to that which is purely instinctive or emotional in his physicality.

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The destitution of the human figure is completed by the ‘drama of objects’, which Futurism theorizes as conceptualizing and giving value to the expressive ideas of popular cinema. Therefore, in Frusta’s La storia di Lulù, a crescendo of metaphors and allusions ends in the final ‘drama of objects’, in which two shoes mime a sexual encounter, taking to extremes the process of reification and reduction of the individual to physical materiality of an automated anatomy. After the theatrical syntheses centered on the ‘drama of objects’, the manifesto La Cinematografia futurista formulates two aesthetic proposals regarding scenes to be realized with ‘Objects animated, humanized, wearing make-up, dressed up, impassioned, civilized, dancing – objects taken out of their usual surroundings and put into an abnormal state that, by contrast, throws into relief their amazing construction and nonhuman life’. Even if originating from the same principle of the poetic, the two proposals are different for their radicalism. In the f irst case, that of the ‘humanized’ objects, Futurism seizes a playful intuition of popular cinema to bring to completion the decline of the traditional anthropocentric privilege. Therefore, Futurist cinema replaces subjective individuality, cornerstone of psychologizing idealism of bourgeois art, of objects that come to life, becoming plastic metaphors of man’s reified behavior, or they become ‘individualized’, revealing the existence of a subterranean universe of energy of matter that transcends the rules of current logic and lets an animistic dimension emerge from the concrete and objective surface of modern life. As in the sixth scene of Vita futurista, entitled Storia d’amore del pittore Balla con una seggiola, in which the Futurist artist makes appear, by summoning it, the spirit of the chair with which he is in love. The ghostly appearance of the latter, which materializes, superimposed, in the form of an attractive feminine figure, is not the memory of an idealized or absent person, but the projection of the spirit of the object itself, personalized and elevated to the real object of the artist’s desire. As metaphor or as metonymic projection of the activities and feelings of man, the object is at the core of the film Velocità by Cordero, Martina, and Oriani. Instead, in the second case, speaking of de-contextualized objects so that they reveal their non-human life, the manifesto of 1916 develops an idea already announced by Boccioni in Manifesto tecnico della Scultura futurista: ‘We cannot forget that the swing of a pendulum or the moving hands of a clock, the in-and-out motion of a piston inside a cylinder, the engaging and disengaging of two cogwheels, the fury of a flywheel or the whirling of a propeller, are all plastic and pictorial elements which any Futurist work of sculpture should take advantage of. The opening and closing of a valve

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creates a rhythm which is just as beautiful to look at as the movements of an eyelid, but is also infinitely more modern’. Futurism realized this intuition only in a sporadic way, as in the film Impressioni di vita n. 1 (1933) in which Corrado D’Errico uses the music by George Gershwin to articulate the rhythms of the machines in action at a railway station. The illogical and autonomous life of matter and objects, retrieved in their self-referential plastic value and enhanced as unprecedented expressive materials, is a supporting element of the Futurist vision of modernity. In particular acceptation of ‘geometrical and mechanical splendor’, as stated in a manifesto by Marinetti, the rhythmic accents and the powerful life of industrial objects in the postwar period inspire the whole current of the ‘cinema of machines’, beginning with the sequences of Ballet mécanique by Fernand Léger in which it is possible to observe a sanctioned operation of Boccioni’s theories. The dancing of objects, amplified by the ­cinematography by Murphy, shows bottles, pendulums, pots, pudding molds, whisks, the animal movement of a feminine eyelid compared to the plastic rhythm of a mechanical valve, as Boccioni writes. In his copious manifestos, Marinetti insists on the necessity to redefine the raw material of art. The vitalist mythology of the metropolis, the metonymic narration and the drama of objects are among the most outstanding themes of Futurism. In other words, the artist has to renounce the idealizing emphasis, rhetorical conventions, and old reconstructions in order to realize, instead, an ever more direct bond between art and life. The noble and ritual function of the traditional work of art is replaced by the lively experience of urban space, by the physical action of a fragment of the human body, which acquires an aesthetic dignity only from its reality as matter in movement, and from the self-referential presence of the common or utilitarian object, immediate and trenchant signifier of the world of technology and progress. Thus, in the film Vita futurista, a vision of cinema as performative art is reflected, as a direct grasping of reality in action, as restitution of a living gesture and not of an activity recited in the theatrical way. Futurist cinema, which is cinematography of the moving body, aims to grasp the breaths of the living and not the fictitious reconstructions focused on closing reality into the conventions of the literary style and psychologism. A revival of this idea takes place years later with the stratagem of Marcel L’Herbier and Georgette Leblanc, who film live a neo-Futurist concert of George Antheil at the theatre Champs Elysées in order to insert it as an episode of the film L’Inhumaine (1924). At the heart of modernity, which ousted man from humanist thought and literary psychology, reign not only everyday objects, industrial machines,

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Umberto Boccioni, Elasticità (1912), oil on canvas 100 cm x 100 cm, Museo del Novecento – Coll. Jucker, Milan. Photo credits: Mondadori Portfolio Electa/ Luca Carrà. Copyright: Comune di Milano. All rights are reserved.

and the magnificence of new metallic materials. Collective life is ruled by the new absolute values that are kinetics and dynamism, the contrast and simultaneity of forces, the intensity and variety of perceptual contents. Futurism explores a combination of formal procedures able to restore its newness, rhythms, psychic and sensorial impact. Futurists take possession of the most advanced results of the visual culture of vaudeville and of the scientific research that studies movement through the new instruments of experimental photography. Loïe Fuller and Leopoldo Fregoli, on one hand; Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey on the other, become models of an art that, omitting the narratum, aims only towards iconic values: image, gesture, and movement. Connecting Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance, as immaterial and synesthetic expression of colour and shape, to Boccioni’s poetics of ‘moods’,

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the two brothers from Ravenna Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra create kine-painting, a multimedia art of ‘abstract movement’, thinking along the lines of a purge and a definitive synthesis of the form originated from psychic energy and set free to manifest itself according to the model of the organic expansion of music. Cinema, related only to the restitution of emotion melted into a liquid and dynamic flow of the disembodied form, physiologically proceeds towards abstraction and the definitive loss of a referential reproduction of the image. Ginna and Corra identify an experimental path that identifies an effectively abstract and anti-figurative specificity in cinematographic language, highlighting its aesthetic value based on the main characteristics of rhythm and visual movement devoid of mimetic content. The abstract cinema of ‘visual symphonies’ will be an abundantly explored field of later avant-gardes, but also present in Futurism, with Corrado D’Errico’s Musica: ‘La gazza ladra’ (1934). Physical and mechanical energy are equally explored by Futurists who borrow from the chronophotography of Marey the possibility to introduce into the cinematographic practice one of the most significant aspects of experimentation of an aesthetic of movement, that is, the instance of ‘kinetic de-figuration’, a dematerialization of the form under the effect of a linear or centrifugal flow, a dynamic vortex or a free explosion of energy. It is a purely abstract image of energy flow. Futurist paintings offer many examples of this extreme and instantaneous restitution of movement that deletes form until reaching the essentiality of energy trails, then inferred from the geometricalizing weavings of Balla’s painting. The rolling of the camera, even too fast, on board of a moving car, in the film Fiera di tipi (1934) by Leone Antonio Viola, or the whirlpooling in emptiness by the camera in Velocità by Cordero, Martina e Oriani, produce the same kind of effects of kinetic de-figuration, exploiting with this same intention, the mechanical determinism of the lens. Due to the movement, that of the camera or that of the perceived object, the image falls below the threshold of visibility and the shape is no longer perceivable by the eye of the camera, as happens in the photo-dynamics of the brothers Arturo and Anton Giulio Bragaglia. This very formal procedure recurs in particular sequences of other avant-garde films, as Jeux de reflets et de vitesse (1925) by Henri Chomette, Entr’acte by Clair, Ballet mécanique by Léger. Futurists also extract from early cinema the process of ‘de-realization of the image’, meant as the possibility of subtracting reality to the natural laws of phenomenology and altering its organic and coherent development. The manifesto La cinematografia futurista talks in this sense of ‘potential

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dramas’, but also of ‘dramas of disproportion’ and of ‘unreal reconstructions’. In Italy, the f irst f ilms projected backwards were presented by Leopoldo Fregoli with his Fregoligraph. Marinetti had the theoretical intuition necessary to show the expressive power of de-realization of the cinematographic image. It is, as stated in Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista, the illogical and autonomous showing of the movements of matter that eliminates any process of identification for the spectator. The latter can, thus, yield to pure aesthetic form, which excludes the prosaic aspect of mimesis and psychological subjectivism: Film offers us the dance of an object that disintegrates and recomposes itself without human intervention. It offers us the backward sweep of a diver, whose feet fly out of the sea and bounce violently back onto the springboard. Finally, it offers us the sight of a man [racing] at 200 kilometers per hour. All these represent the movements of matter which are beyond human intelligence, and hence of an essence which is more significant.

The animation of raw material, both with a break in integrity and temporal coherence, particularly manipulated through inverting the direction of the film, the slowing down or acceleration of the movement, explicitly infringes on the illusion of the reality innate in the cinematographic signifier, distorting the cognitive dynamics of perception and allows us to understand an unexpected dimension of the existent, as well as to enjoy images as simple abstract traces of animated matter. The content, the subject, and its referential function disappear in favor of formal values and their self-signifying weavings. For Marinetti, the only object of cinema is cinema itself because the de-realization of the image, neutralizing ‘the laws of intelligence’, means the liberation of time and space, that is to say, of the categories a priori that, according to Kant, determine human experience. In other words, only cinema can fully realize the eighth principle of Manifesto di Fondazione del Futurismo: ‘Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed’. For Futurists, there is a precise distinction between the de-realized and the denaturalized image. The first is an abstraction inferred from the concreteness of matter in movement, whereas the second reveals to the viewer a world that escapes the phenomenal appearances of reality. In this way, cinema becomes a medium in which Futurists see the possibility to translate the dynamic process of the mind, from the content of the ‘moods’

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theorized by Umberto Boccioni to the psychic and pre-logical mobility prophesied by the cerebrisms of Bruno Corra, Arnaldo Ginna, and Emilio Settimelli. After being transposed into the physically concrete language of the theatrical scene, the cinematographic superimposition is thus reinterpreted by Futurists according to the immateriality and mobility of the filmic image. To restore, on a formal level, the flow of the mental imaginary, the atmosphere of the unconscious or the esoteric instances that transcend matter, Futurists denaturalize the cinematographic image using a deforming mirror. Two surviving sequences of the film Vita futurista show, in this way, some scenes of simultaneous interpenetration that take place in a fluctuating space, rendered unreal and dreamlike by the continuous movement of the anamorphic deformation. Arnaldo Ginna talks of the oscillating anamorphosis as of a formal expedient that, alienating the image through plastic deformation of the visual content, comes to ‘throw the brains of the spectators in unreality zones’. In the second scene, the effect of dreamlike instability is intensified, filming the action of the characters against a wall painted in flashy vertical lines, which, dragged by the general movement of the image, extend themselves, twisting in an elastic and smooth, but eccentric, way. In the document reviewed by the censorship board, the scene is described as a ‘drama of lines to obtain emotions of new extrahuman logic’. Although lacking in critical and technical experience in the cinematographic medium, Futurist theoretical reflection is always the result of an analysis on the aesthetic autonomy of the film compared to reality. The collusion between Futurist cinema and aesthetics is also enhanced by a prolific exchange with the free-wordist, namely ‘words-in-freedom’, founded on the free imaginative association and on the short circuit of analogy connections, by which Marinetti introduces the rapidity and visuality of the cinematographic model into verbal language. The Marinettian free-wordism becomes the most important theoretical basis of cinematic assembly by analogy, which seeks to establish the equivalence between mood and image that offers a corresponding impression. The investigation into the possibilities of the cinematographic device is also conjugated with the experiences of the synthetic theatre that led Futurists to adopt the practices and the formal expedients of variety shows. The manifesto Il teatro futurista sintetico, proposing a conception of the theatrical scene as imago urbis, proclaims the refusal of any logic of the representative order, as it lies within this pulsating modern life, ‘reality throbs around us, assaulting us with bursts of fragments of interconnected events, interlocking together, confused, jumbled up, chaotic’. Adapting

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itself to the heterogeneity of the urban scene, liberator of energy, the theatrical show abandons the epic dimension, finalistic coherence, and the Aristotelian organic structure, to become a simple assemblage of stunning images and narrative clips (Lista 1983). The film Vita futurista entails nine autonomous and unbound sequences, realized through formal and heterogeneous procedures, in which Futurists interpret themselves and their own experiences with the extemporaneousness and the inventive enthusiasm of variety shows. As the continual incongruities in the order of the editing resulting from the documents concerning the film demonstrate, the sequences are shot without any logical concatenation, as separate and episodic components of an adaptable and temporary editing, in which, from time to time, they are chosen and combined as movable materials of a prismatic totality in evolution, generated by its assembly and relation among the elements. Therefore, the first Futurist cinematographic experiment is affected by the hypo-structural and irregular model of vaudeville, consistently recalled by the Futurist synthetic theatre, which stages only a sequential accumulation of artistic performances and sketches, namely a series of microforms independent from one another, aligned in the undetermined and inorganic macroform of the whole show. The meaning, given during the editing process, originates each time from different combinatorial choices, which contextualize and continuously renew the impact of the show. This proceeding by ‘alogical combination of microforms’ reproduces the free-wordist approach of Marinetti, in which the élan vital and stream of consciousness of Breton prevail, and likewise as much for the cerebrist approach of Ginna, Corra, and Settimelli, who are more attracted to the free flowing of psychic images of William Jones. The Marinettian and cerebrist research flows also in this particular direction, from the paintings on ‘mood’ in which Boccioni develops an aesthetic model based on the disintegration of form under the energy vortex and, on its recasting into the mental projections of the dynamic experience. The alogical combination of the microforms expresses and embodies, on the one hand, the visual counterpart of the free-wordist principle of rapid succession and multiplication of thought in vibrating associative chains generated by the spontaneous dissolution of psychic energy; on the other, the process of the formal writing of the ‘cinematographic analogy’ that suppresses the linguistic equivalent of the ‘how’, meant as purely mental grammatical abstraction, through the rapid visual succession of the two elements of comparison.

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Short montage and ‘cinematographic cinema’ Shortly after the realization of Vita futurista, Marinetti creates the subject for the film Velocità, in which he recalls the alogical combination of microforms, giving it a weak narrative line and a more extroverted content, but bestowing a decisive function on the chaining of events into ellipsis. In the last sequences of the film, Marinetti develops a futuristic vision of man and city of the future, superimposing and juxtaposing numerous images or scenes of the collective work and rhythms of the modern metropolis, all pronounced and accentuated by the high speed montage, which accelerates the waves of vistas that hit the observer and makes them dynamic, translating the whirling productions of a constant regeneration of reality. With a strongly avant-garde intuition, in the fast and whipping syntactic articulation of microforms, Marinetti sees the visual translation of the rapid and accelerated rhythm of progress, the dynamic alternation and superimposition of the images in constant change, which hit the spectator and offer themselves to perception in the instability and ephemeral reversibility of the vital stream. In other words, the restitution of the stream of consciousness, or of the rapid and illogical modern scenery borrowed from variety shows and the urban scene, finds, precisely in the dynamic use of the so-called ‘short montage’, also known as rapid, tight or closed, a fundamental formal amplification. The reach of the Futurist invention of cinematographic analogy and of short montage proves to be evident, above all, if correlated with the kind of syntactic orchestration to which the other European avant-gardes recur. Surrealist and Expressionist cinema, for instance, use mainly a simple syntactic construction. Futurist cinema uses cinematographic analogy as a real syntactic module through which it is possible to suggest a concept or an idea that is up to the spectator to grasp, to recompose and to attach a meaning within a discussion for images. Because of its explosive character and libertarian roots, Futurism obviously does not want to elaborate a syntagmatic articulation accomplished in the discourse for images; it prefers to activate, within the spectator, a vitalist impulse devoid of ideological influences. The dynamo-genic principle of an alogical combination of the microforms, theorized and implemented by Futurists, consistently anticipates the constructive principle of the ‘montage of the attractions’ theorized by Sergei M. Eisenstein after he read the Marinettian manifestos. The Marinettian ideal of a ‘cinematographic cinema’, based in ‘mechanical effects’ (Lista 2009), is finally claimed by the film Velocità, realized in 1930 by Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, and Pippo Oriani, the most mature

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and significant examples of Futurist cinematographic production. The film condenses many of the Futurist linguistic procedures, proposing cinema that, able to cross the barren formalistic virtuosity of cinéma pur, is called to return the universe of real things within which contemporary man operates, absorbed in the dynamism and kinetics of modern life. With Velocità by Cordero, Martina, and Oriani, cinema reveals itself to be a form of expression naturally Futurist because it is the authentic expression of a dynamic, energetic, synthetic, anti-theatrical, anti-psychological, anti-narrative art devoid of human content, based on the self-referential power of the object and on the emotional impact of lighting, on the ephemeral power of the élan vital and on the intensity of sensations. To sum up, in what sense was Futurist cinema to be considered Futurist? As Dadaism, Surrealism, and the other European avant-gardes did, Futurism was able to find a prolific compatibility with the expressive possibilities of cinematographic language. In other words, it was able to highlight and refine a Futurist dimension of cinema in which the vitalist mythology of the metropolis, the destitution of the human figure employed for fragmentation of metonymy, the drama of objects, the kinetic de-realization of the image or its denaturalization through simultaneity, and, finally, the alogical combination of the microforms in an energetic dimension, exalted in the short montage process. Over the course of two decades, Futurists thus elaborated a formal but not formalist approach, perfectly pertinent to the poetic and aesthetic of their avant-garde movement. They identified an absolutely original ontological specificity of the medium: the ‘cinematographic cinema’ as autonomous aesthetic form, self-significant expression of a filmic art, not subject to the logical system of phenomenal world. The screen is not conceived of as a painting that reproduces reality according to a fabulatory or narrative intent, but as free association of representative elements that move in a physical and real, or eccentric, irregular, and illogical way, obtaining a continuous dynamism of matter and thought. The film has to flow like a multidisciplinary fabric that receives energy in evolution, condensing the principles of dynamism, of the assemblage of objects and of their autonomous life, of free-wordism declined in ‘images-in-freedom’, of simultaneous penetration, of alogical combinations of numerous space-time planes, and of self-performative exhibition. The poetics of cinematographic cinema lies in the combination of form and content, pushed to reciprocally intensify in the act of restitution, through both style and thematic horizon, the raring Futurist imaginary, which ranges from stream of consciousness to the kaleidoscopic scenery of the metropolis in action.

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References Lista, G. (1983), ‘Esthétique du music-hall et mythologie urbaine chez Marinetti’, in C. Amiard-Chevrel (ed.) Du cirque au théâtre, 60-91. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme. —. (2008), Le cinéma futuriste, Paris: Editions Paris Expérimental. —. (2009), ‘Il cinema cinematografico’, in G. Lista & A. Masoero (eds.), Futurismo 1909-2009: Velocità+Arte+Azione, 319-326. Milan: Edizioni Skira.

About the author Giovanni Lista is an Italian art historian and art critic, who works at CNRS in Paris. As a scholar he is specialized in the artistic cultural scene of the 1920s, particularly in Futurism. Throughout his career, he published hundreds of essays, articles, edited collections and books on his research topics. For some of them, he also won diverse awards (Georges Jamati Prize, Filmcritica Prize, Giubbe Rosse Prize, Venetian Academy Silver Medal for the lectio magistralis), due to his insightful contribution in the field.

2.

Speed and Dynamism Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avant-garde1 Paolo Bertetto Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch02 Abstract The essay analyses the influence of Italian Futurism on Soviet avantgarde cinema: a process often disavowed or overlooked due to historical misinformation or ideological reasons. For many progressive scholars, it was difficult to admit the decisive influence of Italian Futurism – which converges into Fascism – on revolutionary Soviet cinema. Instead, the research developed here – thanks to a comparative analysis of the Futurist manifestos and of the Soviet avant-garde theoretical writings, as well as of the directors’ compositional choices – makes clearly detectable the influence of Marinetti and his movement on the latters’ theories and poetics. Some concepts of Italian Futurism’s worldview and aesthetics play a fundamental role in the theory and experience of Soviet avant-garde cinema. For revolutionary artists, the two crucial ideas of Futurist poetics are speed and power: in a word, dynamism. These ideas and configurations activate in the cultural and artistic context a highly innovative and particularly aggressive symbolic trend against tradition. Keywords: Avant-garde, Soviet Cinema, Marinetti, Eisenstein, Vertov, Feks

The influence of Italian Futurism on the cinematographic avant-gardes is decidedly stronger in Russia, and was, above all, stronger in the Soviet Union, than in Western Europe. The two fundamental pillars of the Futurist poetics, which impress young artists and new film-makers, are speed and 1

Translated by Marika Di Canio and Zachary Wallace.

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power: in one word, dynamism. These ideas and configurations present themselves as a symbolic movement with strong innovative and mouldbreaking ambitions. Those film-makers who want to side against the old world (political, social, imaginary, and so on) choose the key notions of Italian Futurism, which summarize the will of change and the affirmation of modernity as absolute value. Despite the ideological discrepancies, the Soviet revolutionary cinema absorbs all the crucial components of the Futurist poetics and of Marinetti, because it firstly accepts the symbolic form of Futurism, its break with the past and the assertion of what is new, therefore the revolutionary process. The plan of Italian Futurism as well as Soviet avant-garde is that of destroying the past to conjure modernity. Many of those determinations that characterize the Futurist change and innovation can be attributed to the Soviet avant-garde because they reflect a similar destructive movement, marked by aggressiveness and by the will to change everything. However, the objectives they pursue are deeply different. In this sense, it is the most important Italian Futurist manifestos, the role of Marinetti –who goes to Russia in the beginning of 1914 – and the ritual of the soirées and the clashes with the audience and the passéists that move the young artists, who begin siding with the new. While the manifesto La cinematografia futurista (The Futurist Cinema) (Marinetti et al, 1916), on the other hand, plays an absolutely secondary role, because it is little-known and little-considered.2 Futurism, and Marinetti in particular, are dynamis, that is, power. But so are dynamism and speed. Speed is not the visible form of avant-garde, but its inner structure, its way of working, its style. The central idea of the avant-garde is not only art as interpreter of the rhythms of the new era, inscribing dynamism into the process of a linguistic flow, or the certainty that speed represents the modern spirit. It is rather the overwhelming intuition that speed is expressed better by the irregular, by heterogeneous flow, than by a continuous one; more by a disruption, by diversity, by the shock of what is new and unexpected, than by fluidity, progressive development, and homogeneity. The avant-garde understands that information travels faster in the non-continuous than in the homogeneous, in the fragmented

2 It is true that Noguez (Noguez, 1978) points out how La cinematografia futurista anticipated most of the procedures of avant-garde cinema. But it is a conception that does not imply a direct influence, also because the circulation of the manifesto is not very wide. On cinema and Futurism, see also Verdone’s research (Verdone, 1968).

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more than in the solid, in the intermittent light than in the opaque or in the diffused polish. ‘We must continually vary our speed so that our mind is actively participating in it’, writes Marinetti in La nuova religione-morale della velocità (The New Religion-Morality of Speed) (Marinetti, 1916). He adds: ‘In an s-shaped curve with double bends, velocity achieves its absolute beauty […] Speed with and after a curve is velocity that has become agile, acquired consciousness.’ (Marinetti, 1916: 228). To the avant-garde, building a complex and differentiated path means to realize accelerated rhythms, place singular heterogeneities side by side, make the fruition dynamic, set it free from the already experienced mechanisms, release it from the automatism, submit it to all the innovative and alienating tension of the unexpected. Research of the new, typical of the avant-garde, shapes itself on speed, which is ‘desire for the new and unexplored’ (Marinetti, 1916: 225) and liberation from the ‘the values of time and space’ (Marinetti, 1916: 227). Speed is the mobility of imagination, but also the rapidity of a punch, of a provocation, a sudden aggression. It is the unexpected new, unthinkable, which suddenly accelerates the speed of communication, striking the observer. That is why Futurism somehow stands at the origins of the avant-garde: not because it comes first, but because it theorizes and realizes speed, and through speed it discovers the dynamic basis of the new and the essential logic of avant-garde. In this perspective, it is natural for the Futurists that cinema becomes a favoured place, one of the ‘places inhabited by the divine’ of modernity, not only because it is the materialized innovation and the technological art par excellence, but also because it is, structurally speaking, the mobility of light, its speed of condensation and movement. Cinema, indeed, is a pure phenomenon of dynamism in light, a system that takes advantage of concentrations and dispersions of light to create new visible aggregates. These potentialities of cinema have always been ignored or penalized by popular cinema, narrowed into the dimension of photographed theatre or of ‘a theatre without words which has inherited all the most traditional rubbish of the literary theatre’, as Marinetti writes in La cinematografia futurista (Marinetti et al., 1916: 230). Instead, for the Futurists to affirm the potentialities of cinema means both to give it back to its natural structure of infinite mobility of vision and support its manifold linguistic aspect, the implicit versatility, its changeability; and it also means defending the art of speed, to affirm beyond the book, ‘an utterly passéist means’, the symbolic shape of ubiquity, intensification of time, of simultaneity, of the overcoming

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of the static and of spatial rigidities: it means thinking of cinema as the speed of imagination and its visual realization. If, in the Futurist question, the relationship between cinema/speed of light is not realized, on the contrary, Marinetti fully identifies the theoretical connection between speed and modern art. ‘Great velocity is an artificial reproduction of the intuitive analogy of the artist’ (Marinetti, 1916: 226), that is to say its projection on the real world, the way in which it works visualized at the horizon of space. The intuition of the modern artist is first of all fast, it links far spaces and times, it guarantees unimaginable accelerations and combinations, outlines infinite paths, submitting the user’s intelligence to new perceptual rhythms, to a new rapidity. In this frenetic intensification of all the processes, the power of analogy, theorized in poetry from symbolism on, becomes, in the most extreme techniques of the avant-garde, a montage of opposites, a combination by contrast, a collage of conflicting determinations. In the artistic and polemological efficiency of the avant-garde, intensity is the linguistic shape of speed, its realization in the empire of texts. The entirety of the avant-garde is crossed by a particular energetic flow, a tension otherwise unknown, a dynamic of contrasts and surprises entirely new. The intensity is a concentration of strength and transparency, infinite mobility and determined aggressiveness, in which an unexpected radicality is found, a difference with no limits (Deleuze, 1968, Bertetto, 1992 e 2013): a non-representation, a non-narration, an illogicality with a secret logic. Alternative cinema interprets variously this instance that resides at the very core of the avant-garde, elaborating different visual configurations, but all of them marked by the declination of the manifold forms of speed, thus by a differentiated research of intensity. In a certain sense, it is firstly this instance of speed, dynamism, and emerging intensity from Futurism that spreads into the avant-garde cinematographic research, and, in the theory that accompanies it, inspiring new compositional flows, visual configurations, and various conceptual proposals. The poetics of shock, of visual-symbolic aggression, is the synthesis within the space of communication of the model of speed and of the idea of art as ‘violence, cruelty’ – from Manifesto del Futurismo (The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism) (Marinetti, 1909), it is the assumption of the desire of the instantaneous inherent in speed, in a sort of instantaneity of communication, or rather, in an acceleration of contact, in an aggregation of anomalous signs that are able to strike the user, immediately and with force. The linguistic act of the avant-garde has to have Angriffskraft, strength in attack, completely new, to break up the perceptual habits and the

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resistances crystallized by the traditional culture. The natural form of its objectification is ‘a slap in the face of public taste’. which is also the title of the most important almanac of Russian Futurism (D. Burlyuk, etc., 1912).3 The clenched fist is also a symbol, evoked and exalted since the Manifesto of 1909, when aggressiveness and speed mingle together. As Depero photographs himself clenching his fist, Eisenstein, in his polemic with Vertov, opposes the impressionism of the cine-eye with the open power of the cine-fist. (‘We must penetrate skulls with our cine-fist […] Make way for the cine-fist!’ (Eisenstein, 1963 [1925]). All through the 1920s, on the other hand, the reflection and creative pursuits of Eisenstein are extensively marked by the need of aggressiveness, by the will of strength. The attraction, which, in the first period, is the fundamental concept of his poetics, is openly theorized as ‘aggressive moment’ of the spectacle, an ‘element’ that submits ‘the viewer to a sensory and psychic action, verified and mathematically calculated to produce in the spectator a certain emotional shock’ (Eisenstein, 1964 [1923]). It is plausible that the Eisensteinian concept of the spectacle as aggressive intervention, able to move the spectator, to captivate him and let her come out of herself (we can think of the later question of the ek-stasis), has a Marinettian origin. If it is probably irrelevant that the term attraction is used by Marinetti in Teatro di varietà (The Variety Theatre, 1913) in a passage that theorizes ‘the Futurist destruction of immortal masterpieces’, whereas it is exactly the manifesto of the Teatro futurista sintetico that openly states that ‘the theatrical world […] assaults the nerves with violence’, and to ‘imagine a theatre which is able to exalt its spectators […] hurling them across a labyrinth of imprinted sensations to the most exasperated originality and arranged in unpredictable ways’. In these Marinettian assertions it seems that the essential categories of the ‘montage of the attractions’ are summarized: the aggression towards the spectator, the invention of particular unexpected moments and their montage by contrast. 3 The Russian films of the first decade of the 20th century are more influenced by Russian Futurism than by Italian Futurism, but they are partially lost and it is, thus, unlikely that they will be analysed. In Drama v kabare futuristov n. 13 ( Drama in the Futurists’ Cabaret No. 13) by Vladimir Kasjanov, the contribution of Mikhail Larionov and of Natalia Goncharova is crucial, being artists of the avant-garde, but not Futurists. Only one segment has remained of Chained by the Film (1918) written by Mayakovsky with Lilya Brik, of great interest for the unmasking of the f ilmic illusion implemented (the protagonist comes out of the f ilm and faces the objective world). Whereas the other film written by Mayakovsky (in which he is also sometimes the actor) are truly two screen adaptations of a short story by De Amicis and of Martin Eden by London, and they are situated outside the avant-garde.

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It is no coincidence that, in Eccentrism by Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Sergei Yutkevich, and G.K. Kryzhitsky (1922), Marinetti is immediately evoked in the opening (alongside Lunacharsky), with a quote re-elaborated by the Manifesto of the Teatro di varietà that brings the eccentric style closer to Futurism: ‘the Eccentricist’s pants are deep, like a bay, from which squeals forth the thousand toned joy of Futurism’. The entire text by Kozintsev, AB! The Eccentric’s Parade:, is a concentrated exaltation of modernity and of poetics of surprise and of the absurd, realized with the style and themes typical of the Futurist polemology. His idea of spectacle is inspired not only by the will to move the spectator, but by the needs of speed and dynamism as well, as testified by AB! The Eccentric’s Parade: ‘Life requires art that is hyperbolically crude, dumbfounding, nerve-wracking, openly utilitarian, mechanically exact, momentary, rapid’) (Kozintsev, 1922), in addition to Eisenstein’s texts. Towards the mid-1920s these linguistic models, linked to surprise, aggression, montage of heterogeneity, of masks and acrobats, move from theatre to cinema and, confronting themselves with a new technical system, they modify, although without losing their fundamental character. Kozintsev and Trauberg build a cinema of grotesque invention, realizing complex syntheses of different determinations and suggestions, in which representation is systematically violated by the appearance of hyperbolical signs, combinations unreasonable and of bad taste, and absurd progressions. In the field of cinema, the Soviet avant-garde is the most openly Marinettian movement, in spite of the radical ideological divergence. This statement is valid for Eisenstein as well. His theatrical experience is a collage of circuses and music-halls, of parodies of the classics and of mayhem; his first film, the short Dvevnik Glumova (Glumov’s Diary), is a grotesque pantomime with clowns, acrobatic feats, masked faces, and marionette gesticulations, but also with a stolen film, which is then shown off by one of the characters. In contrast, his first feature film, Stachka (Strike), is a pursuit of heterogeneity, a proof of dynamism, an intersection of aggressive framings, of eccentric visions imbricated one within the other like music-hall numbers. It is an experiment in film writing that, at heart, seems to realize a synthesis, certainly not impossible between suggestions and inventions of Italian Futurism, techniques and structures of Russian Futurism, and ideological needs of ‘point of view […] of the heavy industry’. Or, in other words, it is a coordination of ‘exciting stimuli’, which makes the text ‘a concatenated set of traumas’ (1925) (Eisenstein 1964); it is an exercise of provocations and dynamism that takes advantage of the subject as a vehicle/instrument for an assault on the spectator’s nerves.

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Thus, the production of a pathos of attractions and of the visual absurd of the zaum’, the concrete irrational of the trans-mental language (Markov, 1968), which Eisenstein evokes in a theoretical text from 1928. The adoption of the process of metamorphosis, of constant transition from one form to another, from one register to another, or the sudden insertion of unrealistic visual configurations make the film of Eisenstein, Kozintsev, and Trauberg, and, to a lesser extent, the early work of Jutkevič, a linguistic fabric in which the horizon of the narration is systematically overcome and redefined by a compositional dynamic-eccentric instance. Eisenstein himself, after all, does not hide – at least during the 1920s – his connection with the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, and in the long essay Montage of attractions, he explicitly proposes the adoption of a formative technique that he himself defines Futurist. Eisenstein writes: Alongside the procedure of setting a sequence and his filming with the camera, there is an expositive procedure, which I would define Futurist, based on the pure assemby of associations to describe a determined fact; for example, the impression produced by the scenes of clashes (in Strike) can be obtained through the assembly of elements which, in the sequence do not appear united by any logical succession. The accumulation of details: broken objects, pummeling, aspects of the clashes, facial expressions, etc. will not produce a weaker impression than the detailed analysis of all the phases of the clashes (Eisenstein, 1963).

It is the option for a narrative path not limited by imitative and descriptiverepresentative needs, but open to the game of intensities. On the other hand, Eisenstein’s idea of fast montage undoubtedly has its roots in the avant-garde practice, in its technique of elaboration of discontinuity, to multiply the speed of communication. The ideas of Eisenstein during the 1920s seem to fall along some statements of importance, those of aggressiveness in art and of reproduction of conflict in the text, of movement and dynamism, of composition by heterogeneity, which, in one way or the other, recall the Italian and Russian Futurist lesson. His very own conception of art work as ‘dynamic interaction of forces’ – though borrowed from Tynjanov (Tynjanov, 1924) – reflects even more privileged attention to dynamization and displays singular convergences with the theories elaborated in the first decade of the century by Boccioni (Boccioni, 1971), not only the Marinettian exaltation of the ‘aggressive movement’. Indeed, for Eisenstein, cinema is the most suitable material-intellectual expression to the rhythm of modernity, the visual form of the speed of

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time. The montage of short pieces is not the reproduction of the speed of reality, but the production in the territory of cinema of the speed of the contemporary world. Through the technical artificiality of the montage of short pieces, it is possible to realize, at the same time, within cinema to define the structures of a style of intensity, of a writing of the shock that realizes, in the linguistic horizon, the dynamics of metropolitan life. The city is, indeed, the place par excellence of complex speed and of modern shock, the dynamic and conflicting space wherein avant-garde is founded, and the being and psychic functions are deeply transformed. Marinetti’s Manifesto of 1909 exalts ‘the great masses’ of the ‘modern metropolis’ and considers them to be one of the fundamental objects of creative Futurist intervention. Cinema retraces the city as the very space wherein it shaped itself and that it systematically implicates. The voyage through the metropolis is the tribute that cinema offers to its own era, it is the gesture of the automatic rooting of cinema in its very horizon of origin. Variously organized and inspired to different projects of orchestrating visual material, films about the city are, however, unified by the constant presence of movement, by the leitmotif of dynamism, that, from Ruttmann to Vertov, from Cavalcanti to Strand and Sheeler, from Kopalin to Moholy-Nagy in his script A Nagyvaros Dinamikaja (or Dynamik der Grossstadt) (1921), is followed and produced as the very essence of metropolitan life. However, the reproduction of urban movement in the cinema of the city does not guarantee the effect of dynamism, but sometimes, on the contrary, it seems to determine inactive images flattened into the phenomena, devoid of the metropolitan rhythm (e.g. in Berliner Stilleben by Moholy-Nagy). The symphonies of the city experience, sometimes to its own demise, like the mere cinematographic reproduction of the movement, do not reproduce dynamic effect nor rhythm. It is in post-revolutionary Russia that the Futurist myth of the machine finds the most suitable field for a complex development meant to link art and production in the pursuit of a new matter of intellectual work, elaborated by the Constructivist and other avant-garde movements. Within the cinematographic world, if the references to cinema as technological product ‘in the same category as the metallurgical industry’ – as stated by Eisenstein – are many, and Kuleshov declares the necessity of organizing the cinematographic work as an industrial and technological venture (Kuleshov, 1928), however, it is Vertov who resumes more openly the Marinettian discussion on the machine and on the mechanic man as utopian figuration of a possible historical process of transformation. Some of the passages of Vertov’s proclamation of 1922, We. Variant of a Manifesto, are a downright

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re-elaboration of Marinettian pieces from Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine and from Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility. Openly recognizing the rhythm of the machines, the delight of mechanical labor, the perception of the beauty of chemical processes, we sing of earthquakes, we compose film epics of electric power plants and flame, we delight in the movement of comets and meteors and the gestures of searchlights that dazzle the stars (Vertov, 1922: 25).

and Our path leads through the poetry of the machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man. […] The new man, free of unwieldliness and clumsiness, will have the light, precise movements of machine (Vertov, 1922: 25).

Not only does Vertov resume the Marinettian assumptions, but also the same discursive structure of polemological type elaborated in We and in Kinoks: A Revolution (1923) he reflects exactly the way of Italian Futurism of making manifestos. However, Vertov introduces a fundamental innovation to the Marinettian subject matter. For him, the machine is not only an undifferentiated technological instrument/object: it is also the camera, the technological eye of cinema. And the cinematographic eye is the possibility of seeing ‘what the eye cannot see’, is ‘a microscope and telescope of time’, is the ‘cine-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space’. Thus, Vertov thinks of cinema as the ‘material-intellectual production’ of the future, which, thanks to its technological support, can more adequately take possession of the visible, set it free from the limits of anthropologic perception and build a new configuration of the existent. The character of machine becomes the passage through which it is possible to overcome the imperfection and the anguish of man, of ‘psychological’, in the perspective of the creation of the ‘perfect electric man’ with his ‘perfect and precise movements like a machine’. The relationship of Vertov with Futurism goes beyond the myth of the machine. If, on one hand, all the pre-cinematographic education of Vertov is characterized by his interest in Futurism, which is explicated in the creation of a Laboratory of Hearing, inspired by the research of Russolo, and in the same choice of the nom de guerre (Dziga Vertov alludes to perpetual

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motion); on the other hand, the practice of montage of raw materials, not elaborated segments of reality, pieces of life filmed by unknown camera operators, is probably influenced by Russolo’s idea of building sound flows through the montage of noises that imitate life against any rule and musical tradition. If Russolo thought of and realized the mechanic reproduction of noises in the contemporary world, Vertov and his Laboratory of Hearing commits himself to the recording of sounds from the surrounding reality, to edit them in new combinations: the model of the cinematographic work of Vertov is, thus, outlined. The organization of the noises in the contemporary reality of Russolo becomes the organization of the visual materials in the modern world, and the structure of the ‘noises of nature and life’ of Russolo becomes the structure of the light and the dynamic of the Soviet life, ‘the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space’ (in We, which is the manifesto closest to Futurism, Vertov still speaks of art), movements that naturally have to present the fundamental feature of speed. Russolo looks for his own basics not in the history of music or in the Futuristic music of Balilla Pratella, but in Zang Tumb Tumb of Marinetti. Vertov rejects the entire history of cinema, in perfect Futurist style, asserting that ‘the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous’ and that ‘“Cinematography” must die so that the art of cinema may live’. His radical option for the visible world, for the materials of the žižn vrasploch, of life taken unawares, constitutes a break from tradition in respect to the tradition of art, which, after all, seems to have a basis more in the mouldbreaking experiences of the symbolic horizon in favour of life and of the objects of life, typical of the most radical avant-garde, from Futurism to Dadaism, and generally absent in documentarism. The very opposite of this technique, the Vertov’s full-length f ilms gradually develop more complex research in the composition of the image, systematically resorting to techniques of overlay or of the split screen effect, which obviously represent a form of montage in the framing. It is the experiences of the multiplication of vision and of the decomposition and recomposition of the picture – as in Strike – which realize, in the end, authentic effects of simultaneity, determining another meeting point with the Futurist practice. Indeed, the idea of simultaneity in the Futurist program and its roots in the urban life of the modern metropolis is well-known. Futurist painting, which, during the first decade of the century, sketches the first exemplary forms of simultaneity, seizes the complexity of urban life, introducing multiple determinations and composing the plurality of dynamic sensations produced by the modern city. But, within the simultaneity, works not only

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a multiplication of the perceptual elements, an integration of the mental to the phenomenal, but also a pluralization of the visible. What is fundamental in it, is the theoretical relation with speed that the Futurist theory openly sets forth. In 1914, Boccioni writes: It is a matter of conceiving objects in movement quite apart from the motion which they contain within themselves. That is to say, we must try to find a form which will be able to express a new absolute—speed, which any true modern spirit must recklessly enjoy. It is a matter of studying the different aspects that life has assumed in speed and in the resulting simultaneity (Boccioni, 1914: 188).

It is probable that, in the complex visual configuration of overlay, the example of the decomposition in planes and of the pluralization of themes and elements typical of Cubism – as Eisenstein points out in a reflection in Montaž (Eisenstein, 1964 [1937]) – also operates, but a comparative confrontation could not but reaffirm the particular influence of Futurist simultaneity, also because the effect of multiplication of images reflects an acceleration of communication, a will to inform at the same time, and faster at that.

References Aumont, J. (1979), Montage Eisenstein, Paris: Albatros. Bertetto, P. (ed.) (1983), Il cinema d’avanguardia. 1910-1930, Venice, Marsilio. Bertetto, P. (1996), ‘Differenza e intensità. Le strutture formali del cinema d’avanguardia’, in P. Bertetto & S. Toffetti (eds.) (1983), Cinema d’avanguardia in Europa (dalle origini al 1945), 63-92. Milan – Turin: Il Castoro – Museo Nazionale del Cinema. —. (2013), ‘L’estetica dell’intensità’, Imago. Studi di cinema e media 7-8: 9-31. Boccioni, U. (1914), ‘Absolute Motion + Relative Motion = Dynamism’, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism: An Anthology, 187-194. New HavenLondon: Yale University Press. Burlyuk, D. (1912), Poscecina obscestvennomu vkusu, Moscow. Deleuze, G. (1968), Différence et répétition. Paris: PUF. —. (1985), L’image-temps. Paris: Minuit. Eisenstein, S. M. (1963), Izbrannye proizvedenija, I, Moscow, Iskusstvo (ed. N. Klejman). —. (1964), Izbrannye proizvedenija, II, Moscow, Iskusstvo (ed. N. Klejman).

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Eisenstein, S. M., Vertov, D. & FEKS (1975), Teoria del cinema rivoluzionario. Gli anni venti in URSS, (ed. P. Bertetto), Milan: Feltrinelli. Kirby, M. (1971), Futurist Performance. New York: Dutton & Co.G. Kraiski G. (ed) (1968), Le poetiche russe del Novecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza. Kuleshov, L. (1929), Iskusstvo kinò, Moscow: Teakinopecat. Lista, G. (2001), Le Futurisme: création et avantgarde, Paris: Ed. de l’Amateur. Markov, V. (1968), Russian Futurism. A History. Los Angeles: Regents of Un. of California Marinetti, F. T. (1968), Teoria e invenzione futurista. Milan: Mondadori. Nedobrovo, V. (1928), Feks. Grigory Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Moscow-Leningrad: Rapisarda. Noguez, D. (1979), Eloge du cinéma expérimental, Paris: Centre Pompidou. Ripellino, A.M. (1959), Majakovskij e il teatro russo d’avanguardia, Turin: Einaudi. Tynjanov, J. (1924), Problema stichotvornogo jazyka, Leningrad: Poetike. Verdone, M. (1968), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, Rome: Bianco e Nero. Vertov, D. (1922), ‘We. Variant of a Manifesto’, in S. MacKenzie (2014), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, 23-26. Berkley-Los Angeles: University of California Press.

About the author Paolo Bertetto is Full Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. He has also been a lecturer at the University of Turin, Paris 8, Paris 3, Nice, Madrid Complutense, and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He was also the scientific director of Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin. He has published various monographies and has curated almost 20 edited collections and catalogues. Among his main research interests, he focuses on Lang, Bunuel, Resnais, Lynch, Avant-garde, Expressionism, and Nouvelle Vague. He has deepened issues of Film Theory and Film Analysis.

3.

Futurism and Film Theories Manifesto of Futurist Cinema and Theories in Italy in the 1910-1920s Valentina Valente Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch03 Abstract This chapter presents an analysis of the theoretical formulations that can be found in some passages of manifestos and other Futurist poetic and aesthetic writings; the author’s approach focuses on an analysis of the textual production of Futurists, as well as of their interviews, and of a philological work on their writings. The arguments put forward by Futurists in their poetic and aesthetic production find validation in their films and, in particular, in the interviews and statements that surround their filmmaking practices. The aim is to demonstrate that the Futurists’ productions (their films, critical texts, and manifestos) could be interpreted and read as theoretical works along the lines of film theorists of the same era. Keywords: Film Theory, Futurist Manifestos, Early Cinema, Film Aesthetics

Between theory and manifestos Within the framework of film theories, different types of discourses on the cinematic apparatus can be distinguished. Hence, as a guiding principle, the theoretical discourse must remain separate from the critical and historical one, and from the discourses concerning aesthetics and poetics. Nevertheless, as Alberto Boschi points out, such distinction is at times problematic, especially when we are faced with a certain set of texts dating back to the period between the two world wars (Boschi 1998: 14). In the first place, then, in order to delimit what theory is, we need to individuate what the theoretical texts are. Secondly, we need to single

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out other texts characterized by a strong theoretical inflection and those cases in which the film itself acts as an essay bringing forth theoretical concepts on the cinema. In surveying what contributions the Futurists might have provided to the film theory debate, we must take into account their manifestos in the first place, but also – and in equal terms – all the fragments of their cultural debate. Within the Futurist movement itself, in fact, several positions can be traced: they are often distant from one another, thus revealing the different ‘souls’ of this movement. Although it might be a complex task, the scholar concerned with film theory must be able to trace theoretical insights within statements of different nature: such insights anticipate or interpret with particular clarity the Zeitgeist and new artistic developments. According to the declarations of the The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and to the proto-history of Futurist cinema – which can be traced back to the 19th century culture of the variety theatre1 – ‘the meeting between Futurism and the new visual media based on mechanical technologies should have been immediate and prolific. Rather, it happened late and with difficulty’ (Lista 2001: 11). Some of the acquisitions of cinematic language (such as expressive crossbreeding, spatial-temporal co-penetrations, the use of rhythm, free associations, the rendering of movement, etc.) belong to the Futurist perspective as well as to the cinematic apparatus. But here an unavoidable split takes place between what the apparatus is and what it represents in conceptual terms. In the view of the artists who joined the Futurist movement, which exalted the myth of the machine, speed, and synthesis, it was the cinematic apparatus itself that gave rise to aesthetic forms. These forms are generated directly by the culture of modernity – characterized by movement, speed, synthesis, association, rhythm, action – and embody the new sensibility of the 20th century. Therefore, cinema becomes for the Futurists a ‘technical and material place for the requalification of artistic practices, a point of no return achieved by the aesthetic system’ (Grignaff ini 1989: 37). According to Giovanna Grignaffini, it was no accident that the Futurists produced very few cinematic artworks, because ‘cinema did not represent a possible terrain 1 According to Giovanni Lista, the real antecedents of Futurist cinema are to be found in the popular culture of vaudeville between the nineteenth and 20th centuries, particularly in the ‘aesthetic of the movement and the mythologies of modernity’, such as the serpentine dance introduced by Loïe Fuller or the transformism of Leopoldo Fregoli (Lista 2010: 9).

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for application, but rather a high point of observation. From such point they could observe what the other arts had been, and what they should become after cinema’ (Grignaffini 1989: 38). We might then argue that if some Futurists experimented with the cinematic apparatus, for others it represented a ‘new idol’,2 together with speed, the machine, and the dynamism of modern life, as well as the concepts of simultaneity and combination (Calvesi 1970: 56). It was therefore an idol opposed to the old passéist ones. In most cases, cinema was a theoretical object for the Futurists, a high point to which they aspired in their artistic production. If it became an object of experimentation for some of them (the Corradini brothers and the Bragaglia brothers), for others it was ‘a wonderful instrument to explore the infrasensorial and metaperceptual dimension’. In any case, it was a machine and, as such, a source of interest for the Futurists, although it lacked the artist’s vital presence and the energetic dimension of the action; this last feature was, in some cases, a reason for the strong rejection of the connection between Futurist art and the new media.3 Art historian Maurizio Calvesi writes: ‘the refusal of the artwork as a categorical entity, with its own individuality and metaphysical perfection, is opposed by Futurism to the specificity of the techniques and materials which constitute the artwork, with the introduction of new and heterogeneous materials’ (Calvesi 1970). The Futurists theorized the interrelation among the arts, and rejected the definitions and boundaries among different artistic productions. Particularly in this period in the history of film theory, their statements coincide with other theoretical stances, as I will argue later. Examining a number of excerpts, I will address a few particularly relevant aspects, connecting them both to contemporary and later theories. Moving freely and in a scarcely canonical way among the texts, I will search for deeper theoretical speculations than the ones that emerge from their apparent dogmatism and fake clarity. 4 2 Maurizio Calvesi writes about the cinema: ‘Futurism had opposed a new idol to the old passéist ones: speed, the machine, the dynamism of modern life, with its tension to ubiquity and its implications of agility, physical bravery, activism’ (Calvesi 1970: 48). 3 On this point, see Umberto Boccioni’s statements. In the journal Lacerba he writes: ‘We have always rejected, with disgust and contempt, even the furthest kinship with photography, because it is not an art. Photography has this value: it reproduces and imitates objectively, and with its perfection it has managed to free the artist from the chain of the exact reproduction of the real’ (Boccioni, 1971: 169). See also: the study in the journal Lacerba (Del Puppo 2000). 4 Calvesi follows this line of thought, spurred by August Joly’s declaration ‘On ne doit jamais trop prétendre savoir la formule d’une doctrine’ (Le Futurisme et la Philosophie, in La Belgique artistique et littéraire, July 1912)

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I will also elaborate on how the artistic and literary production of Futurism is always theoretical, as it ‘produces the strongest aesthetic legitimation of the cinema in the ’10s’ (Grignaffini 1989: 38). The analysis will focus on some passages of Chromatic Music. Written by Bruno Corra, Chromatic Music was born out of the experimentation of ‘chromatic music’ carried out with his brother Arnaldo Ginna. This text demonstrates that Futurist experiences with cinema took place mainly outside the recognized official movement. In fact ‘the Ginanni-Corradini brothers, who invented cine-painting, as well as the Bragaglia brothers, who invented photo-dynamism, belonged to an independent and heterodox Futurism’ (Lista 2001: 11). Although these are not officially recognized Futurist artworks, in them ‘significant anticipations of avant-garde cinema of the ’20s’ can be discerned (Costa 2002: 165). Finally, I will analyse excerpts from the manifesto The Futurist Cinema, and its link with the first officially Futurist film: Vita futurista (1916).5

The Ginanni-Corradini brothers: between sound, colour, and movement Chromatic Music (1912) is an essay containing interesting theoretical stances, developed by the Ginanni-Corradini brothers in the framework of the ‘cerebrist’ group. Founded in 1909, the ‘cerebrist’ movement eventually ‘joined the Futurism, to which it provided a fundamental theoretical contribution in the fields of theatre and cinema’ (Lista 2001: 26). Ginna and Corra’s perspectives are among the richest and most prolific from a theoretical point of view. Although they were not adequately developed within Futurism, we can consider them as an anticipation of significant trends in international abstract cinema. Their work on colour resumed a current that started with the first experiments of coloured music, such as the ocular harpsichord by Louis-Bertrand Castel, dating back to mid-eighteenth century. On the 16 January 1877, Bainbridge Bishop patented a colour organ, with a visual correspondence to lights projected through the lighting of coloured glasses, set in motion by the organ’s hammers. In 1909, Russian composer Aleksandr Scriabin, influenced by Bishop’s research, wrote a music score with the symphonic poem Prometheus. Here, the notes corresponded to coloured lights. He 5 Only a few fragments are left of Vita futurista (1916), together with Ginna’s testimony. A reconstruction is attempted in Cinema e letteratura del futurismo and M. Kirby, Futurist Performance, New York, 1971.

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imagined building a keyboard for light, which would associate a visionary synthesis of sound and light to the traditional keys (Catanese 2009: 116). It is particularly interesting to notice that the publication of Chromatic Music coincides with Leonid Sabanejew’s famous article Prometeus von Skrjabin published in Der Blaue Reiter (Sabanejew, 1912; Chessa, 2012: 242). It is an interesting occurrence, as much as the fact that the ‘musical transfigurations’ by Ginna exhibited at the International Free Futurist Exhibition in April 1915 were exhibited together with paintings by Archipenko and Kandinsky: Giuseppe Sprovieri writes about this in a letter to Ginna, ‘as a confirmation of the fact that in the arts, certain levels of sensibility are established, which give way to similarities between far-away artists, who are not even aware one of the other’ (Verdone 1968: 13). These occurrences reveal that, in the 1910s, both practical experiments and theoretical statements with many similarities take place at the same time in different countries. Among the speculations on early film theories, one of the most interesting comparative theories argues for an analogy between cinematic art and the practice of musical composition, based on such artistic experimentations: If in fact, from the beginning the supporters of cinema regarded theatre as a system of representation from which the new medium should depart as much as possible, in order to remain faithful to itself and give rise to an autonomous art, music, on the other hand, already in the1910s is often evoked as an apt metaphor to describe the nature and the functioning of film, and as a positive model which can inspire film-makers’ practices (Boschi 1998: 83).

This does not only entail the experimentation of one of the many possible practices, but also the theorization of an abstract cinema, of which Chromatic Music can be considered a forerunner. Chromatic Music initially presents itself as a handbook for those interested in ‘colour symphonies’. Such structure is confirmed at the end, where readers are clearly invited to contact the author of the essay. This presentation of the text as a handbook similarly occurs in the previous Art of the Future. Corra theorizes chromatic chords and chromatic motifs, taking the cue from the corresponding musical concepts; he aspires to describe what he calls ‘chromatic sensations’ (of which he provides a definition and several examples) through the elements of empirical knowledge. These theoretical speculations are included in the manifesto The Futurist Cinema, in point four of the taxonomy of the Futurist films’ features:

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‘Cinematic musical researches (dissonances, harmonies, symphonies of gestures, events, colours, etc.)’ (Marinetti et al. 1916: 232). This passage was clearly a contribution of the Corradini brothers. Nevertheless, in Corra’s essay, the interrelation of artistic forms emerges above all in the passages in which he feels the need to explain how the chromatic sensibility should be employed: ‘Any seemingly intelligent person could attain a clear vision of all the possibilities of all arts, and of all the relations among all arts, if they just meant to […] seriously meditate for a while on the elements and the principles: word, line, colour, sound, form’ (Corra 1984: 127). The theoretical aspect that I find most relevant is the criticism to Claude Bragdon’s aesthetics. Corra vehemently attacks Bragdon’s theorization of music as an art of time and architecture as an art of space6 (resuming Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s division). He writes: Does music only belong to time? Why? It seems to me that if we consider in itself a chord played on the piano, we cannot deny that it exists in space without any relation to time – it does last in time, but then if I stand still for an hour in front of a church’s façade, then I will have to say that architecture exists in time. (Corra 1984: 128)

Hence, he ‘corrects’ Bragdon’s theoretical stance by indicating what he should have stated: the possible forms of an artwork are endless, it is not possible to go over them one by one, but it is indeed possible to have an intuition of them by analyzing a few, and establishing some points of reference. Not all the arts provide, at the current moment, all forms of artworks – but music has in itself all the main forms of artworks, namely it has enough of them to give us an idea of its potentiality of infinite expressions (Corra 1984: 128).

In this way, he introduces one of the fundamental concepts of his essay: the idea of ‘transporting precisely into the field of colour the tempered music scale’ (Corra 1984: 130). For the Corradini brothers, the attempt is carried out with a translation into colours, through the chromatic piano, of renowned musical pieces (for instance, Venetian Boat Song by Mendelssohn or a 6 ‘In such a spectrum of the arts each one occupies a definite place, and all together form a series of which music and architecture are the two extremes. […] in such a classification music is seen to be allied to time, and architecture to space’ (Bragdon, 1910: 10).

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Rondeau by Chopin) and poetic texts (Les Fleurs by Mallarmé). Introducing the chromatic piano as an apparatus for the translation of colours into music and poetry, this essay suggests a groundbreaking idea of translation: it does not entail mirroring an artistic form and taking it as a model by means of deprivation (namely, theatre without words), but by virtue of its dynamism. This is a revolutionary idea of transposition and translation, if compared to the practice of translating successful literary or theatrical texts into films. It involves the transposition of musical dynamics into the cinema or, rather, the articulation of the cinematic art in a similar fashion to the musical composition. Hence, this practice has a strong link with contemporary and immediately subsequent theories, such as the ‘pure cinema’ of the first French avant-garde, and the experimental films in Germany during the 1920s: these movements connect visual rhythm to musical rhythm in a stronger and more systematic way, both in their theory and in their practices. To name two examples: in Painting in Time, Walter Ruttmann writes that the film-maker will be the kind of artist who is ‘in-between painting and music’ (1919); The definitions of pure, absolute, abstract cinema, – ‘not relative to something else’ – seem to be in contradiction, as they do not see a positive element in musical transposition. Nevertheless, it is not the aspect of imitation that interests these artists, rather, they see music as a model for a transposition that can help the cinema approach its purity.

The Futurist Cinema manifesto and Vita futurista Theory does not speculate on the forms that cinema should take according to a specific movement (i.e. on what cinema should be for the members of such movement), but rather on what cinema is, in its deepest nature. Notwithstanding, as with many other movements, Futurism not only reflect on how to convey certain ideas or feelings through the cinema, but also brings forth the idea that cinema is Futurist in itself: the apparatus is Futurist from its own conception. Futurists absorb the apparatus in their own art, and they re-theorize it through The Futurist Cinema manifesto. Paolo Bertetto underlines this concept by disavowing the concrete models of film-making of the theatre without words, Futurists theorize ‘a use of cinema which is organic to Futurist poetics, but which also elaborates linguistic indications aimed at constituting a first specific foundation of the experimental language’ (Bertetto 1983: 33). As Wanda Strauven writes, in 1916 ‘cinema is not yet an art form’. Hence,

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the Futurists would have disagreed both with Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry who date the ‘birth’ of cinema as art in the middle of the 1910s. Instead, they seem to concur with two other French film historiographers, namely Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, who situate this ‘birth’ after the First World War, beginning in 1919 (Strauven 2006: 107).7

We have already registered this, since many of the theoretical considerations that give rise to the debate on cinema emerge in those years. In The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, the thread that connects cinema and theatre is not disavowed, but it is rather found in the path towards emancipation that both arts need to undertake: ‘An earlier Futurist manifesto had rehabilitated, glorified, and perfected the Variety theatre. It is logical therefore for us to carry our quickening energies into a new theatrical zone: film’ (Marinetti et al. 1916: 230).

Fortunato Depero, illustration from the magazine Movie Makers (1929). Courtesy of Archivio Depero. All rights are reserved.

According to the Futurists, the connection between cinema and theatre has to do with a very similar theoretical/practical approach, even if the cinema does not have a tradition to refer to:

7 She also refers to Georges Sadoul: ‘The third volume of Georges Sadoul’s Histoire générale du cinéma is dedicated to the birth of the art of cinema: 1909-1920: Le cinéma devient un art (Paris: Denoël, 1951). According to Sadoul, it all started with the Film d’Art series in 1908. Jean Mitry, on the other hand, claims that cinema as art made its appearance only in 1915. See Histoire du cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1969) […] Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, Histoire du Cinéma (Paris: Denoël, 1935). See the fourth chapter, which is titled “Naissance du Cinéma comme Art (1919-1923)”.’

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At first glance, the filmmaker, born only a few years ago, may seem to be Futurist already, which is to say, lacking a past and free from tradition. In reality, because film has appeared in the guise of a theatre without words, it has inherited all the most traditional rubbish of the literary theatre. Consequently, everything we have said and done about the stage applies to the cinema. Our action is legitimate and necessary insofar as the filmmaker up to now has been and tends to remain profoundly passéist, whereas we see in film the possibility of an eminently Futurist art and the expressive medium most adapted to the complex sensibility of a Futurist artist (Marinetti et al. 1916: 230).

Therefore, the Futurist movement seems to consider cinema and theatre on equal footing, not because of a similitude of the apparatus, but rather because of its use, in which the respective traditions bridle two potentially free media. These theoretical contents are already expressed at length in The Variety theatre, to which the cinema is closely related. At times, then, the cinema is the medium for the implementation of the theatre’s potentialities for attraction; at other times, it is stated that the cinema should implement the potentialities of its own apparatus. In Vita futurista, a wider possibility of experimentation with elements of attraction and with the destruction of stylistic motifs is assigned to the cinema, as in this passage of The Variety theatre: 16. The Variety theatre is destroying all our conceptions of perspective, proportion, time, and space. (Example: a little doorway and gate that are thirty centimeters in height, isolated in the middle of the stage, which eccentric American comedians open and close with solemnity as they repeatedly enter and exit it, as though they couldn’t do otherwise.) (Marinetti 1913: 162).

The element of distortion described here is strongly connected to The Futurist Cinema manifesto, as in ’10. Filmed unreal reconstructions of the human body. 11. Filmed dramas of disproportions’ (Marinetti et al. 1916: 233), as well as some passages of Vita futurista, for instance, this description of some parts of the film by A. Ginna: ‘4 . Caricature of Hamlet, symbol of the pessimist passéism. Moving figures, deformed by concave and convex mirrors.’ (Bertetto, 1983: 144) or by Corrado Pavolini, who remembers a bicycle ride in the promenades of Florence’s Cascine: those devils had invented some stupefying effects for the time, achieving an absurd humour which even the Americans failed to overcome. For

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example, the argument between the fat man the lanky man was a brilliant thing, hilarious and tragic at the same time. Marinetti achieved this by filming the two actors through two distorting mirrors, a concave and a convex one. The two figures were grotesque beyond limits. But the atmosphere was even better […] (Lista 2001: 42).

The example of cinematic work on proportions and distortion of the human figures represents a specific use of the cinematic apparatus, whose peculiarity is to deceive and conjure up the invisible. Vita futurista was defined by Ginna as a ‘film of experiences’; judging from the texts that accompany its production and its difficult distribution, we can consider it as an extension of The Futurist Cinema manifesto itself. Besides, it is worth considering some interpretations of Vita futurista, which describe it as ‘something like a documentary of one of those political-theatrical performances which Marinetti held dearly; these artworks must be considered as exemplary gestures, as provocations’ (Costa 2002: 169). Hence, taking into account the different interpretations and the remaining materials on Vita futurista, it is easy to conclude that the f ilms constitute a theoretical object, in which the Futurists carried out what they had stated in their manifestos.The textual excerpts that have been presented and analysed here as examples of theoretical issues on the cinema raised by the Futurist movements are only a few of the numerous cues attesting the will to re-theorize the apparatus by following its innovative essence. They show us the revolutionary potential of the cinema – within the Futurist movement itself, and for the future development of the arts – and how cinema, at the same time, is the ‘natural extension’ of an ongoing artistic metamorphosis. On the one hand, these texts shed light on the specificity of cinema and on the Futurists’ contributions to its recognition and to the process of turning cinema into an art. On the other hand, they highlight the possible (and prolific) dialogue between the cinema and the other arts. Because of this dialogue, both the guiding principles of the other arts, and the ones towards which cinema seemed to be destined, were thrown into crisis.

References Bertetto, P. (1983), Il cinema d’avanguardia 1910-1930. Venezia: Marsilio. Boccioni U. (1971), Gli scritti editi e inediti. Milano: Feltrinelli. Boschi, A. (1998), Teorie del cinema. Il periodo Classico 1915-1945. Roma: Carocci.

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Bragdon, C. (1910), The Beautiful Necessary: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture. Rochester: Manas Press. Calvesi, M. (1971), Le due avanguardie: dal futurismo alla pop-art. Bari: Laterza. Casetti, F., S. Alovisio & L. Mazzei (eds.) (2017), Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896-1922, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Catanese, R. (2009), ‘Prospettive ed esperimenti nel cinema futurista’, Avanguardia 42: 99-118. Chessa, L. (2012) Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult. Berkeley – Los Angeles: University of California Press. Costa, A. (2002), Il cinema e le arti visive, Torino: Einaudi. Del Puppo, A. (2000), Lacerba 1913-15. Bergamo: Lubrina Ginna A. & Corra B. (1984), Manifesti futuristi e scritti teorici, in M. Verdone (ed.). Ravenna: Longo. Grignaffini, G. (1989), Sapere e teorie del cinema. Il periodo del muto. Bologna: Clueb. Joly, A. (1912) ‘Le Futurisme et la Philosophie’, in La Belgique artistique et littéraire. Lista, G. (2001), Cinema e fotografia futurista. Milano: Skira. —. (2010), Il cinema futurista. Genova, Le Mani. Pavolini, C. (1926), ‘Cinematografo puro avanti lettera’, Il Tevere, Rome, quoted in G. Lista, (2001), Cinema e fotografia futurista. Milano: Skira. Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla & R. Chiti (1916), La cinematografia futurista, L’Italia Futurista, (I) 1: 1, translated as The Futurist Cinema in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism: An Anthology, 229-232. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F.T. (1913), ‘The Variety theatre’, in Rainey, L., Poggi C. & Withman, L. (eds.), Futurism. An Anthology, 159-164. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Strauven, W. (2006), ‘From “Primitive Cinema” to “Marvelous”’, in W. Stauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 106-120. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Sabanejew, L. (1912), ‘Prometeus von Skrjabin’, Der Blaue Reiter. Munich: Piper. Verdone, M. (1968), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Rome: Bianco e Nero.

About the author Valentina Valente is Adjunct Professor of Management of Archives and Cinematheques at Sapienza University of Rome. She has also taught Photography and Film Theory at the same university. She finished her PhD at University of Padua and has published many essays about the theory of cinema and the philosophy of film. Her last book is an edited collection of research about film sound.

4. Film Aesthetics Without Films Sabine Schrader Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch04 Abstract This chapter discusses the ambivalent relation between Futurists arts and cinema. On the one hand, there is Marinetti’s statement that cinema is his favorite medium; on the other hand, film only plays a peripheral role in his artistic work. Additionally, it is not during the ‘periodo eroico’ that the Futurists turn to film, but it is later than 1916, during a phase that is rather affirmative or regarded to be more of a commentary on the so-called heroic, subversive early days. They are, in fact, more interested in movements in pictures (or literature) than in moving pictures. Crossing cultural film and media studies and literary criticism, this article offers an overview of Italian silent cinema. Furthermore, the article analyses the futurists contradictory rhetoric of cinema in their collective manifestos and in Boccioni futurista: Pittura Scultura Futuriste (1914). Keywords: Film Theory, Futurist Manifestos, Marinetti, Boccioni, Futurist Literature

When F.T. Marinetti publishes his first manifesto in Le Figaro (19 February 1909), cinematographic technology has reached a stage at which films with a running time of up to 40 minutes can be produced. The first movie theatres are being built, seating up to 1000 people. Consequently, film is present in the early manifestos as a sign of technological modernity: the screen should compete with the stage, for instance, since film is able to show scenes that cannot be properly depicted on stage, e.g. war battle scenes or car races (Marinetti 1913 a, b). Marinetti also contrasts the short duration of film with the merely long duration of the old medium, the book (Marinetti et al. 1916). In 1913, he even claims to have been working with film for a long time in a large survey conducted by the Nuovo Giornale di Firenze on the topics of literature and film (Marinetti 1913c: 3). When Umberto Boccioni

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in 1911 and Marinetti in 1912 in Maison d’étudiants claim that the day would come when a simple picture would no longer be sufficient to depict the ever increasing movement of life (Baumgarth 1974: 71), both appear as visionaries, as seen from today’s perspective.The Futurists do develop,1 as this article shows, an aesthetics appropriate to the new medium, but films as such play only a peripheral role in their artistic work. On the one hand, they proclaim an aesthetics of velocità and simultaneità, corresponding to our current notion of media reality. On the other hand, they react to the indirect character of film as a medium by proclaiming and realizing an aesthetics of immediacy and of performance, as will be shown. It is not during their ‘periodo eroico’ that they turn to film, but it is rather as late as 1916, i.e. during a phase that is rather affirmative or regarded to be more of a commentary on the so-called heroic, subversive early days (De Maria 1968; Finter 1980). 1916 marks the publication of the Manifesto del Cinematografo and, in the same year, the Futurists make their only film, Vita futurista. In the following years, Marinetti works on a second project called Velocità (1917-1918), but the film was never actually realized.2 The relationship between film and Futurism is, therefore, quite contradictory. In the last analysis, the ambivalent attitude towards film is typical for the Futurists’ aesthetics, where different competing discourses surface.

Movement in pictures instead of moving pictures The Futurists are far from being completely positive in their comments on the new medium. Without a doubt, Umberto Boccioni is one of the most obstinate critics of the new medium. While Marinetti’s texts are predominantly polemic, Boccioni strives for a philosophic foundation of the fine arts. In his collection of essays Boccioni futurista: Pittura Scultura Futuriste (Dinamismo Plastico), he discusses movement and velocity as expressions of lifetime and their artistic application in the dinamismo plastico.3 Time is conceived by Boccioni again in its restlessness, i.e. as a never-ending chain of movement; 1 The present article sets its sights on the close group surrounding Marinetti, including Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini. 2 The manuscript was printed and commented on in Lista 1995. In 1930-1931, a film is produced in the Futurist orbit that bears the same title – i.e., Vitesse, by Pippo Oriani –, yet it is not based directly on Marinetti’s manuscript, since he concentrates on the city and not on the antagonism between Futurism and passatismo (Verdone s.d. 1996). 3 The manuscript was possibly already finished in early December 1912, printed by mid-1913, and distributed in a corrected version in 1914 (Boccioni 1914).

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and life as a respective sequence that he wants to represent in art in terms of continuity and simultaneity in space (Boccioni 1914: 186). In his remarks, Boccioni applies the work of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) to a great extent, using the terminology of the latter. With his philosophy of life, Henri Bergson turns against the positivistic tendencies of his epoch. His works also center around a new definition of the categories of space and time. He, hence, joins the re-evaluation of time in philosophy and the arts taking place in the nineteenth century, which reacts to the question brought up by the secularization of time, namely, how to overcome the mechanical time that dominates everyday life. Up to that point – as one of Bergson’s premises has it – time had only been perceived in relation to space, as a continuous movement of standstills, but, according to Bergson, it cannot be dissected. In this context, Bergson differentiates between time that can be measured (‘le temps’), which is basically nothing else but a change in space, and duration (‘la durée’), which he defines as the ‘real’ time, time that can only be experienced in the mind, thanks to intuition (Bergson 1946: 25ff). He goes on to make a distinction between a time that can be experienced scientifically (‘temps objectif’) and a subjective, mental time of duration (‘temps subjectif’). The durée is based on a principle inherent in each object that one recalls when seeing the respective object (Bergson 1946: 209). Memory has stored momentary snapshots that the observer relates to the present and that thus represent, at the same time, an anticipation of the future, creating an awareness of duration. In other words, Bergson tries to comprehend objects despite the changes (or movements) they are subjected to in their ‘duration’; thus focussing not on transience but on the permanence of being. Bergson’s theory is of great interest to the Futurists because of his concept of movement understood in terms of a time differential. Boccioni uses this differentiation of absolute and relative movement as an orientation point. For him, the ‘dinamismo plastico’ arises as simultaneous action, as interplay of absolute and relative movement (Boccioni 1914: 195). He summarizes as absolute movement (‘moto assoluto’) all those optional possibilities of an object for movement, its force (‘forza’), such as the potential elasticity of an object. This absolute movement embodies the distinct ‘arche-psychology’ or the ‘essence’ of an object. Contrary to this, relative movement indicates the actual movement that can be measured scientifically; for example, the movement of a galloping horse or a turning wheel. Both forms require different perceptions, which Boccioni splits into ‘sensazione’ and ‘creazione’ (Boccioni 1914: 92). The sensation aims at the superficial aspect, ‘creazione’ at Bergson’s concept of durée. When both work together, the result is a state

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of mind capable of transcending the known limits of space and time; it is the task of art to materialize this ‘stato d’animo’. Even though Boccioni no longer tries to achieve a naturalistic reproduction of what can be perceived, he still hopes to capture the imminent truth in each object, according to Henri Bergson’s ‘true perception’ referring to a metaphysical dimension. This twofold meaning of movement becomes the key for Umberto Boccioni’s rejection of cinema: When we speak of movement, it is not a cinematographic concern […], the infantile curiosity to fix the trajectory of an object from point A to point B. On the contrary, we want to attain pure sensation, that is, to create form in plastic intuition, to create the duration of the appearance, i.e. to live the object as it manifests itself (Boccioni 1914: 175).

Here, too, Boccioni follows Bergson: according to him, photography and film are based on a purely mechanical perception (or rather a relative movement), which only cuts time into pieces; so a film is nothing but a ‘narrative relation of an episode’; in other words, space, not time. Therefore, the ‘arche-psychology’, the imaging potentiality, cannot be captured (Bocci­ oni 1914: 181). So it seems as if it were precisely the moving pictures that would prevent the film from depicting the principle of movement, since Bergson and Boccioni understand the movement shown as mechanical and depleted of sense, and thus deny it to the ability for pure perception, for directly viewing the objects. Another aspect comes into play: just like Henri Bergson before them, Umberto Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti trace the ability for pure perception back to intuition, the characteristic of the artistic genius (Boccioni 1914: 198), which is, in turn, at odds with the collective production process prevalent in cinema (Schrader 2007: 200). The ‘Futurist Intuition’ is something that Marinetti wants to claim exclusively. So it is not surprising that his reaction is one of outrage when the title of the film Mondo Baldoria. Prima pellicola futurista (1914, dir.: Aldo Molinari) claims to be Futurist (Marinetti 1914: 108). 4 His point is first and foremost the attribute ‘Futurist’. Expelling the Bragaglia brothers from the group in 1913, whose photographs have entered the annals of history under the term ‘Futurist’, proves this claim to originality. In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marinetti intones, as it were, a swan song on intuition and originality. 4 The film Mondo Baldoria is lost; regarding its synopsis, see the reconstruction by Lista 2001: 31.

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Velocità and simultaneità At the outset of his Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (1912), ­Marinetti describes how he found himself in the engine room of an airplane, listening to the engine noise and realizing that the literary language is no longer appropriate to the new velocity. A consequence on a content level is – as we know – the apotheosis of modernity, the modernolatria, presenting itself in the manifestos as an industrialized, urban civilization. The Futurist processes of art thus try not so much to constitute a new reality; rather, the Futurists subordinate their art to an experience of reality already preceding the art, namely the ongoing industrialization and fast moving (modern) times; as such, the Futurist aesthetics is, at its core, always also a mimetic aesthetics. Searching for a new aesthetics is therefore put at the service of an experience of old modes of description waxed anachronistic, which are no longer able to adequately structure and interpret collective perceptions. The central aesthetic terms were, according to the Futurists, velocity and simultaneity. According to Marinetti, velocità – in its ideal form: air travel – is able to speed up and multiply the knowledge of the world and to make it simultaneous. Practically speaking, this means that technology is revolutionizing traditional categories of human perception, i.e. the feeling for space and time. Marinetti already writes in his first manifesto that space has annihilated time with decisive consequences on the human psyche: ‘Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the gramophone, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile […] are not aware of the decisive influence that these diverse means of communication, transportation, and information have on their psyches.’ (Marinetti 1913a: 65). Later, Boccioni is the first one to extol the transfer of temporal sequences to simultaneity as the principle of the fine arts (­ Boccioni 1914: 261). As a consequence, Marinetti anticipates, in Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza fili – Parole in libertà, the conception of the world as a global village, as Marshall McLuhan describes it later in the 1960s: The earth made smaller by speed. New sense of the world. Let me explain: men have gradually conquered a sense of the house, a sense of the neighborhood in which they used to live, the sense of the city, the sense of the region, the sense of the continent. Today men possess a sense of the world; they just poorly need to know what their ancestors have done, but they constantly need to know what their contemporaries are doing in every part of the world. Thus the necessity, for the individual, of communicating with all the peoples of the earth. Thus the need to feel

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oneself at the center, to be judge and motor of the infinite both explored and unexplored. Magnification in the sense of humanity and an urgent need to set in every moment our relations with the whole humanity. (Marinetti 1913a: 68).

In the course of Futurist artistic creation, there is a focus on trying to transfer simultaneità, i.e. the dissolving of the borders of space and time, of proximity and distance, into the arts. It is here that the Futurists are often faced with their own limitations; the linearity of literature and the immobility of the fine arts as medial principles are initially at odds with this. As a consequence, media scholar Götz Großklaus regards Futurist aesthetics as the beginnings of a modern ‘media reality’ (Großklaus 1995: 87), in which spatial and temporal distance are reduced, time shrinks to the moment, and space shrinks to a point, liberating human beings from their inclination to natural time and the natural environment of the body. The basic temporal measure of movement in space used up to that point, was generally connected to natural premises of physical work and wind power. Thanks to the new motion machines (railways, etc.) and the new image and communication media (photography and film), spatial distances and gaps and the annihilation of temporal intervals could be deleted – with the twofold effect of temporal-spatial contraction to form concise points or the extension and interconnection of such points to form temporal and spatial fields (Großklaus 1995: 37). In the aesthetic representation, the temporal image of the film brings about this new ‘relational quality of time’: this new coordination of the entirety of all possible events in the simultaneity of the now. Seen from today’s perspective, film has become the metonym of the experience of a global interconnectedness of the world and, with it, of dissolution of spatial and temporal limits. In other words, film seems to be able to live up to the promise of velocità and simultaneità in an ideal fashion, but the Futurists were the first to try to reap the benefits of this sensibilità futurista for other media.

‘Everything of any value is theatrical’ As we know, the beginning of Futurism is marked by the desire of its main agents to stage things by dissolving the separation between art and practical life, as a reaction to art being so aloof in bourgeois society. Futurist art was no longer to be separate from practical life, but it was to completely dissolve in it by reorganizing the principles of practical life. Correspondingly, concepts

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were created that were supposed to ‘futurize’ previously non-artistic areas of life, such as politics, gender representation, cuisine, clothing, etc. Anything of value was to be turned into a ‘spectacle’ (Marinetti, Settimelli & Corra 1915: 117), in order to dissolve the separation of elite and popular culture. The aim is a concept of staging immediate, unique, creative origination in the interest of intensifying velocità and simultaneità. The Futurists, hence, aim to achieve an immediate experience in art, which they put on stage in the literal sense of the word. The focus of such stagings is on presence, which is turned into an aesthetic process. The ideal expressions for this are the serate. The first of these Futurist evenings takes place with Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Armando Mazza in the sold-out Teatro Rossetti in Trieste (12 January 1910). The declaimed manifestos were complemented by small role -play sessions, recitations, and the exhibition of various paintings. The theoretical concept of the serate is laid out in the manifesto Il teatro di varietà (1913) and also later in the manifestos on synthetic theatre. ‘New’ is the key term for the variety show (and later: theatre) program, since any form of repetition would equal stasis and might run the risk of forming a tradition. Variety shows were rather to become a ‘profitable shopwindow for countless creative efforts’, as well as a ‘dynamism of shape and colours’ as a simultaneous movement (Marinetti 1913b: 83). What is presented is fragmented and accelerated, linear logic gets lost, contrasts multiply and get distorted into absurd dimensions. Velocity and ‘records’ in the variety shows give testimony to the dangers of modernity that have to be mastered and create a futurist ‘heroism’ (Marinetti 1913, 81f). These reflections reappear in The Futurist Cinema (1916) and seem to be cineastically redeemed in Vita futurista.5 Since the film has not been preserved, most evidence is provided by Arnaldo Ginna, who published a synopsis of the film scenes in 1916 that he complemented in a testimony in 1965. Short scenes show the everyday life of the Futurists: abusively misbehaving in a restaurant or sleeping ‘like a Futurist’. The individual scenes have titles such as ‘Futurist Breakfast’, ‘Discussion between a foot, a hammer and an umbrella’, or ‘How a Futurist Sleeps’ (Ginna 1990: 105). As a rule, Futurist life is contrasted with a caricature of passatista or everyday life. A case in point is a scene in which a 5 The cinematographic activities of the Futurists in 1916 can be regarded as a reaction to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s multimedia success Cabiria (1914, by G. Pastrone); after all, it is D’Annunzio against whom Marinetti acts time and again, proclaiming his desire to burn his work alongside that of Homer. But the Futurist interest in cinematography may also – just as an aside – be understood as an answer to the increasing presence of war films. The new medium had long since become an important part of the cultural field that Marinetti tried to claim as his own. The Futurists’ cinematographic commitment is thus also a close fight for cultural prestige as well as about the predominance on Italy’s cultural plane; they exploit film for this purpose.

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Fortunato Depero, illustration from the magazine Movie Makers (1929). Courtesy of Archivio Depero. All rights are reserved.

Futurist is going for a walk, progressing with ‘a new gait’. In contrast, Marinetti and Giacomo Balla parody the ‘neutral, passatistic gait’. In the sixth scene, there is a presentation of a ‘rhythmical poetry’ accompanied by the reciter’s violent arm movements (Ginna 1975: 31). The individual scenes come along in a very playful and self-ironic manner. Futurist cinema seems – if one believes Ginna’s descriptions – to take up early slapstick cinema. As a counterweight to the successful monumental historical films like Pastrone’s and D’Annunzio’s Cabiria, the Futurists position Vita futurista as a fragmentary film with a strict presence. Instead of monumental history with a linear plot leading the new medium to commercial success, the Futurists return to the origins of film, to the cinema of attractions, thriving on individual, semi-documentary, unconnected scenes and surprise effects.

‘The Pleasure of Being Booed’ (Marinetti 1911: 163) The Futurists not only wanted to bust the traditional dramatic narration on stage or on the screen, they also wanted to tear down the ‘fourth wall’, as in the Futurist theatre by means of actors discussing heatedly with the audience. The audience was to be reached ‘physically’, so that one could speak of simultaneity of production and reception. The grotesque is transferred from the stage to the audience, who are actively integrated into the performance – even though they stay in the audience – e.g. chairs were prepared with glue or the same seat would be sold to ten people at once (Marinetti 1913b: 88). The audience is equipped with projectiles such fruits, vegetables, and household items (e.g. light bulbs) that they can throw on stage. The louder the protests, the more fisticuffs or police action, the more successful the performance. In this way, an anti-art established itself, which, by calling for a destruction of the

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traditions, sought new forms. The simultaneity of declamation, comments, and projectiles from the audience make the text itself take a back seat; what remains is the sensual experience of the spectacle. While the manifestos still emulated the rituals of violence, violence (in a controlled fashion) can be brought about by the texts during the serate. The aim was to prepare the audience to tackle modern life. Interaction was supposed to take on a cathartic and central function to help the audience cleanse itself from its conventional perceptive traditions following space and time, perspective and proportion. The film Vita futurista did not, however, meet with interest from the side of distributors or cinema-owners; this is hardly surprising, since it counteracts cinematographic development, both in terms of content and form. Instead, Vita futurista was integrated into the variety-show program. Its premiere took place on 28 January 1917 at the Teatro Niccolini (in Florence). Both, the audience and press, reacted with benevolence (Innamorati 1984: 124). In the ensuing screenings, however, the audience behaved as ritual calls for: the audience brought along the usual projectiles – during the performance in Bologna, tagliatelle al ragù was hurled at the screen; in Rome, it was coals and stones (Ginna 1990: 108). In nearly no time at all, the screens were destroyed, so that the screening had to be discontinued. In the final analysis, this is the end of the Futurist excursion into the realm of this new medium. The performance history transcends the anecdotal, though: it becomes apparent that the indirectness of the new medium of film was able to bridge the gaps brought about by limitations of space and time, but it was not commensurate to the Futurist desire for interactive staging. The form of theatricalization that the serate stood for is a counter-model to the cinematographic medium – all theoretical thoughts about simultaneity notwithstanding. Rather, in this age of incipient cultural industry, Marinetti and Boccioni tried to return the aura to art – with its presence in time and space. To my mind, the medial disruption and the ensuing dissolution of material limitations instigated the Futurists to react by reviving the immediacy of art that they successfully realized in the theatre. In so doing, they established a successful Italian theatre tradition that has already proven its worth in other pluri-medial staging formats, the opera as a spectacle for the people and transporting agent of national ideas. They responded to the crisis in representation by an aesthetics of presence. Their aesthetics can thus be regarded not only as an answer to the role of art in bourgeois society, but also as an answer to the accompanying radical media upheavals around 1900 with its apparent results of anonymization and devaluation of the art producers and recipients. This way, they broke new ground for the theatre of the Novecento – though not for film.

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References Baumgarth, C. (1974), Geschichte des Futurismus. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Bergson, H. (1946), Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Boccioni, U. (1914), Boccioni futurista: Pittura Scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico). Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia. De Maria, L. (1983), ‘Introduzione. Marinetti poeta e ideologo’, in L. De Maria (ed.), F.T. Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista, XXVII-C. Milan: Mondadori. Finter, H. (1980), Die Semiotik des Avantgardetextes. Stuttgart: Metzler. Ginna, A. (1975), ‘Vita futurista’ (L’Italia futurista 1.10.1916), in M. Verdone (ed.), Poemi e scenari d’avanguardia, 30-32. Rome: Officina Ed. —. (1990), ‘Note di Ginna su Vita futurista’, in M. Verdone (ed.), Cinema e letteratura del Futurismo, 104-110. Trento: Manfrini. Großklaus, G. (1995), Medien-Zeit Medien-Raum: Zum Wandel der raumzeitlichen Wahrnehmung in der Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Innamorati, I. (1984), ‘Locandine teatrali’, in F. Bagatti (ed.), Futurismo a Firenze (1910-1920), 124-125. Florence: Sansoni. Lista, G. (1995), ‘Un inedito marinettiano: Velocità, film futurista’, Fotogenia 2: 6-25. —. (2001), Cinema e fotografia futurista. Milan: Skira. Marinetti, F.T. (1911), ‘Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi’, in I. Scaramucci (ed.) [1972], Le avanguardie del primo Novecento. Il futurismo, 161-163. Milan: Celuc. —. (1913a), ‘Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza f ili – Parole in libertà’, in L. De Maria (ed.), F.T. Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista, 65-80. Milan: Mondadori 1983. —. (1914), ‘Gli sfruttatori del Futurismo’, in L. De Maria (ed.), F.T. Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista, 108-110. Milan: Mondadori 1983. Marinetti, F.T., E. Settimelli, and B. Corra (1915), ‘Il teatro futurista sintetico’, in L. De Maria (ed.), F.T. Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista, 113-122. Milan: Mondadori 1983. Marinetti, F.T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla, and R. Chiti (1916), ‘La cinematografia futurista’, in L. De Maria (ed.), F.T. Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista, 138-144. Milan: Mondadori 1983. Schrader, S. (2005), ‘“Un po’ carnevale” – Zum performativen Potenzial der futuristischen Serate’, in M. Erstić, G. Schuhen & T. Schwan (eds.), Avantgarde-MedienPerformativität, 229-246. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. —. (2007), Si gira. Literatur und Film in der Stummfilmzeit Italiens. Heidelberg: Winter. Verdone, M. (ed.) (1996), ‘Velocità’ di Pippo Oriani. Un film futurista. Rome: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

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About the author Sabine Schrader is a Professor of Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. She has written on Italian and French Literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her interest in the rise of cinema in fin de siècle culture extends from silent cinema to contemporary films and television series in France and Italy.

5. Marinetti’s Tattilismo Revisited Hand Travels, Tactile Screens, and Touch Cinema in the 21st Century Wanda Strauven Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch05 Abstract This essay suggests reconsidering Futurist cinema in the light of Marinetti’s Tattilismo (or Art of Touch), by exploring contemporary experiences of tactile art and imagining the possible future(s) of touch cinema. In the early 1920s, Marinetti’s Art of Touch was a provocation in the face of the dominant hands-off museum culture. Today, we are surrounded by screens and surfaces that invite us to touch them. Yet, as exposed here in six different takes, this increase of tactile interfaces in our daily lives does not (necessarily) imply an enrichment of our sensory perception, let alone a completion of touch cinema. Keywords: Art of Touch, Marinetti, Contemporary Art Installations, Touch Cinema, Sensory Perception

Take One: Touching Reality A huge forefinger ‘travels’ over the horrifying picture of a wounded, bloodcovered body; with the help of a (equally huge) thumb, it stretches the image in order to obtain a closer view, points to some detail and pushes the image around; with a firm movement from right to left, it makes another picture of another mutilated body, dead or alive, appear. The finger repeats this right-to-left gesture several times – now faster, now slower – to reveal more brutal images. At one point, it reverses the direction of its gesture, from left to right, to return to the previous image. Then, it resumes its swift right-to-left movement. Shortly after, it arrests to zoom in again on a gruesome part of the picture.

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This ‘hand travel’, which lasts about five minutes, was recorded in 2012 by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn.1 The video is entitled Touching Reality, but, in reality, the finger does not touch anything, that is, it does not touch any thing, any destroyed body of this brutal reality of war and murder. It merely glides over the surface of a smartphone or tablet; it touches a touchscreen without really touching what is on display. Furthermore, Hirschhorn reinforces the distance by deliberately opting for a non-interactive installation that excludes the spectator, gallery visitor, or museum-goer from engaging directly, tangibly, with the artwork. The touchscreen footage is displayed on a non-touchable projection surface or screen. The spectator, who contemplates this detached, non-engaged ‘hand travel’, is thus put into an equally non-engaging viewing position. In a video interview with Hugo Vitrani, Hirschhorn explains his fascination for this ‘Apple gesture’, this gesture of touching without really touching, which pervades today’s society. It is a new gesture that did not exist before, that is indeed closely linked to the newest touchscreen generation, which started with the iPhone, first launched in 2007, and was followed by the iPad in 2009. Hirschhorn also observes how this new gesture does not distinguish between war pictures and holiday pictures, for instance; it remains the very same gesture, super cold (‘hyper froid’) and uncommitted (‘non-engagé’). His video Touching Reality points to the contradiction inherent to many contemporary touch-based devices, that, despite their hands-on operability, create more detachment. In the artist’s own words, the new touchscreen gesture is a ‘gesture that seems to be a gesture of sensitivity but at the same time is a gesture of enormous distancing’ (Hirschhorn 2012). With Hirschhorn’s ‘hand travel’ we seem to be at the antidotes of Marinetti’s Tattilismo, or Art of Touch, that he conceived in the early 1920s, under the influence of (and in collaboration with) his wife Benedetta. It signified a decisive (albeit not definitive) turn in the Futurist bellicose and virile program, a move towards a more gentle or subtle approach to ‘reality’. Central to this new art form is the artist’s own fragility and the re-education of the senses. In the corresponding manifesto ‘Tactilism’, dated 16 January 1921, Marinetti narrates how he submitted his 1 I would like to thank Laetitia Gendre for drawing my attention to this artwork. As for the contextualisation, Alexandra Schneider reminded me that in the winter of 2004-2005 Hirschhorn caused a true art scandal, in the vein of Futurist provocations, with the exhibition Swiss-Swiss Democracy at the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris.As part of the exhibition, there was a theatre performance in which someone lifted his leg to urinate on a poster of the right-wing Minister of Justice, Christoph Blocher. The controversy led to budget cuts for the Swiss art sector. For an interview with Hirschhorn about these events, see: http://www.swissinfo.ch/ eng/-an-artist-has-to-pay-the-price-/4429314.

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Thomas Hirschhorn, TOUCHING REALITY, Paris (2012). View of the exhibition ‘Intense Proximity’, La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012. Photo by Romain Lopez. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. All rights are reserved.

‘sense of touch to intensive therapy, localizing the confused phenomena of will and thought on the different parts of [his] body, and especially on the palms of [his] hands. This education was slow, but also easy, and all healthy bodies can use this education to get precise and surprising results.’ (2009: 266) The concept of ‘hand travel’ is introduced in this 1921 manifesto, in correlation with the notion (and invention) of the Futurist ‘tactile table’. The Italian word for the latter is tavola tattile, which would have been a nice term for referring to the electronic tablet, if modern Italian had not opted for the English loanword. Its diminutive tavoletta is even closer to the English term ‘tablet’ and has the same (original) meaning of flat inscription surface or writing pad. Yet, Marinetti’s ‘tavole tattili’ are not to be inscribed or carved like the Mosaic tables of stone. They are also not necessarily flat or smooth like the glass surface of smartphones and tablets. On the contrary, they are characterized by a mixture of textures to be explored by travelling fingertips, as can be understood from Marinetti’s description of his first tactile table, entitled Sudan-Paris (1920-1921): In its Sudan part this table contains tactile values that are crude, greasy, rough, sharp, burning (spongy material, sandpaper, wool, pig’s bristle, and wire bristle). In the Sea part the table contains tactile values that are

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slippery, metallic, cool (different grades of emery paper). In the Paris part the table contains tactile values that are soft, delicate, caressable, warm and cool at the same time (silk, velvet, and large and small feathers) (2009: 267).

Marinetti stresses that his tactile creations have nothing to do with plastic (or visual) art: they are not painting, nor are they sculptures. Sudan-Paris is there to be touched (and not to be looked at); during its first presentation to the public at La Maison de L’Œuvre in Paris, the artwork was allegedly passed around, from hand to hand. Today, however, the work is exhibited as a traditional painting, hung on the wall and protected by a heavy glass plate, preventing any museum-goer from directly touching and experiencing the various materials used.2 In Alois Riegl’s terms, we could say that, during Futurism’s institutionalization process, the original tactile (or ‘haptic’3) qualities are exchanged for optical ones. The artwork can no longer be perceived from up close (the haptic as being the visual regime of closeness, and therefore of fragmentation), but is now contemplated as a whole, from a safe distance – precisely as in the case of Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality. It should be stressed that the haptic, in Riegl’s theory, refers to the sensation of touch (or, even better, an activated memory of the sensation of touch) rather than to actual touch; this is precisely the reason why the Austrian art historian decided to replace the term ‘tactile’, which he originally used in opposition with ‘optical’, with the ‘more fitting designation “haptic” (from haptein-fasten)’ (Riegl 1988: 190). Riegl’s haptic, thus, does not necessarily or automatically involve physical contact (or ‘contactilation’, to use Marinetti’s term) (2009: 267). For my purpose, on the contrary, ‘tactile’ (or the Italian tattile) might be a better term; it derives from the Latin tactus, the past participle of tangere (to touch). It refers indeed, more than ‘haptic’, to the concrete act of touching, that is, not metaphorical, but literal touching. Even in the case of actual touching, as I will argue in this essay, the sense of touch 2 This is how I have seen Marinetti’s tactile table on display, protected by a glass plate, in Brussels at one of the Europalia 2003 exhibitions: Futurismo 1909-1926, Musée d’Ixelles, 16 October 2003–11 January 2004. 3 Riegl borrows the term ‘haptic’ from the field of physiology, as he explains in a footnote to the polemic essay ‘Spätrömisch oder orientalisch?’ (‘Late Roman or Oriental?’), published in the Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, 23 April 1902. The essay summarizes the general arguments of his 1901 book Late Roman Art Industry in response to the attacks of the (rivalling) Polish-Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski. The term ‘haptic’ (haptisch) is an alteration of Riegl’s previously used terminology ‘tactile’ (taktisch). In the 1890s, the term ‘haptic’ was already in use with the meaning ‘pertaining to the sense of touch’. Today, the term is used in the more specific meaning of tactile feedback; it is an add-on to a tactile interface that provides feedback to the user.

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often remains subordinate to the sense of sight. Over the last decade, there has been an increased attention to issues of touch, tangibility, and haptics, especially in the field of media studies – a tendency that might be partly (or even largely) due to the pervasion of touch-based devices in our daily life. 4 By revisiting Marinetti’s Tattilismo, I want to reflect upon the conditions of the touchscreen as tactile experience and the (im)possibility of a touch cinema. Although some references to historical examples will be made, my main interest lies in the future, or possible futures, of the ‘tavola tattile’ as a cinematic application: a true Futurist cinema?

Take Two: This is Not a Touchscreen Let us return to Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality. As suggested above, the tangibility of this video installation is limited to the ‘tavola tattile’ represented. Despite the plain presence of the forefinger (and the thumb), the artwork itself is not to be touched. In other words, the installation plays with the tension between touchscreen and non-touchable screen. Today, in terms of screen technology, we seem to be witnessing a paradigm shift in which the touchscreen is becoming the default mode. This is proven by the recent phenomenon of warning notes in museums and other public spaces that accompany (old) monitors and tell us they are no touchscreens. In an absurdist, Magrittian manner, we find those ‘This is Not a Touchscreen’ signs even on ATM machines in gas stations. After such an encounter, an American blogger concludes: ‘Apple brought the power of the touchscreen to a majority of the households in America, and now we’re ruined. I find myself swiping at the built-in GPS screen in my car. My computer monitor. The screen at the ATM.’ (Riggs 2012) I would like to observe that it is about time to coin a new term for the non-touch, non-touchable, or untouchable screen, that is, the screen that existed before the introduction of the touchscreen and that is no longer the default screen. At the time of the historical avant-garde, the situation was the exact opposite. After the gradual institutionalization of the museum during the first part of the nineteenth century, the practice of touching artworks 4 See, for instance, the f ilm theoretical studies by Marks (2000) and Barker (2009); the historical case studies of interactive art in Grau (2007); the research project Texture Matters (2011-2014), led by Klemens Gruber and Antonia Lant; the special section on ‘tangibility’ of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (2012); as well as several publications in the Senses & Society journal.

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Provisional caption in the basement of EYE Film Institute Netherlands, May 2012. Photo by Wanda Strauven.

on display had become taboo, turning in the ‘interactive’ private gallery visitor of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a distant (and disciplined) viewer. By the mid-1840s, the dominant ethos was hands-off.5 In the early 1920s, Marinetti’s Tattilismo was an overt provocation in the face of the institutionalized museum culture, because it reversed the established hierarchy of the senses by saying: ‘Please don’t look, but touch!’ In the same vein, Marcel Duchamp created his famous Prière de toucher (1947), an artwork in the form of a book/catalogue with a female breast made out of foam on its cover, surrounded by black velvet. Of all the media screens (or display surfaces), the book cover is – or at least used to be (before the introduction of the eBook) – the most touchable (and most touched) one. At the other end of the scale stands the screen of the movie theatre. So, ‘touch cinema’ seems to be a contradictio in terminis, or at least an unrealizable project. Yet there exist(ed) several situations, in which the projection screen is literally touched, especially in pre- or proto-cinematic applications, in the setting of early and contemporary home cinema, and

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On the hands-on practice of early museum culture, see: Classen (2007).

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as early cinema topos.6 On the other hand, it should not be underestimated that the children of today, who constitute the next generation of cinemagoers, are growing up in a context in which the touchscreen has become the default screen. From a very early age, they are not only familiarized with the touchscreen, but also with the fact that the ‘untouchable’ cinema screen now literally fits in the palm of our hand. This brings the possibility of touch cinema close to the phenomenon of cell phone cinema, of films made by cell phone cameras and watched on cell phone screens. It does not, however, (necessarily) increase our sensory awareness, because, very simply, to touch does not does not (necessarily) mean to feel.

Take Three: Temperature While in the second half of the 1960s the first touchscreens were being developed, Jean Baudrillard observed that the hand was ‘no longer the prehensile organ that focuses effort’ but had instead become ‘nothing more than the abstract sign of manipulability’ (2005: 55). Today, Baudrillard’s theory seems more valid than ever: the increase of tactile interfaces in our daily life has not, so far, implied an enrichment of our tactile perception. However, the touchscreen technology took significant steps over the last 50 years to allow more subtle and precise tactile operations. Whereas the touchscreens of the first generation were accused of being imprecise, slow, and poorly designed, the second-generation touchscreens of the late 1980s to theearly 1990s became known as high-precision touchscreens. (Plaisant 1999) Research of the third-generation touchscreen was (and still is) much focused on multi-touch applications, allowing more than one finger at the time to touch the screen. A company such as Apple owes its success to the decision to invest in both technology and design, that is, the touchscreen interface and the touchscreen aesthetics. That they have understood that design is not only a matter of sight (for the eyes), but also of touch (for the fingers) is, for instance, clearly proven by the choices made for the original iPad’s ‘housing’, which consists no longer entirely of glass, but combines silky-like aluminium (for the back), rubber (for the logo), and leather (for the smart cover). In other words, the touchscreen design is conceived of in terms of different textures, different materials for the various touchable surfaces, that is, not only the screen but all the exterior elements of the ‘tavola tattile’ that can be 6 For a more detailed discussion of these various situations and applications, see: Strauven (2012).

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explored by travelling fingers. It almost seems Apple has tried to implement Marinetti’s recommendation to provide ‘arrangements of tactile values that permit hands to wander over them, following coloured traces and thereby realizing a succession of suggestive sensations whose rhythm, by turns languid, cadenced, or chaotic, is regulated by precise rules’ (2009: 267). Hirschhorn defines the Apple gesture as a cold gesture, by which he refers, most obviously, to the detached, non-engaged attitude of the user. So, it is a metaphorically cold gesture, which could, however, be connected to the coldness of the materials used for the surface of the apparatus: glass and metal. In ‘Tactilism’, Marinetti distinguishes six categories of tactile sensations subdivided according to two scales (planes versus volumes). Each category has its own temperature, ranging from ‘cold’ (first category) to ‘cool’ (second category), from ‘lukewarm’ (third category) to ‘warm’ (fourth to sixth category). The type of materials listed in the first category are sandpaper (carta vetrata) and, interestingly enough, aluminium foil (carta argentata), which allows for some rudimentary comparison with the ‘housing’ of Apple’s iPad. More pertinent is that Marinetti defines the touch associated with those ‘cold’ materials of the first category as ‘abstract’ and ‘certain’ – what is exactly what one could say about the gesture in Hirschhorn’s video. The other categories include touches that are ‘nostalgic’, ‘soft’, ‘human’, and ‘witty’. (Marinetti 2009: 266-267) From this categorization, we should, however, not deduce that a cold (or, respectively, hot) material automatically leads to a cold (or, respectively, hot) touch. Silk, for instance, appears in various categories, its temperature depending on its texture: smooth silk is associated with a cool touch, while plaited silk is classified as warm. Wool, on the other hand, is not warm, but rather lukewarm. What is maybe even more surprising in this tactile evaluation is the fact that material qualities like softness or smoothness do not always imply positive tactile experiences, while rough or even sharp surfaces can easily trigger pleasant feelings. Art historian Caro Verbeek tested this Futurist thesis of tactile values with contemporary audiences. In 2010, she created, with the help of Amsterdam-based artist Edward Janssen, a replica of Marinetti’s Sudan-Paris. She describes the purpose of this replica as follows: I have used it in many lectures and let it be passed around audiences, just like Marinetti did, always curious about the reactions of the public. Unexpectedly, the rough and sharp parts at the top often seemed to evoke positive associations, in contrast to the smooth, elaborate textures at the bottom, which frequently made people giggle, squeak, and sometimes even shiver, especially when pausing at the feathers (Verbeek 2012: 229).

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Reconstruction of Sudan-Parigi by Caro Verbeek and Edward Janssen, visited by Dr. Piet Devos, Amsterdam. All rights are reserved.

It seems, thus, that, in order to increase our sensory perception, we need more textured or coarse surfaces. Is this maybe the problem of today’s touchscreen devices that they have no rough surface, but a very smooth screen? So, the problem of the touchscreen for the realization of a true (Futurist) touch cinema would be the screen itself?

Take Four: Pinching Today, most smartphones come with a so-called capacitive touchscreen, which consists of a glass panel covered with a thin, transparent coat of metallic oxide. The latter is an electrical conductor, as is the human body. The contact between these two conductors creates ‘a distortion of the screen’s

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electrostatic field, measurable as a change in capacitance’ (Wikipedia 2012). Such a change allows the touchscreen device to determine the exact location of the touch. It is also this capacitive technology that made new gestures like swiping and pinching possible. These are the gestures that are so central to Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality and which I described above in purposefully non-Apple language; respectively, as ‘firm movement from right to left’ (and from left to right) and as the stretching of the image between forefinger and thumb. In her essay ‘The iPhone as an Object of Knowledge’, Alexandra Schneider (2012) observes that Steve Jobs very cleverly decided to introduce a new vocabulary for the innovative Apple gestures. Especially the expression ‘pinching’ is – I would like to add – an original and true Wittgensteinian ‘language-game’ (Sprachspiel). According to Wittgenstein, the meaning of the word depends on the language-game in which it is used; that is, the same word can change meaning when part of a different ‘activity’.7 To pinch, in Apple language, means to touch the screen very softly or tenderly; with two fingers, which move either towards each other (pinch-in) or away from each other (pinch-out). This counters, of course, the more common association of pinching with pain – as, for instance, thematized in the giant clothespin pinching installation by the Turkish artist Mehmet Ali Uysal, aptly entitled Skin 2 (2010). Schneider writes: ‘The idea of being “pinched” does not necessarily evoke the sense of a tender touch, and the etymology of the corresponding French verb pincer (from which the English word derives) confirms this intuition.’ However, as Schneider also points out, ‘when the verb first appeared, […] pincer […] also [meant] saisir d’amour, [referring to] a state of being touched (or moved) by a feeling of love’. (2012: 54) So, interestingly enough, Job’s 21st-century ‘language-game’ goes back to a ‘language-game’ of centuries ago (to the twelfth century, to be exact). Moreover, it seems that, at least until the 1920s, when Marinetti’s launched his Art of Touch, the French verb pincer was used, informally, in the meaning of ‘to love, to be in love with’. Although no reference is made to pinching, neither in the meaning of squeezing, nor in the meaning of caressing or loving, the Futurist manifesto describes ‘tactile tables for different sexes’ that must replace the ‘degrading’ game of chess: In these tactile tables, the arrangement of tactile values permits the hand of a woman and a man, acting together, to take a tactile journey 7 See Wittgenstein (1986: 11): ‘[…] the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.’

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Mehmet Ali Uysal, Skin 2 (2010), Liège, Belgium. Photo by Zoe Baraton. Courtesy of the artist and Pi Artworks Istanbul / London. All rights are reserved.

and to evaluate together. These tactile tables are extremely varied, and the pleasure that they furnish is unexpectedly enhanced as the rival sensibilities stimulate one another, the two forcing each other to feel more perceptively and to explain better their competing sensations (Marinetti 2009: 267-268).

Elsewhere, I have connected the gesture of pinching with the practice of (digital) zooming that seems to dominate our media usage today. Whereas in the last three decades of the 20th century, the practice of TV zapping led to a new attitude that the Belgian video artist Johan Grimonprez has called ‘zaptitude’, it looks like we are now entering the episteme of ‘zoomtitude’.8 Zooming has become a very common practice, thanks to very simple 8 I introduced the term ‘zoomtitude’ in the paper ‘Tracking, Zapping, Zooming’ that I delivered at the NECS 2010 conference in Istanbul. Grimonprez formulated his ‘zaptitude’-thesis in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2003): ‘A zapping mode splices blood with ketchup, like CNN: images of war cut with strawberry ice cream. It would rather point at an epistemological shift in how a “zaptitude” has transformed the way we look at reality. A jumpy fast forward vision has replaced our conventional models of perception and experience. […] We’ll soon be mistaking reality for a commercial break.’

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(digital) tools, such as the zoom levers of non-professional digital cameras, the magnifying tool in software photo-editing programs, the zooming in (+) and out (-) tool of Google Maps, etc. The Apple gesture of pinching is the touchscreen solution to zoom in and zoom out, by which the multiple layers of the image become visible, or even tangible. Even though we might not touch reality (as Hirschhorn criticizes with his Touching Reality), pinching allows us to penetrate the depth or layeredness of the image. This penetration of the image by our touching tools (forefinger and thumb) echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous definition of cinema as surgery or, rather, his comparison of the cameraman with a surgeon who ‘diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body’ (1969: 233). Filmic images, according to Benjamin, are therefore fragmented, which confirms Riegl’s thesis of the haptic. For our definition of touch cinema, we might wonder if the touchscreen itself, because of its penetrating pinching mode, is not already a form of cinema. This would mean that touch cinema is not necessarily a tactile cinema (to be touched), but rather a haptic cinema (to be looked at). This comes close to Laura Marks’ (2000) definition of ‘haptic visuality’ and its effects of fragmentation, out-of-focus, blurriness, etc., so typical of the medium of electronic video, but also, indeed, of the pinched details on our digital touchscreen devices. Thus, we touch in order to see?

Take Five: Darkness Likewise, Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality questions the role of touch in our (still) dominantly visual culture. By monstrously displaying the actual act of touching the screen, the video tells us that the finger is at the service of the eye; or, put differently, touching has become a new form of seeing. Interestingly enough, before the introduction of the iPhone, mobile phones could be operated – after some training – without the help of the eye. However cumbersome, the original SMS-protocol, which depended on a 10-button keypad (1 to 9 + 0) to create all letters of the alphabet, allowed users to write messages without looking at the (then still very small) screen. Some will remember, with nostalgia, those days when you could send text messages in the full darkness of the movie theatre, with your phone in your pocket, by simply pushing the buttons. In ‘Tactilism’, Marinetti too insists on the necessity of darkness during the process of sensory training. He recommends, for instance: ‘every night, in complete darkness, to recognize and enumerate every object in

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your bedroom’. He adds: ‘This was exactly the exercise I took up in the subterranean darkness of a dugout amid the trenches of Gorizia in 1917, when I made my first tactile experiments.’ (2009: 269) On the other hand, Marinetti also warns against the drawback of darkness, which consists of ‘concentrating attention on something too abstract’. While a well-trained, true tactilist prefers to stand ‘in the beam of a stage light’, the beginners of this new art form might be first kept in darkness, blindfolded or with their eyes closed. (2009: 268) The initiation through full darkness is at the core of some of the art installations by the contemporary American artist James Turrell, particularly his Dark Space series, which consists of unlit (and labyrinthine) corridors through which museum-goers must navigate by touch until they reach a sealed and darkened room.9 Such experiences are certainly disorientating; they make us conscious of our own body, of our sense of touch as (under-explored) spatial capacity. Yet, Turrell’s Dark Space does not help us to learn to feel better; that is, it will not turn us into true tactilists. What we need to do, for a true Futurist touch cinema to exist, is to create (or develop, or cultivate) more sensitivity in our fingertips.10 Given our daily interaction with touchscreen devices, it might seem logical, or even natural, that all touchscreen users are becoming true tactilists in the near future. Yet, as already suggested, what is (still) missing is a textured surface of this new default screen. Or, to repeat the thesis formulated above, the real problem of the touchscreen appears to be the screen itself. Touchscreen developers seem to be aware of this problem; a company called Tactus Technology, for instance, has developed a new user interface that enables real, touchable buttons to rise up from the screen surface and then, after use, magically disappear again.11 This is the concept of a tactile touchscreen, a screen that allows your fingers not only to touch, but also to feel. The industry is, of course, thinking in practical terms: tactile keyboard, tactile buttons to 9 In 2013, I visited Turrell’s Dark Space in the Sprengel Museum of Hannover, where the American artist created four site-specific installations to mark the opening of an extension at the museum in 1992. 10 Here, a connection could be made with Vivian Sobchack’s viewing experience of Jane Campion’s film The Piano; Sobchack (2000) famously describes how, during the opening shots, her fingers grasped the filmic image and understood, before her eyes did, what was going on. Even if there was no actual touching involved, the fingertips clearly felt something. 11 Tactus Technology, founded in 2008, presented their new technology at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). When the Tactus touchscreen will be commercially available is still unclear at the time of writing this essay.

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Tactus, advertisement screenshot. Courtesy of Tactus Technology. All rights are reserved.

operate the screen, etc. But this very same technology could maybe, in the near future, also lead to a more artistic (or tactilist) implementation, enabling not only functional buttons to arise, but also various textures (or ‘arrangements of tactile values’) to appear and to be explored by naked fingertips. It might even be used to create ‘tactile theatres’, according to Marinetti’s description: The seated audience will rest their hands on long tactile ribbons that will unwind in front of them, producing different tactile sensations with different rhythms. These tactile ribbons will also be arranged on little spools, with musical and lightning accompaniments (2009: 268).

Indeed, why not integrate these moving (kinematic) ribbons into the new tactile touchscreen technology? Would this not result into a true Futurist touch cinema?

Take Six: Naked Eye, Naked Finger For the conception (or realization) of touch cinema, it seems key that the screen is not so much seen with the naked eye, but rather touched with the naked f inger. The importance of nakedness is also emphasised in ‘Tactilism’, especially in relation to the (mythical) invention of this new art form. Marinetti narrates:

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I was naked in the silky water that was being shredded by rocks, by foaming scissors knives razors, among beds of iodine-soaked algae. I was naked in a sea of flexible steel that breathed with virile, fecund breath (2009: 265).

On the other hand, Marinetti also points out the necessity of wearing gloves all day long during the learning process. This way ‘the desire for varied tactile sensations’ will be condensed in the hands. (Marinetti 2009: 269) We know that today’s most common touchscreen, the capacitive one, does not allow the user to wear (non-capacitive) gloves. The touchscreen requires the naked finger; it requires a skin-to-metal-oxide contact. Indeed, the (coverless) screen can be considered as the (naked) skin of the technological device – not only metaphorically, but also very literally. This is because the terms screen and skin are etymologically connected; the first screens were protective shields made out of (animal) skin. The etymological roots of the English word screen are uncertain: it could derive from the Old North French escren, which possibly derives from the Middle Dutch screm, which, at its turn, derives from the Old German skirm, meaning ‘shield made of skin’. According to the Dutch dictionary Van Dale, the Dutch word scherm has Latin and/or Greek roots: corium and/or korion, both meaning ‘skin’.12 In other words, screen equals, in its most original or basic meaning, skin. When we touch a (media) screen, our skin is, literally and physically, in contact with another skin. Already in the late 1960s, the Austrian artist Valie Export intuitively understood this close (etymological) connection between skin and screen, when she conceived her street performance Tapp- und Tast-Kino (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968): Export turned her own naked upper-body into a film screen, not to be looked at, but to be visited by travelling (naked) (mostly male) hands.13 This was, of course, a provocative Feminist critique of the male gaze upon the female body, as displayed by classical Hollywood and theorized some years later by Laura Mulvey in her famous, and equally provocative, essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). When comparing Export’s touch cinema with Duchamp’s Prière de toucher, Verbeek points out the fundamental difference between the two provocations: whereas Export compels the audience to touch her breasts 12 For a longer, more detailed (and documented) etymological search of the term, see: Strauven (2012). 13 In Strauven (2005), I discuss Export’s performance, along with early cinema’s rube films, in terms of sensory (un)disciplining.

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in the banal yet concrete setting of the street, Duchamp’s instigation remains purely conceptual, since the naked breast on the catalogue cover is unmistakably fake. In this fakeness lies also, according to Verbeek, the fundamental difference with Marinetti’s sensory education: ‘Duchamp was not seeking a pure tactile sensation or the obtaining of knowledge through the epidermis; the role of touch in Prière de toucher was conceptual.’ (2012: 232) Indeed, in Duchamp’s case, there is no skin-to-skin contact. Another important difference to point out is the following: Export’s naked screen stays hidden from sight, behind the little curtain of the cardboard box that is attached around her upper-body, while Duchamp’s foam breast is there for the eyes too. It basically remains a visual spectacle, inviting the sense of touch to join the experience. I would like to end with a last example of contemporary multi-touch art, that somehow reverses Duchamp’s Prière de toucher: namely, the multitouch finger paintings by the American artist Evan Roth who turns the touchscreen experience into a visual spectacle, into a Prière de regarder. Unlike Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality, Roth’s paintings are not so much about the (moving) gesture, but rather about its effects or traces, about what is left behind on the screen. Roth makes huge black (sometimes combined with red) ink prints of his own f ingerprints on touchscreen devices, from the very simple gesture of ‘slide to un-lock’ to more complex multi-touching, such as typing with ten fingers on a keyboard or playing Angry Birds All Levels (2012). The latter consists of 300 sheets of tracing paper that have the same size as the iPhone on which the game was played, and that are hung on the wall, one by one, with the aid of a needle in each corner.14 However remote this might seem from the realization of a true touch cinema, Roth’s paintings make us aware of our actual touching of the screen. His paintings are nothing more (or nothing less) than traces of a real, physical skin-to-skin contact. The ‘reality’ underneath the travelling fingers has disappeared; what remains is the visualization of the ‘hand travel’ itself. ***

14 There is also a stop-motion or animated version of this 300 paper sheet art installation, which lasts about 20 seconds. The clip can be watched on the artist’s website: http://www.evan-roth. com/work/angry-birds-all-levels/.

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Evan Roth, Slide to Unlock, (Multi-Touch Painting series), Lambda print face mounted on acrylic, dibond backing, 114 cm x 70cm, Paris (2013). Photo by Vinciane Verguethen. Courtesy of Evan Roth. All rights are reserved.

We know that we leave our fingerprints on every surface we touch. But do we really know what we touch, what kind of skin our skin encounters during this ‘contactilation’? This essay is an invitation not only to touch various surfaces, but also to feel their different textures; to explore, for instance, the ‘touch of feeling’ of the various materialities used for the untouchable film screen (from the basic calico sheet to the silver-painted screen of the early days, to the classical white screen, the perforated Dolby screen and the return of the silver screen for 3D cinema). In other words, we should learn to touch, in order not only to see, but also to feel. Until the tactile touchscreen is not commercially (and artistically) available, all we can do is train ourselves by touching all those various media screens and surfaces, both in darkness and in full light, both with gloved hands and naked fingers, to develop more accurate tactile sensitivity. Maybe this way we will not even need a touch cinema, but become a sort of Alois Riegl, who developed his theory of the haptic while being a textile conservator, of the 21st century?

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References Barker, J. (2009), The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press. Baudrillard, J. (2005) [1968], The System of Objects. New York: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1969) [1936], ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, 217-264. New York: Schocken Books. Classen, C. (2007), ‘Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum’, Journal of Social History 40 (4): 895-914. Grau, O. (ed.) (2007), MediaArtHisotires. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hirschhorn, T. (2012), Insoutenables destructions du corps. Entretien a vec Hugo Vit rani. ht t p://w w w.d a i ly mot ion .com/v ideo/ xshfl0_thomas-hirschhorn-insoutenables-destructions-du-corps_creation. Marinetti, F.T. ( 2009) [1921], ‘Tactilism’, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, & L. Wittman (eds.), Futurism: An Anthology, 264-269. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham-London: Duke University Press. Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 (3): 6-18. Obrist, H.-U. (2003), ‘Email Interview with Johan Grimonprez’, in dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y: An Art Project by Johan Grimonprez, no page numbers. Brussels: Argos. Plaisant, C. (1999), ‘High-precision Touchscreens: Museum kiosks, Home Automation and Touchscreen Keyboards’. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/touchscreens/. Riegl, A. (1988) [1902], ‘Late Roman or Oriental?’, in G. Schiff (ed.), German Essays on Art History: Winckelmann, Burckhardt, Panofsky, and others, 173-190. New York: Continuum. Riggs, R. (2012), ‘http://www.yourdesignonline.com/apple-ruined-world’, Your Design Online. Technology at Work. Schneider, A. (2012), ‘The iPhone as an Object of Knowledge’ in P. Snickars & P. Vonderau (eds.), Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media, 49-60. Berkeley: Columbia University Press. Sobchack, V. (2000), ‘What my Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, Senses of cinema 5. http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/5/fingers/. Strauven, W. (2005), ‘Touch, Don’t Look’, in A. Autelitano, V. Innocenti, and V. Re (eds.), The Five Senses of Cinema, 283-291. Udine: Forum editrice. Strauven, W. (2012), ‘Early Cinema’s Touch(able) Screens: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou’, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 2. http://www.necsusejms.org/early-cinemas-touchable-screens-from-uncle-josh-to-ali-barbouyou. Verbeek, C. (2012), ‘Prière de toucher! Tactilism in Early Modern and Contemporary art’, Senses & Society 7 (2): 225-235. Wikipedia (2012), Touchscreen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen. Wittgenstein, L. (1986), Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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About the author Wanda Strauven is Privatdozentin of Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research and teaching interests include early cinema, Italian Futurism, avant-garde, media archaeology, the history of tactile media, and children’s playful interaction with media. She is the author of Marinetti e il cinema. Tra attrazione e sperimentazione (2006) and edited several collections about Film Studies.

6. Dance and Futurism in Italian Silent Cinema Elisa Uffreduzzi

Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch06 Abstract Considering the chronological coincidence of the birth of cinema parallel to modern dance, the research about Futurism – a movement of chief importance, which, during the silent era, accomplished its parabola – has to take account of its effects on these two arts of movement, especially when they interact with each other. In fact, when cinema was born, also the instances of renewal of dance modernism, promoted by performers such as Loïe Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Isadora Duncan, came to life. Their ‘new dance’ had an important impact on Italian silent cinema too. Among the various types of ‘new dance’, one of the most innovative was the ‘avantgarde dance’, here interpreted in a broad sense. This macro-category is divisible into further subcategories in turn, each one corresponding to the diverse artistic flows that influenced it, as Futurism. Keywords: Dance, Silent Cinema, Thaïs, Futurism

Futurists’ fascination with Serpentine Dance In the 1910s, Loïe Fuller’s research about dance and lighting design, aroused the interest of the brothers Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, also known as Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra. They came from the Cerebrists movement and, when they converged with the Futurist one, they provided it with their expertise in terms of cinematographic technique. In 1911, for the reissue of l’Arte dell’avvenire (The Art of the Future), Ginna and Corra contemplated the cinematography for the first time and they also made tribute to Fuller describing her as the ‘unaware precursor of the new art (Lista, 2010: 34)’. Ginna and Corra realized some abstract movies, including

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the lost short La Danza (The Dance, 1912): an experiment aimed to translate the music in images or, better yet, in colours (Lista, 2010: 137-138). A dance given by the movement of forms and colours instead of bodies, then. More­ over, consider that the Cerebrist movement, from which the two brothers came, was also devoted to spiritualist philosophy, sciences of the occult, metapsychology, and theosophy. Theosophy was the movement in which Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy originated (Lista, 2010: 30-35): in 1913, the Austrian philosopher founded the movement of anthroposophy in Germany, devoted to a deep renewal of the dance, that he considered a privileged access to a sacred dimension of the Self. Therefore, he ideated his theory of the Eurhythmy: a philosophical and choreographic conception that influenced the coeval dance world, but also a large part of the European intelligentsia of the time. In Steiner’s terms, Eurhythmy is a kind of non-static visible language, which transmits words, colours, sounds, moods, rhythms, and ideas, without any spoken language, just through abstract movements of the human body (Steiner, 1924: 18; Gordon, 1987: 95). Steiner, as well as Fuller, was also interested in the new lighting technologies and especially in the construction of the space through the electric light combined with colours. It is important to highlight that Eurhythmy and dance modernism both presented the ideal of a dance akin to the aspirations of artistic renewal expressed by the Futurists. In 1917, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1917: 238-239), containing a half critique of Isadora Duncan’s dance and a fierce reproof of Valentine de Saint-Point’s choreographies, though she was openly Futurist.1 On the contrary, the manifesto exalted Nijinsky, Loïe Fuller, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, and Marinetti also clearly stated the characteristics required for a Futurist dance: ‘anti-harmonic; illmannered; anti-gracious; asymmetrical; synthetic; dynamic; free-wordist’ (1917: 234-239). The anti-gracious concept was intended to oppose the principles of Western art (whose harmony and formal balance aimed to represent ideal beauty) and against the nineteenth-century mannerisms, which were evident in the rigid codification of romantic ballet (e.g. La Sylphide, 1832 and Giselle, 1841). In Manifesto of Futurist Dance, Marinetti accurately describes and illustrates a series of Futurist dances: The Shrapnel Dance, The MachineGun Dance, and the Dance of the Aviatrix. This shows the strong will for discarding any academicism – ‘once the glorious Italian ballet was dead and 1

She also wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Paris, 25 March 1912).

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buried’ (1917: 234-239) – and, instead, referring to the mechanical movement of the machine: One must go beyond muscular possibilities and aim in the dance for that ideal multiplied body of the motor that we have so long dreamed of. Our gestures must imitate the movements of machines assiduously paying court to steering wheels, tires, pistons, and so preparing for the fusion of man with the machine, achieving the metallism of Futurist dance (1917: 236).

Moreover, some years earlier, Marinetti stated: ‘What we need is wings! […] Yes, let’s make airplanes!’ (1909: 54). As Patrizia Veroli points out (2009: 138), ‘it was the incorporation of the mechanical devices of modernity that turned humans into modern beings’, which was the fundamental purpose of Futurism. ‘The Identification of the human being with the motor implied, for Marinetti, the possibility of a prosthetic body, with the increased potential of new external organs’ (Veroli, 2009: 139). Such a vision recalls the bamboo sticks of Loïe Fuller’s costume (intended as extensions of her arms) and was later recovered in the futurist shows of the 1920s (Veroli, 2009: 142). Fuller freed dance from the realistic balletic settings – mainly constituted by fixed décors – preferring an empty stage, designed only by the lights and the dancer’s movements. Furthermore, the floating silk of her costume amplified her movements almost completely concealing the dancer’s figure. This way, as Susan Jones highlights (2013: 21), ‘Fuller’s work even prefigured the futurist theatre’s interest in performance that eliminated the body altogether in favour of lighting design, […]. Fuller anticipated many radical inventions of “cutting edge” theatre technologies of early twentieth century’.

The Dance of the Geometrical Splendor Theories for a ‘futurist dance’ found the first practical application on the cinematic screen in the movie Vita futurista, realized in Florence in 1916 by Arnaldo Ginna. The sequence on which we focus, was entitled Dance of the Geometrical Splendor, created by Giacomo Balla. The title derived from Marinetti’s manifesto of Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility (18 March 1914). During the scene, some floodlights illuminated a few girls dressed in tin foil, while performing a rhythmicdynamic dance (Verdone, 1984: 10) that was precisely the expression – both

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choreographic and iconographic – of the ‘metallism of Futurist dance’ described by Marinetti’s dance Manifesto (1917: 236). According to Giovanni Lista, this sequence is due to Balla’s fanciful imagery and it is also ideally linked to Loïe Fuller’s dance, whose choreographic research also involved lighting design. In fact, her repertoire included the Danse d’acier [Dance of Steel, 1914], a ballet to the music by Florent Schmitt, characterized by rhythmic rigidity and described by coeval chroniclers as ‘the sway of fabrics with metallic ribbons, brightly illuminated’ (Lista, 2010: 206). The few surviving frames portraying the Dance of the Geometrical Splendor (Verdone, 1967: appendix) though insufficient for a deep analysis of the choreography, allow some significant considerations: the pose of the dancer’s arms – whose shape is superimposed on the left side of the frame – composes an attitude that suggests the balletic third (left) position of the arms according to Enrico Cecchetti’s method, although there are some (perhaps volunteer) defects. In fact, the dancer’s elbows wrongly face downwards, and the palm of the left hand limply hangs over her head. Moreover, her right arm seems to be laying on a barre, as during a ballet lesson. If this unconventional pose was accomplished with intention, one could assume that – in spite of the theorization of the forthcoming Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1917) – Marinetti’s dance conception considered the classical-romantic ballet technique as a starting point, something to be deconstructed and transformed, rather than fully rejected.

Thaïs – between dance and mimodramma Thaïs2 (directed by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, 1916), is the most striking example of a surviving futurist movie imbued with choreographic elements. Despite the ‘futurist label’, this picture recovers a coherent narrative plot, as compared with Vita futurista. Ileana Leonidoff, a modern dancer renowned in 1910s and 1920s Italy, performs the dance scene as Bianca

2 Cast: Tais Galizky (Countess Vera Predorajenska/ Thaïs); Ileana Leonidoff (Bianca Belincioni [sic] Stagno); Alberto Casanova (a suitor); Augusto Bandini (Oscar). The f ilm was found in 1938 by Henri Langlois, with the title Les Possédées. Actually it was the edition with French intertitles of the movie thaïs, by Anton Giulio Bragaglia. The only surviving copy of this movie is preserved at La Cinémathèque française.

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Belincioni Stagno,3 ‘dancer and good horsewoman’ as the movie intertitles state. Ileana Leonidoff was a pseudonym for Elena Sergeevna Pisarevskaja, born in Sevastopol (Crimea), in 1893. In July 1916, she participated in a soirée at Costanzi Theater in Rome: with Tais Galizky, she performed a series of improvized dances, in substitution for Stacia Napierkowska’s dance programme, which had been cancelled. The show was widely praised and it had a deep impact on the Futurist Anton Giulio Bragaglia, to the extent that he hired both Galizky and Leonidoff for his movie Thaïs. The main character – the countess Vera Preobajenska (who was called ‘Nitchevo’ and also had the pseudonym ‘Thais’), played by Tais Galizky was yet another repetition of the myth of the femme fatale redeemed by death. On the contrary, Leonidoff played the opposite role of the angelic woman and dancer. At that time, she had probably already performed in some movies, playing minor roles for the Film d’Arte Italiana production company since 1914 (Piccolo, 2009: 17-23; Chiti, 1961: col. 983; Gili, 1986: 1-7). However, Ileana Leonidoff was a performer as well as a theorist: in April 1918, she published her own artistic manifesto in the magazine Il Mondo, entitled Il mimodramma, exposing her peculiar choreographic conception, between pantomime and dance. In that text, Leonidoff explicitly talks about poses (Leonidoff, 1918: 35-37). Laura Piccolo (2009: 35) suggests Bragaglia’s collaboration for the redaction of her text and actually Bragaglia later expressed his interest in pantomime in the essays Evoluzione del mimo (1930) and Il film sonoro (1929). Bragaglia considered pantomime as the origin and the main purpose of cinema production and he wished to revive pantomime as the only way for cinema, to achieve the status of art. According to him, cinema and pantomime had in common the tendency for the contamination with other forms of art and, in order to improve their expressive potential, ‘the history of pantomime’ and by extension of cinema, argues Bragaglia, ‘is an interrupted alternative to the multifaceted collaboration proposed to the “mute” art by the word and, in different degrees, by dance […], which deforms and alienates from its being the spiritual and delicate art of Terpsichore.’ Cinema and pantomime are weak arts, corrupted by an original sin, and therefore always seeking a surplus of expression and emotion that they borrow from other arts (spoken word, dance, music, theater…). As a consequence, Bragaglia maintains, they lose their 3 Belincioni, according to the movie intertitles, but probably meaning Bellincioni (with double ‘l’).

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originality, risk failure, and jeopardize their very identity (Mosconi, 2003: 39) (Bragaglia, 1930: 11).

In her manifesto, Ileana Leonidoff states that the superiority of mimodramma, in comparison with dance, is due to the wider degree of freedom of the various subjects involved (the author of the plot, the music composer, the orchestra, and the actors). That freedom makes the mimodramma an ‘unlimited creation’, ‘the synthesis of the Art’ (1918: 36). Leonidoff’s mimicchoreographic theory mixed pantomime, dance, music, and symbolism under the aegis of Futurist avant-garde. Despite her early statements and the lack of a professional training, she continued her career as a dancer even after her retirement from the screen. In Thaïs, we have the rare occasion to see her choreographic ideas translated in practice. Enrico Prampolini’s visionary set design was characterized by various geometrical motifs, since the first frame of the movie. In 1915 Prampolini published the manifesto of Futurist Scenography and Choreography, in which he promoted the anti-naturalistic scenography and the oblivion of painted backdrops for ‘a colourless electromechanical architectural structure, enlivened by chromatic waves from a source of light, produced by electric reflectors with coloured filters arranged and coordinated in accordance with the mood demanded by every dramatic action’ (Prampolini, 1915: 214). As it seems, Prampolini fully understood and inherited the subversive stagecraft proposed by Loïe Fuller for her Serpentine Dance (Lista, 2005: 62-63). The choreographic scene of Thaïs takes place at the beginning of the movie and the second intertitle anticipates the following shot, which introduces Bianca, the dancer. Just a few seconds of performance are enough to convey a minimalist choreography. The dance is completely irrelevant for the development of the plot; nonetheless, it provides Ileana Leonidoff the chance to show her skills as a dancer, which must have determined Bragaglia’s choice for her role. For the dance scene of Thaïs, Leonidoff wears a turban, tight trousers under a skirt, a shirt, a bolero jacket, and a kind of sautoir on her neck, namely the stereotypical odalisque costume. She also wears flat shoes (a kind of demi-pointe shoes in ballet terms): this is the only element that recalls ballet costumes, whilst the overall outfit is reminiscent of the Orientalist female fashion of the time; the skirt-trousers especially recall the robes sultanes designed by Paul Poiret in 1911 for Parisian women (Morini, 2000: 151). Poiret’s new models were probably due to the innovative costumes designed by Léon Bakst for Shéhérazade (1910), the renowned ballet choreographed by Fokine for the Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company. Ileana Leonidoff

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Film still from Thaïs (Anton Giulio Bragaglia, 1916). Courtesy of Archivio Prampolini, at Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Museo Nazionale di Arte Contemporanea MACRO, and Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia (Centro Studi Bragaglia). All rights are reserved.

founded her own company of Russian ballets in May 1920, and called it Balli Russi Leonidoff (Piccolo, 2009: 99). Despite its briefness, the choreography in Bragaglia’s movie, combines the mannerisms of classical-romantic ballet with stylistic elements of modern dance and gestures of Eastern taste, due to the coeval Orientalist vogue. Actually, the dance is mainly constituted by choreographic poses, which seem to deconstruct the ballet grammar of steps and attitudes: – First Pose: Ileana Leonidoff brings her left arm in front of her face, keeping her elbow down, while her right arm is stretched backward. Her legs are in the left effacé derrière position, but the legs are en dedans and she bends her knees. For a canonical arabesque, the working leg (the left one, in this case) should be raised up, instead of being pointed on the ground. The result is a kind of deconstructed balletic second arabesque. At the same time, the position of the dancer’s arms seems to trace back to Ancient Egypt paintings; thus, it recalls Isadora Duncan’s and Ruth Saint Denis’s Orientalist choreographies, for whom the reminiscence of Antique Greece (Duncan) and India or Egypt (St. Denis) were the basis of their dance concept.

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– Second pose: From the previous pose, the dancer just stretched out her legs, the right one en dehors, the left one en tendu en dedans backward, maintaining the left effacé derrière position en dendans. The arms draw a kind of circle beside Leonidoff’s face, on her right side. – Third pose: The dancer brings her arms in the second ballet position allongé, with a marked lateral tilt of the torso on her right side and the glance towards her right hand. The arms thus follow the dancer’s bust. The body posture is now different: this is a right side effacé derrière, with flexed parallel knees. – Fourth pose: This time the arms are stretched backwards, while the legs are crossed in front of the dancer (the right one in front of the left). Her head is turned downwards, glancing to her right side. I define this peculiar pose as ‘the Swan one’, since it recalls the eccentric attitude of the arms that represent the iconic synthesis of the ballet The Dying Swan (1907), the famous solo that Mikhail Fokin expressively created for Anna Pavlova. – Fifth pose: The crossing of the legs changes (the left one is now in front of the right) and she sits on the ground, laying her hands on her lap. The outcome is a kind of balletic plié taken to the extreme, until she touches the ground. Leonidoff keeps her eyes downwards, but her head and her back are stretched upright. She finally ‘waits’ until the conclusion of the shot, maintining this anomalous plié position. While the first, fourth, and final grand plié are imbued with ballet grammar and Orientalism, the second and third poses are minimalist and geometrical like Prampolini’s set design. This composite statuesque choreography is undoubtedly modernist, stylized, and innovative.

Solo dances and Futurism – who is in and who is out? Solo dance is a distinctive feature of avant-garde dances, from Serpentine Dance to Thaïs and the Manifesto of Futurist Dance: in fact, as Giovanni Lista points out (Lista, 2005: 62), dance innovations are given as far as the danseuse performs the choreography by herself, since, in ballet choral dances, the dancer was expected to express the choreographer’s sensibility, whilst the soloist – in avant-garde and modernist performances – was expected to communicate her own feelings, bringing the subject to the centre of the stage and the artistic authorship. In fact, ‘While frequently the dancer and the choreographer had separate functions in ballet, Fuller’s

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solo combined both (Jones, 2013: 22).’ However, Susan Jones (2013: 9-10) also underlines a contradiction in the impersonality that some Futurists (e.g. Umberto Boccioni) were looking for and that was also required by Nijinsky to Ballets Russes’s dancers, for his modern ballet choreographies. Such a refusal of the subjectivity for Nijinsky meant the interpretation of ‘an abstract, formal aesthetic’, respect to which the dancer was a mere medium; whilst, for the Futurists, it meant the rejection of individuality in favour of a stage totally entrusted to the action of the body (instead of the body itself) and the expression of abstract concepts: ‘pure plastic rhythm’ (Jones, 2013: 9). Additionally, Valentine de Saint-Point’s Metachoric Dances (première at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in 1913), were abstract choreographies constituted by solos focused on the iconic value of the costume, which was supposed to convey situations and moods rather than a storyline (Lista, 2005: 62). Why were the creations of a futurist dancer who seemed to meticulously follow the ‘futurist rules’, so fiercely rejected by Marinetti? In his Manifesto of Futurist Dance, he wrote: her métachorie consists of poems that are mimed and danced. Unfortunately it is passéist poetry that navigates within the old Greek and medieval sensibility: abstractions danced but static, arid, cold, and emotionless. Why deprive oneself of the vivifying element of imitation? Why put on a Merovingian helmet and veil one’s eyes? The sensibility of these dances turns out to be elementary limited monotonous and tediously wrapped up in an outdated atmosphere of fearful myths that today no longer mean a thing. A frigid geometry of poses which have nothing to do with the great simultaneous dynamic sensibility of modern life. With much more modern ambitions, Dalcroze has created a very interesting rhythmic gymnastics, which nevertheless limits its effects to muscular hygiene and describing agrarian field work. We Futurists prefer Loïe Fuller and the African American cakewalk (utilization of electric lights and mechanical movements) (Marinetti, 1917: 236; emphasis in the original).

Therefore, the ancient-inspired costumes she wore and the lack of dynamism seem to be the main reasons for the rejection of Metachoric Dances. Moreover, Isadora Duncan – who received Marinetti’s praise – used to wear a Greek-style tunic and, a few lines earlier, the same manifesto recognized: ‘Valentine de Saint-Point has conceived an abstract and metaphysical dance that was meant to embody pure thought, without sentimentality or sexual excitement’ (Marinetti, 1917: 236), thus, adhering to the Futurist precepts.

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Most probably, the secret reason of this blame resided in Saint-Point’s detachment from the Futurist movement (around 1914), to pursue her own path of research, fame, and career. Valentine was a feminist indeed and she reached the peak of her success around 1917 (the year of the Manifesto of Futurist Dance), when she performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York (Berghaus, 1993: 27-42), (Merwin, 1998: 77-78). A manifestation of independence that Marinetti seems had not forgiven. Moreover, Marinetti refused her ‘frigid geometry of poses’, revealing a contradiction within the Futurist movement if we compare Marinetti’s statements in 1917 with Leonidoff’s seemingly static dance in Thaïs. In light of these considerations, where is rooted the acceptance of Leonidoff’s statuesque poses in Bragaglia’s movie?

Stacia Napierkowska Ileana Leonidoff and Tais Galizky substituted the famous French dancer and actress Stacia Napierkowska during the concert of 1916, when Bragaglia saw and chose them for his movie. Therefore, it is licit to wonder if Leonidoff, replacing Napierkowska, imitated her dance, then writing her manifesto of mimodramma in order to pursuit her own style and artistic status. The Polish dancer Stacia Napierkowska (1891-1945) soon escaped from the academic ballet training, looking for unconventional dances and pantomime (Bousquet & Martinelli, 1988: 1-16), which marked her cinematographic acting: Napierkowska, moved from pantomime acting to acting almost exclusively for film. But the overall presence of pantomime actors, or actors who had established themselves in pantomime, in French filmmaking, is undeniable. However, by the same token, these actors fit seamlessly into the ensembles with which they worked, ensembles that included many actors from other stage traditions. Napierkowska, it is true, is an actress with a very distinctive, dance-like style (she had been a dancer as well as a mime […]) (Brewster, 2003: 27).

An impressive example of her dance style is displayed in the first dance scene of the movie Effetti di luce (Ercole Luigi Morselli & Ugo Falena, 1916). The choreography once again consists of a dynamic sequence of choreographic poses. Despite the modernist allure and intention of the choreography (the dancer coeval elegant clothes), there are also some

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elements clearly attributable to the ballet technique, such as the croisé devant or derrière body positions, the port the bras, the épaulement, the tendu, and the cambré: small details that reveal Napierkowska’s previous ballet training. The ballet elements intervene mainly between a pose and another, assuring gracefulness and a sense of continuous motion, during those moments of transition. In other words, they guarantee the dynamism that Futurists were looking for, perhaps the reason for the acceptance of Leonidoff’s dance in Thaïs, via Napierkowska’s example.

Conclusions From François Delsarte’s body-mind system of expressions to Geneviève Stebbins’s statue-posing; from Isadora Duncan Ancient-Greek inspired dance to Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s plastique animée, 4 choreographic poses are a constant leitmotiv, variously proposed. Dalcroze’s theory of movement focused on ‘plastic poses’, meant as dynamic passages, instead of static pauses (Dalcroze, 1919: 138-142). Therefore, the movement was given by the uninterrupted flow from one pose to another: a feature also recognizable in Stacia Napierkowska’s first dance in Effetti di luce and, consequently, Ileana Leonidoff’s dance in Thaïs. In light of these considerations, it is not surprising that Leonidoff’s dance was accepted by Futurists whilst Valentine de Saint-Point’s Metachoric Dances were not: the dynamism intrinsic to the poses is the discriminant element between the two choreographies. Napierkowska’s dance thus functions as the connecting link between the modern theories of body movement, dance, and silent cinema, while Leonidoff actualized that peculiar choreographic concept by inserting it under the auspices of Futurism, sharply perceiving the trend of the time.

References Bragaglia, A. G. (1930), Evoluzione del mimo. Milan: Ceschina. Brewster, B. (2003), ‘What Happened to Pantomime?’, Cinema & Cie, 2: 15-35. Bousquet, H. & V. Martinelli (1988), ‘La bella Stasià’, Immagine. Note di storia del cinema, 8: 1-16. 4 Dalcroze began to publish his ideas in 1897. It is thus plausible that his theory was circulated in Europe in 1916, when Effetti di luce was realized, although the first edition of his major text Le rythme, la musique et l’éducation was published in 1919.

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Chiti, R. (1961), ‘Ileana Leonidov’, in Id., Filmlexicon degli autori e delle opere. Rome: Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, IV: 983. Gili, J. A. (1986), ‘Thaïs’, in Immagine. Note di storia del cinema, 2: 1-7. Gordon, M. (2007), Il sistema di Stanislavsky. Dagli esperimenti del Teatro d’Arte alle tecniche dell’Actor’s Studio, Venezia, Marsilio, 2007 [The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987]. Berghaus, G. (1993), ‘Dance and the Futurist Woman: The Work of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953)’, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 11 (2): 27-42. Jacques- Dalcroze, É. (2008), Il ritmo, la musica e l’educazione, L. Di Segni-Jaffé (ed.) Turin: EDT, [Le rythme, la musique et l’éducation. Lausanne: Foetisch Frères, 1919]. Jones, S. (2013), Literature, Modernism, and Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leonidoff, I. (1918), ‘Il mimodramma’, Il Mondo, 15: 10, in L. Piccolo (2009), Ileana Leonidoff. Lo schermo e la danza. Rome: Aracne editrice. Lista, G. (2005), ‘La danza come performance individuale da Loie Fuller alle avanguardie’, in G. Belli & E. G. Vaccarino (eds.), La Danza delle Avanguardie, 59-76. Milan: Skira, 2005. —. (2010), Il cinema futurista. Genoa: Le Mani. Marinetti, F. T. (1909), ‘Let’s Murder the Moonlight’ in L. Raney, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An Anthology, 54-61. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. —. (1917), Manifesto of Futurist Dance, L. Raney, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An Anthology. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 234-240. Merwin, T. (1998), ‘Loïe Fuller’s influence on F. T. Marinetti’s futurist dance’, Dance Chronicle, 21 (1): 77-78. Morini, E. (2000), Storia della moda. XVIII-XX secolo. Milan: Skira. Mosconi, E. (2003), ‘The Art of “Speaking Silently”’, Cinema & Cie 2: 36-46. L. Piccolo (2009), Ileana Leonidoff. Lo schermo e la danza. Rome: Aracne editrice. Prampolini, E (1915), ‘Scenografia futurista’, La balza futurista, 3: 17-21. Steiner, R. (1997), Euritmia linguaggio visibile. Quindici conferenze tenute a Dornach dal 24 giugno al 12 luglio 1924. Milan: Editrice antroposofica. Verdone, M. (1967), ‘Cinema e letteratura del futurismo’, Bianco e Nero XXVIII (10-11-12), Rome: Edizioni di Bianco e Nero. —. (ed.) (1984), Manifesti futuristi e scritti teorici di Arnaldo Ginna e Bruno Corra. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Veroli, P. (2009), ‘Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism: Electricity, Technological Imagination and the Myth of the Machine’, in G. Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 125-147. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi.

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About the author Elisa Uffreduzzi (Ph.D., University of Florence) is an expert in theories of dance and body movement in relation to the silent screen. Her publications include the book La danza nel cinema muto italiano (Aracne, 2017) and the essay Mambo and Maggiorate: Italian Female Stardom in the 1950s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Her research interests include digital humanities and the influence of popular theatre in silent pictures. In 2016 she joined the Media Ecology Project (Dartmouth College), pursuing the granular analysis of Florence Lawrence films.

7.

Futurism and cinema in the 1910s A reinterpretation starting from McLuhan Antonio Saccoccio Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch07 Abstract The analysis of manifestos, articles and essays written in the 1910s by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni, the two leading theorists of the Futurist movement, shows a strong influence of the film language on their sensitivity and their imagination. However, the Futurists approached film-making late and with circumspection. An interpretation of this ambivalent attitude can be provided by the theories developed by Marshall McLuhan half a century later. This study rises from the consideration that any attempt to explain Futurists’ ideas and behaviours with regard to cinema will be doomed to failure if it remains closed within the disciplinary debate. It is necessary, instead, to frame these ideas and behaviours in a global media system. In this essay, then, I will examine a number of texts written by the Futurists and explain how they anticipated some ideas later developed by McLuhan. Keywords: Futurist Manifestos, Marinetti, Boccioni, McLuhan, Media Theory

The cinema in the Futurist imaginary Marinetti’s early manifestos do not include any reference to movies. This is not surprising because, in this first phase of theoretical elaboration, the exaltation of dynamism and speed is entrusted to the new means of transport, in particular the automobile and the airplane,neglecting the media of information and communication (telegraph, gramophone, telephone, and cinema). Futurists show little interest in film. In L’incendiario by Aldo Palazzeschi, a collection of poems published in 1910 in Milan by Futurist Press “Poesia”,

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cinema is never mentioned. In the anthology The Futurist Poets, published in 1912 by Futurist Press “Poesia”, about 80 lyrics by thirteen authors are included. It is significant that, more than three years after the rise of the movement, in a volume of Futurist poetry of over 400 pages, cinema is mentioned only three times and by a single author: Libero Altomare. To the other major Futurists included in the collection (Palazzeschi, Buzzi, Govoni, Folgore, and Cavacchioli), film does not offer any interesting poetical cues. The founder of Futurism mentions cinema only in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, dated 11 May 1912: Film offers us the dance of an object that disintegrates and recomposes itself without human intervention. It offers us the backward sweep of a diver whose feet fly out the sea and bounce violently back on the springboard. Finally, it offers us the sight of a man driving at two hundred kilometers per hour. All these represent the movements of matter which are beyond the laws of human intelligence, and hence of an essence which is more significant (Marinetti 1912).

In 1913, probably due to the intensification of the theoretical debate in the journal Lacerba, the Futurists began to take cinema into consideration. In the article dated 15 March 1913 that appeared in the Florentine journal, Umberto Boccioni mentions cinema alongside the gramophone, electrical advertisements, and speed as ‘anti-artistic manifestations’, bearers of the new sensibility that is the basis of Futurism (Boccioni 1913a). This is a fundamental observation, which was recovered and amplified by Marinetti two months later in his manifesto Destruction of Syntax Wireless Imagination Words-in-Freedom: Futurism is based on the complete renewal of human sensibility that has occurred as an effect of science’s major discoveries. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the gramophone, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the airplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (the synthesis of a day in the world’s life) are not aware of the decisive influence that these various forms of communication, transportation, and information have on their psyches (Marinetti 1913a).

By this point in time, means of communication are on the same level as means of transportation. Cinema was one of the inspirations of the new Futurist sensibility, as confirmed by Carlo Carrà’s manifesto of The Painting

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of Sounds, Noises and Smells, dated 11 August 1913 and published in Lacerba in September of the same year. ‘Our canvases, in that event, will express the plastic equivalent of the sounds, noises, and smells found in theaters, music-halls, cinemas, brothels, railroad stations, ports, garages, hospitals, factories, etc.’ (Carrà 1913). A further step is demonstrated in Marinetti’s The Variety Theater (November 1913), in which the cinema enters directly into the Futurist spectacle. The Variety Theater is unique today in making use of film, which enriches it with an incalculable number of visions and spectacles that couldn’t otherwise be performed (battles, riots, horse races, automobile and airplane meets, travels, transatlantic steamers, the recesses of the city, of the countryside, of the oceans and the skies) (Marinetti 1913b).

With reference to Boccioni’s article, there is an annotation of considerable importance for our discussion: ‘The charge that we are merely being “cinematographic” makes us laugh; it is vulgar idiocy. We are not trying to subdivide each individual image, we are looking for a sign, or better, a single form, to replace the old concepts of division with new concepts of continuity’ (Boccioni 1913a). The decisiveness with which Boccioni distances himself from the cinematographic medium and the care with which he subsequently argues his statement, suggests that we are faced with a considerable problem. This forces us to broaden our field of investigation.

McLuhan, Futurism, cinema, and the media system At this point, it is appropriate to consider cinema as part of a larger medial system, which also includes the telegraph, photography, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the phonograph, etc. Not surprisingly, all these means are mentioned in the Futurist texts. To analyse the relationship between Futurism and media, some categories developed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s are useful. In particular, it should be noted that, according to the Canadian scholar in the modern age, two distinct phases follow one another: the first is dominated by mechanical technology and finds its greatest representatives in Gutenberg and the printing press; the second phase is dominated by electricity. Futurism was born – certainly not by chance – just at the moment in which the electrical phase was beginning to establish itself strongly in some European countries. It seems that the Futurists understood only partially to act in this era of transition between

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mechanical technology and electrical new technology, without being able to have a clear understanding. Marinetti and Boccioni state that the new means of communication, transportation, and information (including cinema) profoundly influence and transform human sensibility; they also offer us a number of ways in which this happens, but they cannot quite understand that electrical technology is deeply different from the purely mechanical. The exaltation of speed often induces the Futurists to enhance indiscriminately all that is new, because ‘the new’ produces speed and especially transformation. This is not the context to explore this topic, but there is no doubt that the futurists were instinctively in complete harmony with the changes induced by electricity. For our discussion, a closer look is useful to pinpoint that if machines and electricity are idolized by Futurists in the same way, the same is not true of the other technologies and media. On one hand, photography (a mechanical medium) met with Futurists’ general condemnation; on the other hand, the telegraph and telephone (electric media) were exalted. For the cinema, the situation is more complex, because it is glorified, but, at the same time, it takes a secondary place in the artistic field. Indeed, it is the reading of McLuhan that can supply us with an explanation of this ambiguity. In Understanding Media, the Canadian scholar strongly asserts: ‘The movie […] is a spectacular wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world’ (McLuhan 1964). McLuhan firmly believes this; indeed, it is repeated in another passage of the same volume: ‘The hybrids of electricity and the older mechanics have been numerous. Some of them, such as the phonograph and the movie, are discussed elsewhere in this volume’ (McLuhan 1964). The same McLuhan also warns us that, in periods of transition, the effects of two technologies tend to overlap. The same was also for Futurism, which found itself to act during the transition between the mechanical age and the electric age.

The book, the film, and the mechanical reproduction of reality It is the manifesto The Futurist Cinema (1916) that offers us an interesting mediological hint: For a long time the book, an utterly passéist means of preserving and communicating thought, has been fated to disappear, along with cathedrals, towers, crenelated walls, museums, and the pacifist ideal. A static companion to those who are sedentary, nostalgic, and neutralist, the

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book cannot entertain or exalt the new Futurist generations intoxicated with revolutionary and bellicose dynamism. […] The Futurist cinema will develop, sharpen sensibility, will accelerate creative imagination, endow intelligence with a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence. In so doing, the Futurist cinema will collaborate in the general renewal, replacing the literary review (always pedantic) and drama (always predictable), and killing the book (always tedious and oppressive) (Marinetti 1916).

The manifesto opens with a sharp attack on the passéist means par excellence, the book, which will be replaced by the new Futurist medium, the cinema. There is a remarkable reference to the simultaneity as a fundamental attribute of Futurist cinema, remarkable because the simultaneity is seen by McLuhan as the main feature of electric media. In this first part of the manifesto, the Futurists really seem to be aware of the ongoing conflict in the world between old and new media. They even understand that new media do not ever completely replace the old media:1 ‘Propaganda needs may still oblige us to publish a book every now and then. But we prefer to express ourselves through the cinema, through great screens of words-in-freedom and mobile illuminated signboards’ (Marinetti 1916). It is useful to compare this statement with a very similar one uttered by Marinetti in the previously mentioned manifesto Destruction of Syntax Wireless Imagination Words-in-Freedom (1913): My Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (11 May 1912), in which I first invented synthetic and essential lyricism, wireless imagination, and words-in-freedom, is concerned exclusively with poetic inspiration. Philosophy, the exact sciences, politics, journalism, education, business, however much they may seek synthetic forms of expression, will still have to make use of syntax and punctuation. Indeed, I myself have to make use of them in order to advance the exposition of my concepts (Marinetti 1913a).

In both cases, the new Futurist expressions (synthetic lyricism, words in freedom, cinema, etc.) are preferred, but, at the same time, it must be admitted that the use of traditional books, subject to syntax and punctuation, is still privileged for argumentative texts. The verb ‘costringere’, used on 1 ‘The simultaneity of electric communication, also characteristic of our nervous system, makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world’ (McLuhan 1964).

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both occasions, indicates that Marinetti and the Futurists use traditional linear writing reluctantly. Further down in the same manifesto of 1913, we read: ‘I urged instead a swift, brutal, and immediate lyricism, one that would appear to all our predecessors as antipoetic, a telegraphic lyricism that would have nothing of the bookish about it, but as much as possible of the flavor of life’ (Marinetti 1913a). The book is clearly seen here as opposite to the telegraph; thus, alien to modern life. The manifesto can only culminate in the section dedicated to the typographic revolution, in which the book is ‘made futurist’ through the destruction of harmony and linearity of the written page: I have initiated a typographical revolution directed against the bestial, nauseating sort of book that contains passéist poetry or verse à la D’Annunzio, handmade paper that imitates models of the seventeenth century, festooned with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, decorative capitals in red ink with loops and squiggles, vegetables, mythological ribbons from missals, epigraphs, and Roman numerals. The book must be the Futurist expression of Futurist thought. Not only that. My revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page itself’ (Marinetti 1913a).

Marinetti anticipates what McLuhan’s conception: ‘It is the artist’s job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new’ (McLuhan 1964). The typographic revolution and free-word tables disarrange the mechanical linearity of the written page to make the readers of Futurist books ready to welcome the simultaneity of the new electric media.The refusal of a certain mechanical nature occurs many times in the Futurist texts in reference to photography and also to the cinema. Indeed, in the article Futurist Dynamism and French Painting, Boccioni states: ‘The worst thing is for the short-sighted people […] that had believed we were seekers of trajectory and mechanical gestures. We have always refused with a feeling of disgust and contempt as being outside art the furthest relationship with photography’ (Boccioni 1913b). Similarly, Soffici states in La pittura futurista, published in Lacerba (15 December 1913): ‘We can observe that by dynamism they literally meant some representation of motion, comparable to that which cinema conveys. It would be difficult to imagine something more coarse. They did not understand that the word dynamism in our language, which is that of painting and not of mechanics,

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only wanted to mean the chance to get out of Cubist static […]’ (Soffici 1913b). Boccioni writes, in his essay Pittura scultura futuriste: ‘It is this passionate love for the Reality that makes us prefer an American Cake-Walk dancer to a Valkyrie’s audition, which makes us prefer the filmed day’s events to a classical tragedy’ ­(Boccioni 1914). But the Futurists cannot simply duplicate reality; for this reason, they condemn photography and film as simple mechanical reproductions. Boccioni is categorical: ‘Our work therefore consists of pure plastic elements, it awards the job of “plausible reproduction” of objects and figures to the illustrators and photographers and all mechanical means of reproduction.’ In L’Italia futurista (1 October 1916), we read: ‘Let us free the cinema from its slavery to a simple reproducer of reality, from the confines of a lively photography, and raise it to art, that is, a means of expression: painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, etc.’ In the contemporary manifesto The Futurist Cinema: ‘Because it essentially visual, cinema must above all fulfill the evolution that painting has undergone: detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn’ (Marinetti 1916). As we can see, to Boccioni, the adjective ‘mechanical’ often loses the positive value that it almost always has in Marinetti’s writings. Papini and Soffici, however, do not oppose each other. Giovanni Lista writes: The Futurist art had to fix the sensitive data of reality, as it wanted to be the heir of Impressionism; but it aimed at overcoming the mechanism of cinema and photography in order to interpret the movement as duration, that is as a continuous stream of space-time that is identified with the consciousness of the subject in action (Lista 2001: 17).

According to Stephen Kern, Futurists perceive the opposition between the sequence of the books and the simultaneity of cinema. Citing their manifesto on the cinematography, the scholar says: ‘In 1916, the Futurists celebrated the capacity of the cinema, which will give the intelligence a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence. They felt the sequence in books overwhelming, and preferred cinematograph films, because they offered an alogical, fleeting synthesis of life in the world’ (Kern 1983). Here, Kern already analyses the Futurism with McLuhan’s categories. The simultaneity and the analog synthesis of cinema oppose the typical sequence of books. It is not difficult to find oppositions of this kind in texts written by Futurists in the 1910s; they testify to their adherence to the new electrical world and a rejection of the mechanical world. Futurists enhance synthesis and disregard analysis; they embrace simultaneity and try to demolish linear sequence; they employ plenty of analogue processes and attack logic.

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As we can see, according to McLuhan, the former terms are all the result of electrical technology, while the latter are peculiarities of the mechanical phase.

Analysis and synthesis Let us return to the discussion of the article published by Boccioni on Lacerba of March 1913. Just a month later, again in Lacerba, Soffici touchs upon this theme in an article that bears the significant title Teoria del movimento nella plastica futurista: We imagine, therefore, that when the Futurists pose as a term of their pictorial research, the dynamics or movement of bodies in space, they intend to replace the synthesis required in every work of authentic art, an analysis of the different states or positions of the members of a reality, so that from the configuration of the successive stages of the gesture or of the movement, an illusion of motion appears in the eyes of the viewer, which similarly occurs more or less in the mechanism of cinema. […] It is superfluous to remark, I think, as this way of understanding is, much further from intelligence, bestial (Soffici 1913b).

With this article, Soffici intends to clarify ‘the idea of ​​movement in painting as perceived by Futurists’ and, to do this, he must first explain that their research has nothing to do with films, stating that Futurists look for synthesis, whereas analysis reigns in cinema. The reasoning is not far from that previously stated by Boccioni, according to which Futurism is looking for a ‘unique shape’ rather than for a division.In the summer of 1913, Boccioni writes in Lacerba the article Futurist Dynamism and French Painting, in which, starting from a few observations of Fernand Léger, he claims the ‘priority’ of Futurism ‘in all dynamic research’. Once again, cinema is quoted: We were outraged, in Paris and elsewhere. We were called photographers, antiartistics, cynematographic and especially with the intention of insulting us for our colours, we were called Impressionists! And the Italian critics, by Mr. Henri des Pruraux, gave us the following definition: “It is from the snapshot that grotesque statements derived: A trotting horse has twenty pairs of legs… The snapshot, and its aggravating: the cinema, which breaks life, tossed at a hasty and monotonous pace, would they be

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the two new classics in favour of whom Futurists proscribe the masters of the museums?”. Indeed, it is a polite but wrong question. You have to be lenient. Critics, poor people, they cannot understand but the works and the defined periods. (Boccioni 1913b), (La Voce, n. 44, October 31, 1912).

The core of this discussion is clear: the French accuse the Italian Futurists of reproducing the patterns of film and photography; in this way, they tend to put their painting outside art. Here’s one of the reasons why Boccioni and other painters are forced to distance themselves, repeatedly and publicly, from the cinema.2 The process of approaching the film takes a turn when the synthetic theatre is launched (1915). Let us keep in mind that, in the manifesto The Futurist Cinema, the Futurist manifestos The Futurist Synthetic Theater and The Variety Theater are named immediately and the cinema is called ‘a new theatrical zone’. In the manifesto The Futurist Synthetic Theater, we read: ‘This essential and synthetic brevity will enable the theatre to sustain and even overcome competition from the cinema’ (Marinetti 1916). The subtitle of the manifesto, however, proposes a series of very significant adjectives in brackets: (atechnical-dynamic-simultaneous-autonomous-alogical-unreal). Between the title and the subtitle, are therefore the attributes ‘synthetic’, ‘simultaneous’, and ‘alogical’. In the middle section, it is stated peremptorily: It’s stupid to want to explain with logical minuteness everything taking place on the stage, when even in life one never grasps an event entirely, in all its causes and consequences, because reality throbs around us, assaulting us with bursts of fragments of interconnected events, interlocking together, confused, jumbled up, chaotic. For example: it’s stupid to act out a contest between two persons always in an orderly, clear, and logical way, since in daily life we nearly always experience mere flashes of argument which have been rendered ephemeral by our activities as modern men, passing in a tram, a café, a railroad station, so that experiences remain cinematic in our minds like fragmentary dynamic symphonies of gestures, words, lights, and sounds (Marinetti 1916).

The entire speech cannot fail to mention the cinema. After a few months, the time was ripe to address a speech made ​​on the new medium. Even 2 Similarly, Giovanni Lista states: ‘Boccioni had to difend the peculiarity of “futurist pictorial dynamism” against the accusation of “cinématisme” that the French critics had addressed to him’ (Lista 2001: 14).

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in the 1916  manifesto on f ilm, however, the Futurists continue to use the same conceptual framework by definitively refusing each analytical procedure in the movies, for example: ‘Except for interesting films about travel, hunting, wars, etc., filmmakers have done no more than inflict on us the most backward-looking dramas, lengthy or brief. The same scenario whose brevity and variety can make it seem advanced, in most cases is nothing but the most trite and pious analysis’ (Marinetti 1916). If you look beyond the usual controversial exuberance, the manifesto addresses the issue according to precise mediological terms: if the book is called ‘a wholly passéist means’, the cinema is ‘the expressive medium most adapted to the complex sensibility of a Futurist artist’. In the cinema, the Futurists see ‘the possibility of an eminently Futurist art’, but this possibility does not make the film an asserted Futurist medium. It seems that the Futurists have perceived that hybrid nature of cinema that McLuhan reveals several decades later. For the Canadian scholar, ‘Film, both in its reel form and in its scenario or script form, is completely involved with book culture’; also, ‘the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational’ (McLuhan 1964). For this reason, the Futurists want to remove the film from the mechanical reproduction of reality and free it from analysis and sequence; for this reason, they propose ‘cinematic analogies’, ‘cinematic simultaneity and interpenetration of different times and places’ (Marinetti 1916: 232).

The problem Boccioni Umberto Boccioni died on 17 August 1916. The production of the film Vita futurista begins in the second half of that month and the manifesto The Futurist Cinema is dated 11 September 1916. It seems that, to launch the cinema, the Futurists have waited for the painter’s death.Certainly, Boccioni was deeply skeptical whether to use cinema with artistic purposes or not. In his 1914 essay Pittura scultura futuriste, the painter speaks distancing himself from cinema several times. Surely one of the reasons that pushed Boccioni away from cinema was the need to defend himself from the accusation – which came mainly from France – of wanting to copy the cinema. For example, in chapter eight of his essay, he says: here’s what our Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (11 April 1910) says: ‘For us, the gesture will no longer be an arrested moment of universal dynamism. It will unquestionably be the dynamic sensation immortalized

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as such.’ A river of vulgar nonsense has been spilled out on this declaration in Italy and abroad. Let’s explain it then. When we talk about movement, we’re not guided by a concern for cinematography, or by a silly competition with instantaneity, or by a puerile curiosity to observe and fix the trajectory that an object travels moving from point A to point B. (Boccioni: 1914: 108-109)

Apart from these reasons related to the artistic controversy, Boccioni and other Futurists probably felt that cinema was an unsuitable medium for their expressiveness. Actually, the cinema seems incompatible with Boccioni’s Bergsonian vitalism, because it3inevitably tends to a simple mechanical reproduction. It is difficult to put the vital energy constantly pursued by Futurists into the cinematic medium. Giovanni Lista realized that: ‘For the Futurists, even as a representation of the movement, the photographic or cinematographic image destroys the energy dimension of the act, delivers the vital happening to the changelessness of what was, corresponds to a passive recording and not to a dynamic perception of reality as absolute becoming’ (Lista 2007: 35). For Boccioni, cinema is not very different from photography: both are mechanical media. To solve this problem, to make cinema a Futurist medium, they only had to find a way to introduce Futurist vitalism into cinema. The solution was, apart from the more technical solutions proposed by the manifesto, to invent the film-performance: Vita futurista.

References Bergson, H. (1903), ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, XXIX: 1–36 Boccioni, U. (1913a), ‘Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste’, Lacerba, (I), 6. —. (1913b), ‘Il dinamismo futurista e la pittura francese’, in Lacerba, (I), 15 —. (1913c), ‘Dinamismo plastico’, in Lacerba, (I), 24 —. (1914), Pittura scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico). Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’, translated in M. E. Versari (ed.) (2016), Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism) Los Angeles: Getty Publications. Carrà, C. (1913), ‘La pittura dei suoni rumori odori’, in Lacerba, (I), 17. 3

Boccioni blamed the Cubists’ works precisely for their lack of vitality.

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Kern, S. (1983), The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lista, G. (2001), Cinema e fotografia futurista. Milan: Skira —. (2007), ‘Il riscaldamento dei media: cinema e fotograf ia nel futurismo’, in Vertigo. Il secolo di arte off-media dal Futurismo al web, 33-38. Bologna: Skira. Marinetti, F.T. (1913a), Distruzione della sintassi Immaginazione senza fili Parole in libertà. translated as ‘Destruction of Syntax – Radio Imagination – Wordsin-Freedom’, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 143-152. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. —. (1913b), Il Teatro di Varietà, translated as ‘The Variety Theatre’, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 159-165. New HavenLondon: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F.T., E. Settimelli, B. Corra (1915), Il teatro futurista sintetico, translated as ‘The Futurist Synthetic Theatre’, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 204-209. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F.T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla, R. Chiti (1916), La cinematografia futurista translated as The Futurist Cinema, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 229-233. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill Soffici, A. (1913a), ‘Teoria del movimento nella plastica futurista’, in Lacerba, (I), 8. —. (1913b), ‘La pittura futurista’, in Lacerba, (I), 24.

About the author Antonio Saccoccio is an essayist and composer in the field of avant-garde music, literature, and art. He has published articles and edited collections on Marinetti, Boccioni, Papini, Prampolini, Debord, and McLuhan. He curated the international conference ‘Eredità e attualità del Futurismo’ (Legacy and modernity of Futurism) and he collaborates regularly with the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

8.

The Human in the Fetish of the Human Cuteness in Futurist Cinema, Literature, and Visual Arts1 Giancarlo Carpi Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch08 Abstract This study examines the photographic, painting, and literary theory output of several Futurists in the context of the invention and diffusion in English-language and Italian illustration and advertising of a formal stereotype: the Kindchenschema. In summary, the study aims to demonstrate the relevance of the aesthetic category of ‘cuteness’ to the use of personification in Marinetti, the adoption of Kindchenschema by Depero, the morphology of some of Balla’s furnishings, and the so-called ‘camouflaging of objects’ photography of Tato. There is, then, a specific fetishistic structure that, exploiting the effect of personalization and simplification of objects caused by the morphological properties of Kindchenschema for leverage, produces a semantic short circuit between the presence of the object that has been animated and its negation. Keywords: Kindchenschema, Marinetti, Tato, Depero, Balla, Cuteness, Commodity Fetishism

The aim of this paper is to highlight parallels between two recent interpretations regarding the rhetorical figure of personification and, more broadly, the processes of animating inanimate objects: one interpretation derives from the field of studies of literary futurism, while the other derives from the study of aesthetics and hinges upon the aesthetic category of cuteness and the art associated with it. Following a theoretical introduction of the two interpretations, critical, iconographic, and historical-stylistic evidence

1

Translation by Richard Mckenna.

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will be presented to demonstrate a degree of interdependence between their artistic aims from a formal and historical point of view. In his afterword to the recent edition of Marinetti’s novel Venezianella e Studentaccio, Patrizio Ceccagnoli argues that the use of the rhetorical figure of personification in the novel invokes the concept of commodity fetishism – in the sense of the term in which Marx employed it – and describes the recurring animation of inanimate objects in Marinetti’s writing as a fetishistic act. ‘However, in giving to matter a de facto human psychology, Marinetti simply ascribes to the substitute (the “life of matter, the non-human”) various aspects of what has been replaced (the “literary I”, the human)’ (Ceccagnoli 2013: 146). The principle characteristic of this interpretation is immediately apparent: the animation of objects is not seen simply as a process of vivification (of, for example, the monuments of Venice), but also as a process of mortification of those negative contents the city represents – the past. This is, therefore, a method of repudiation, in the sense of Freud’s theory: ‘It is a deeply ambiguous attitude which recalls the process of Verleugnung (“foreclosure”, “disavowal”) upon which Freud’s noted theory of the fetish is based’. (Ceccagnoli 2013: 146). Ceccagnoli accounts for this process by pointing out that Marinetti transgressed his own well-known prescription (contained in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature) to beware of ‘ascribing human feelings to matter’ (Marinetti 1912) and, in ascribing human feelings to objects, had represented feelings (the past) in matter (the personified object). In fact, in order to ‘embrace the life of matter’, from the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature in 1912 through l’immaginazione senza fili (imagination without strings) and parole in libertà (words in freedom), Marinetti proposed what he would later call ‘the death of the literary I’. At the same time, however, despite statements against ‘dramas of humanized matter’ the writer would nevertheless attribute human characteristics and feelings to material through an obsessive use of personification, prosopopoeia and anthropomorphism. (Ceccagnoli 2013: 145).

This is an aspect upon which I remarked in 2009, taking as aspects of work produced by women my starting point (Carpi 2009: 14-15). The crux of this interpretation is therefore the fetishistic (i.e. substitutive) function of the processes of the animation of matter. In a broader sense, then, this type of animation occupies a particular position with respect to the Marxist concept of the commodity. If the form of the commodity is, properly speaking, characterized by an irreconcilable split between

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phenomenon and fungibility caused by the exchange value of the goods themselves (which makes them interchangeable), the peculiarity of this personified-fetish is that it attempts to expose its own fungibility, thus achieving parallelism via a definition of the aesthetic category of cuteness. As Sianne Ngai states in her recent book, Our Aesthetic Categories, ‘The commodity’s irresolvable split between phenomenon and fungibility thus provides the best explanation of why cuteness activates both our empathy and our aversion.’ (Ngai 2012: 66). I myself pointed out in a 2012 essay that, in a 1915 illustration using Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie to advertize Jell-O, this ‘subject/non-subject’ – this cute figure – realized, paradoxically, its imaginal nature (Carpi 2012: 13).

The emphasized infantile form and the codification of the ‘cute’ figure at the beginning of the 20th century Let us focus our attention upon the various morphological aspects of the aesthetic phenomenology of cuteness, both to better understand its theoretical interpretation and to attempt some hypotheses for comparison with Futurist art from a historical point of view. We have said that the peculiarity of this personified-fetish is that it attempts to reveal its own fungibility; this property can also be explained by a scientific phenomenon linked to morphology: Kindchenschema, that set of physical traits whose resemblance to those of a newborn baby triggers an affectionate response in the viewer. Most manifestations of cuteness in the visual arts – from the illustration of the late nineteenth century to today’s Superflat and Pop Surrealism – are based upon the emphasis of infantile traits, an emphasis that creates an ambiguous sensation of the presence and otherness of the subject depicted. To return to the interpretation above, this otherness can be more precisely explained as the generalization of its subject. In cuteness, the process of animation – that is, of subjectification – of an inanimate object implies the generalization of the object that is obtained. Once personified, the non-human – matter – is elusive if considered as a living thing. The nonsubject state of objects, their incompletely human aspect, which have been animated in this way, causes definitional frustration and indicates that they have taken the place of something else. Take, for example, the well-known figure of Hello Kitty: on the one hand, our compassion for this object that has been animated by emphasizing its neonatal features is frustrated because the animation process has failed to make it an actual subject, a living being capable of receiving our compassion. On the other

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hand, it is precisely this feeling of frustration that makes us perceive the figurine as a living thing. From a historical point of view, the codification of the emphasized neonatal form occurred at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States of America. The principal iconological interpretations indicate that, via the codification of a monstrous but appealing appearance, adult perception of the alterity of children in the United States of America in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries came to overlap with their form. We might say that the shock and the wonder of that otherness was exorcised by controlled alteration. That is, the otherness of the child, opposed by the new role2 that the child was to be assigned within the domestic environment3 was, like ‘human psychology’ in Futurism, recast through a codification that, by representing it in the deformed features of cute forms, disavowed it in the Freudian sense and kept it under control. Indeed, Ceccagnoli utilizes the figure of the chiasmus to explain (verbally and visually) the type of personification used by Marinetti, in particular with reference to the Santa Unica torturata da Santa Velocità e Santa Simultaneità parolibera (‘free‑word’) panels, in which a personified subject (the abstract quality of uniqueness, 2 In Italian illustration, a transition from the miniaturization of the body of infantile figures and the emphasis of their gestures (Pallottino 1988: 164) to an emphasis upon neonatal features (Antonio Rubino, Sergio Tofano, Gustavo Rosso) took place between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the 20th century. The historians of childhood literature Pino Boero and Carmine De Luca note that the adoption of Art Nouveau stylings in illustrations for children implied ‘features (which are) sometimes deformed and grotesque bordering upon the caricature of many characters.’ (Boero & De Luca 2007: 82). As for literature, it is worthwhile mentioning Antonio Faeti’s comment about writers such as Ida Baccini and Vamba, of ‘[…] a tendency to “take points of view” in which one presumes to set oneself at the level of animals and children in order to observe and describe the world.’ Faeti adds that ‘this “stepping into the shoes of the small” almost always leads, instead, to the creation of a varied repertoire of child-monsters, not wholly dissimilar to those sinisterly drawn by Wilhelm Bush.’ (Faeti 1977: 160). I also believe that the relationship between the subject represented, whether it be a child or anything else, and the “otherness” expressed by his own morphology / Kindchenschema can be interpreted in a specific way as the presence / persistence of the pre-individual in the individuation, according to the concepts elaborated by Gilbert Simondon. 3 ‘Adult, especially middle-class, comic strip readers longed for an image of the (mostly) boy child which addressed the changing roles of parents and home life. The “acute” child at the “edge” of the acceptable was changed into the “cute” child – willful, even selfish, and devious at times, but ultimately good at heart.’ (Cross 2004: 59). ‘The cute child, unlike the Victorian sacred child, is pure spectacle, pure display. What is lost in this idealization of the cute is sexuality and the danger of its power: what is lost is the desire of the Other, absorbing that Otherness into the logic of the Same. Cuteness performs the de-sexualization of the child’s body, redefining that body from an object of lust (either sexual or economic) to an object of “disinterested” affection.’ (Merish 1996: 188).

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anthropomorphized into woman) is simultaneously mechanized (the transformation of the foot of the woman herself into a speedboat). What tensions dramatize this figure? Firstly, the opposed concept of romantic femininity, which is first personified (i.e. made present), then mechanized (that is, repositioned in a condition of inferiority) in the position of an object, of something present and controllable that serves to control an absent and opposed thing. The chiastic structure highlighted by Ceccagnoli appears as a process equivalent to those implemented in the same period in North American illustration with the codification of the emphasized infantile figure. The difference lies in the fact that, in the case of Marinetti’s parolibera, the ‘disavowed’ content is ‘romantic femininity’, while, in the case of American illustration, it is ‘childhood’, as well as the fact that, due to its peculiar characteristics, the emphasized infantile form summarizes the chiasmus between personification and objectification. Ngai, interpreting Merish, notes that ‘[…] as Merish also argues, cuteness seems to be a disavowal – at once a repression and an acknowledgment – of otherness. On the one hand, it “stages the assimilation of the Other into middle-class familial and emotional structures”, transforming “transgressive subjects into beloved objects”; on the other, it exaggerates social difference, turning beloved subjects into transgressive objects.’ (Ngai 2012: 60). At one point in his interpretation of Marinetti’s fetishism, Ceccagnoli, quoting Amanda Fernbach, too makes use of the concept of ‘disavowal’. ‘Fetishism is, in fact, also understood as […] the disavowal, rather than the pursuit of otherness, and the validation of culturally hegemonic classificatory systems.’ (Ceccagnoli 2013: 159).

Historical analogies with Futurism, Antonio Rubino and Art Nouveau, Kindchenschema in Balla and Depero Examining this first stage in the development of cuteness in English and American illustration, we observe an initial parallel with the historic nature of Futurism. A transition from the miniaturization of the bodies of infantile figures and the emphasis of their gestures to an emphasis of their neonatal traits also occurred in the Italian illustration of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries; we can also see the adoption of the emphasized infantile form and other points of contact with the Futurist aesthetic particularly clearly in the work of Antonio Rubino. In Rubino, in fact, the new codification of the otherness of the child, which had developed in America and entered Italian illustration during the last decade of the nineteenth century via

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the Treves editions of Palmer Cox’s books, encountered the processes of animating matter that futurism promoted in literature. In terms of the visual arts, other indications (in particular, Balla’s work on the production of a ‘Bedroom for Children’ in 1914, which used simplified shapes to animate the furnishings and objects) allow us to identify elements of factual confluence within this conceptual framework, in addition to Fortunato Depero’s adoption of Kindchenschema in his piece Prospettiva dinamica figurate (1917). While not wishing to imply qualitative similarities between the philological kinship of Kindchenschema in Rubino’s illustrations and in Futurist painting, morphological analogies clearly exist and the sporadic adoption of infantile features may indicate a shared aesthetic horizon. Moreover, Lista states that it was the reading of the book L’arte dei Bambini (Children’s Art) by Corrado Ricci that spawned, throughout Europe, and particularly in Depero, the fashion for ‘infantile primitivism’. (Lista 2009: 45). It is worth examining more closely that phase of Balla and Depero’s Futurism that Crispolti classes as sculptural ‘formal analogies’ and traces its origins in art nouveau, bearing in mind that Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie was itself a product of the art nouveau style she utilized. On the one hand, the Kewpie, which presents itself as a representation whose pathetic quality derives not from the subject depicted – which is indefinable – but from the pathetic property of its form; on the other hand, it presents itself as a representation of a set of formal analogies of diverse elements, from figures to sentiments and emotions. The formal origin of these two representations is, in both cases, the Jugend style adopted by O’Neill and Balla. By taking her cue for the generalization of her subject from art nouveau’s vegetablized furnishings, O’Neill managed to synthesize the infantile bioform, while Balla, instead, went beyond the Jugendstil concept of applied arts, creating sculptural abstractions that ‘expand in the real space which is not allotted to them’, penetrating real life and becoming objects while, together, reaffirming one another as fiction – as phenomenal appearance. The codification achieved by O’Neill of a fiction that manifests its presence purely by virtue of the objective pathetic property of the emphasized infantile diagram, a fiction whose subject (for example, a baby) therefore coincides with that abstract objectivity, turns that subject into nothing other than a phenomenal appearance. In the creative distancing of Balla from art nouveau, it corresponds, in a certain sense, to this entry of objective reality into the frame to reaffirm itself as a phenomenon. As we have seen, Balla’s work contains examples of the adoption of the infantile bioform. What aesthetic function do the feet of the table or the circular bioforms sprouting from the backs of the chairs perform? The same as that of Balla’s frame: that of making art, the object of

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art, enter life, making itself presence in order to reaffirm itself as fiction. The term ‘presence’ brings us directly back to a phrase from the Ricostruzione futurista dell’Universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe) manifesto written by Marinetti: The manifesto expressed the desire to find abstract counterparts from the universe to create plastic entities in a multi-sensory fusion. These works and the character of the “object” in them are, however, also marked by Marinetti, from whom a long quote is included ending in the following observation: ‘Art thus becomes presence, a new object, a new reality that consist of the abstracts elements of the universe. The hands of a traditionalist artist suffered for the lost Object, while our hands were desperate to create a new Object. Therefore, the new Object, a sculptural entity, is born in your hands in a miraculous way.’ (Gallo 2012: 17)

Art becomes Presence. Note the interdependence, both lexical and semantic, between that ‘lost object’ and the ‘new object’, an interdependence that seems to hint that this ‘object to create’ is a substitute, a fetish of the ‘lost object.’ In Marinetti and Fillia’s La cucina futurista, we are presented with an edible sculptural group, a conglomerate without a subject – indefinable yet attractive, like the cute object. In this case, it, an animated creature without a subject, plays the specific role of replacement object, a replacement of the beloved deceased, of romantic love, as well as, implicitly (inasmuch as it is an edible object of art and thus ephemeral), a replacement of ‘arte passatista’ (‘Old fashioned art’): At six in the afternoon develop from above sweet dunes of meat and sand towards two great emerald eyes in which the night is already gathering. The masterpiece. It had as its title the curves of the world and their secrets. Marinetti, Prampolini, Fillia, working together, had inoculated you with the gentle magnetism of the most beautiful women and the most beautiful dream-Africas. Its oblique architecture of soft curves trailing one another in the sky hid the grace of all female feet in a thick and sugary clockwork green with oasis palms which mechanically engaged their gearing tufts. Further below one could hear the garrulous happiness of paradisiacal streams. It was a motorised edible sculptural complex, perfect (Fillia & Marinetti 1932).

The provenance of this representation in the sculptural groups of the 1920s is evident, but what are the ‘abstract’ equivalents of all the forms of the

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Fortunato Depero, Citrus – Limone che corre (1927), cover for the magazine of Camera Agrumaria, Messina. Courtesy of Archivio Depero. All rights are reserved.

universe, the formal analogies of feelings and emotions, used by Marinetti to vivify the work? They are anatomical details, dismembered body parts, anthropomorphic metonymies, personifying agents that, like Balla’s formal analogies, generate the work’s presence and affirm – manifestly, here – an absence. The ‘soft curves trailing one another in the sky’ correspond to the circular bioforms that germinate from the backs of the chairs painted by Balla and those bioforms correspond to the frames around Balla’s pictures. With Balla, the process of objectification and subsequent personification of an abstract concept – oneness – that we have already seen in Marinetti’s tavola parolibera, corresponds with the dual function of the frame: If the frame in fact projects the painted mechanical game into the surrounding space and in this way also makes it an object which actually lives in space, and if we therefore recognize in the work the idea of the Futurist reconstruction of the universe, that is, the idea of moving from the ‘expression of the universal vibration’ to giving ‘skeleton and flesh

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to the invisible’, to creating sculptural groups to be put ‘into action’, that which is in effect expressed is not only or principally the projection into space of the pictorial body but rather its objectification – its making of itself an autonomous constructed entity which is located in real space (Gallo 2009: 17-18).

In conclusion, it should be remembered that a scholar of O’Neill’s work identified precisely this affinity in abstract direction between O’Neill and the Futurists in obtaining ‘a significant form as emotional expression’ (Armitage 1994: 163).

The drama of objects in Futurist film and photography Another phase of Futurism with regard to which our interpretative hypotheses may prove useful is the period of its greatest proximity to Surrealism and regards those pieces produced in the 1930s. Here, we find in one of Prampolini’s major works, the Palombaro dello spazio (The Space Diver), another example of the use of the emphasized infantile form, occurring – significantly – at the time of the rediscovery of the organic line as opposed to the geometric styles of mechanical art. It is important to remember that, at this point, Prampolini had reflected deeply upon the process of reification of the actor and his disappearance from the stage through the conception of a polydimensional stage space, a sort of personification of objects corresponding to the disappearance or reification of the human actor. In this phase, there is evident use of anthropomorphism in Futurist photography, particularly in the genre named ‘the drama of objects’, whose origins lie in the ‘dramas of objects’ which Marinetti produced for theatre between 1910 and 1919. Their combination of discordant objects may perhaps produce Surrealist effects, but their definition as ‘drama’ has human and humanizing connotations. As early as 1979, Giovanni Lista remarked thus upon the existence of a link between the first manifesto of Futurist cinema and the technique of ‘camouflaging objects’ and the ‘drama of objects’: ‘As early as 1916, the manifesto of Futurist cinema had already theorized the “drama of objects”, disguised and animated upon the screen.’ (Lista 1979: 217). One of Tato’s photographs (Ballerina, 1931 c.) that is part of the ‘camouflaging of objects’ genre includes a typically cute object, a sort of rabbit with neonatal features whose function we will examine more closely below. Similarly, in Vita futurista, the first well-known Futurist film, we see that the marriage between Balla and a chair implies the personification

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of the chair-bride, while, as regards the film Vitesse, we can at least affirm that we are in presence of a variety of animations and anthropomorphisms based more or less closely upon formal analogies between moving objects and man. They range from the animation of objects that have no formal analogies with the human body (as in the case of the cups) to others that are more directly based upon that analogy (for example, the matches), just as in the case of the man/metal dummy, in which the animation of several metallic spheres is dialectically linked to the reification of the human body. Although the driving force of the film and the link – narrative and otherwise – between these various animated objects is mostly abstract or symbolic analogy, the disintegration of the assemblages formed recurrently by the objects always occurs, the two cardinal poles of the mechanization of the body and the personification of matter therefore reconnect. Let us now turn to the Second Manifesto of Futurist photography, written by Marinetti and Tato in 1930. As many as eleven of its sixteen points theorize the ‘dramas of objects’ and pivot explicitly upon humanization: ‘the drama of humanized, petrified, crystallized or vegetablized objects using special lights and camouflaging’ (Marinetti & Tato 1931). We must immediately note that the term ‘object’ here appears to be used obsessively as a non-semantic marker with the function of a fetish – a substitute for any other thing. Let us also consider a further possibility of interpretation, taking as our point of departure the dramas of objects: among the methods proposed for the humanization of objects (that is, among personifying agents) there is also ‘camouflaging’ – a technical expedient that anticipates the contents and principles of the ‘Plastic Illusionism of War and the Improvement of the Earth’ manifesto. In this manifesto, whose first title was ‘Futurist Manifesto for the Improvement of the Terraqueous Globe’ and which Lista has recently discussed, however, ‘camouflaging’ is described as the intention of […] softening and feminising, making graceful all the warlike hardships difficulties and brutalities of landscapes and urbanisms, to reinvigorate make virile and militarise everything soft languid voluptuous caressing infantile that landscapes contain, to feminise to the most evaporated abstraction the heavy concrete outlines and cubicities, to everywhere spiritualise the materiality and the vulgarity of landscapes and urbanisms (Crali & Silvestri 1942).

For Lista, the manifesto aims to ‘[…] reconcile man to the world by softening the contrasts’ (Lista 2013: 29). Lista sees this ‘idyllic’ factor as the result of the utopia of futurism’s dematerialization: ‘Futurism as utopian tension,

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desire for the imaginary and drive towards an absolute creation capable of breaking free from all the constraints imposed by matter, finds in this manifesto a singular and surprising application.’ (Lista 2013: 29). Further on, […] the modernity of the manifesto is entirely in its hypotheses that it is possible to live in a world which is immaterial because it has been virtually and aesthetically remade, i.e. become pure image. This is, in fact, in some way what is happening today with the sovereign religion of retouching which permeates every aspect of contemporary culture and media and with the electronic screens which populate our existential space (Lista 2013: 29).

Implicitly, Lista interprets the concept of smoothing out contrasts in things as their fetishization: that is, as in Marx’s theory, their transformation into images of commodities. Thus, the manifesto – but also and above all ‘futurism as utopian tension’, a tension linked to and supported by the idea of dematerialization – would be better interpreted as a search for a cute aesthetic, one of a ‘minor’ aesthetic radically linked to mass culture and design. As Ngai comments, ‘The idea of a subset of “minor” aesthetic categories seems markedly salient for the historical account of the rise of consumer aesthetics in the postwar United States and Europe, as corporate advocates in the rapidly expanding f ields of design and advertising sought to show how “mass culture and high art could be in a radically commercialized Bauhaus venture”’ (Ngai 2012: 58). The cute rabbit that Tato features in the photograph Ballerina is not an object that requires camouflaging (as, instead, does the camouflaged lemon forming the dancer’s head) nor is it a subject composed of objects disguised by anthropomorphism such as the dancer, as it is, in itself, a manifestation of the simultaneous presence of phenomenon and fungibility in the form of object (commodity). The aim of the technique of camouflaging objects is not that of combining them to surreal effect but the transformation of the thing into image through personification. In the same sense in which Ceccagnoli, quoting Ballarini, states that Marinetti put ‘the sense of loss in things’ (Ceccagnoli 2013: 142) upon the stage, Tato represents ‘the sense of loss in things’ through objects that, together, form a human figure. The placing there of that cute object, an object whose personification and loss of meaning is implemented in its own form, was, however, a remarkable intuition: paradoxically, the affirmation of itself as a thing deprived of meaning. It will therefore be observed with a certain critical radicalness that, in its more synthetic and advanced work, the strategy of Futurist

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Frame from Water Babies, Silly Symphonies (Wilfred Jackson, 1935). Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company. All rights are reserved.

anthropomorphism is not simply a form of disavowal or fetishism, but, rather, a form of cuteness, an attempt to recover, as Ngai notes ‘[…] what Marx calls the “coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects” which becomes immediately extinguished in exchange’ (Ngai 2012: 63). Indeed, if we consider Depero (whose forms in the panel that he designed for Campari anticipated that of Pac-man) and the claims made for his work being a precursor of design, we may find ourselves adopting this aforementioned ‘minority’ perspective. In conclusion, it is important to affirm the fetishistic quality of personification in Marinetti’s work and highlight how it contributed to the new conception of sculptural groups. Already, in the La cucina futurista, the simple descriptive version of the fetishistic personification that we had observed in the parolibera panel of Noi (Us) has been abandoned and we are approaching the aesthetic synthesis obtained from the emphasized infantile form in the popular arts, the principal codification of cuteness. Even more concise than the descriptions of the sculptural groups are the individual personifications in literature: ‘The grassy steps which liquefying themselves dream of becoming a field’ (Marinetti 2013: 3). From this interpretive perspective, I would

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like to quote what I feel is an illuminating comment from Paolo Valesio who, though probably unaware of the cute nature of Disney characters, sees in these lines analogies with Disney’s films: I do not use a cinematographic term like ‘animation effects’ by chance: in VS there are in fact numerous occasions in which the atmosphere resembles that of a Walt Disney film – moments which give precise shape to the cheerful and infantile mood of the novel (Valesio 2013).

References Armitage, S. (1994), Kewpies and Beyond. The World of Rose O’Neill. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Boero, P. & C. De Luca (2007), La letteratura per l’infanzia. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Ceccagnoli, P. (2013), Marinetti e Venezia: dal Romanticismo al feticismo, in P. Ceccagnoli & Valesio P. (eds.) (2013) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Venezianella e Studentaccio. Milano: Mondadori. Carpi, G. (ed.) (2009), Futuriste. Letteratura. Arte. Vita. Roma: Castelvecchi. —. (ed.) (2012), Gabriels and the Italian Cute Nymphet. Milano: Mazzotta. Cross, G. (2004), The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Crali, T. & R. Silvestri (2013 [1942]), Illusionismo plastico di guerra e perfezionamento della terra, in Tullio Crali. Vertigini e visioni. Civitanova Marche: Comune di Civitanova Marche. Faeti, A. (1977), Letteratura per l’infanzia. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Fillia & F. T. Marinetti (1932), Un pranzo che evitò un suicidio, in Fillia & Marinetti F.T. (1932), La cucina futurista. Milano: Sonzogno. Gallo, S. (2009) ‘Su le cornice di Balla’, in G. Carpi (ed.) (2009), Futurismo romano. Balla Depero Prampolini Dottori. Roma: De Luca. —. (2012), Balla and Boccioni: Focus on the space between object and architecture. Playfulness vs. necessity, in M. Valkonen, G. Carpi et al. (ed.) (2012), A New Art: Speed, Danger, Defiance – Italian Futurism 1909 – 1944. Espoo: Espoo Muesum of Modern Art Publications. Lista, G. (1979) Futurismo e fotografia. Milan: Multhipla Edizioni. —. (2009), Les Sources italiennes du futurisme, in Ottinger D. (ed.) (2009) Le Futurisme à Paris: une avant-garde explosive. Paris: Centre National Georges Pompidou, Milano: Paris – 5 Continents Éditions. —. (2013) L’aeropittura prospettica e mistica di Tullio Crali, in in Aa.vv. (2013) Tullio Crali. Vertigini e visioni. Civitanova Marche: Comune di Civitanova Marche.

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Marinetti, F.T. (1912) Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista. Milano: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, in L. Scrivo (1968), Sintesi del Futurismo storia e documenti. Rome: Bulzoni. Marinetti, F.T. & Tato (1930), La fotografia futurista. Manifesto, in L. Scrivo (1968), Sintesi del Futurismo storia e documenti. Rome: Bulzoni. Marinetti, F.T. (2013) Venezianella e Studentaccio, in P. Ceccagnoli & P. Valesio (eds.) (2013) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Venezianella e Studentaccio. Milan: Mondadori. Merish, L. (1996) Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.) (1996), Freakery. Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press. Ngai, S. (2012) Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany. Cute. Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pallottino, P. (1988) Storia dell’illustrazione italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli. Simondon G. (2007), L’individuation psychique et collective, à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité. Aubier: Paris. Valesio, P. (2013) Il portasigarette ritrovato, in P. Ceccagnoli M. & P. Valesio P. (2013) (ed.) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Venezianella e Studentaccio. Milan: Mondadori.

About the author Giancarlo Carpi is an essayist, art critic and has a PhD in Italian Literature, University of Rome Tor Vergata. He has been a curator at several museums worldwide (Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University, SAMCA in Sofia, and others), and held conferences on Futurism and cuteness at various universities, including University of Rome Tor Vergata, University of Kansas (USA), University of St. Andrews (UK). He has published some books, essays, and catalogues about Italian Futurism and Italian Avant-garde. His book Futuriste is a textbook in the degree course “Theories of contemporary performance” at Sapienza University of Rome.

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Francesco Cangiullo, Balie. Lettere umanizzate (1917), free‑wordist table, published on ‘L’Italia futurista’ (no. 31, Florence, 1917). Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Gesellschaft.

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Section 2 Daily Filmed Exercises Designed To Free Us From Logic

9. Yambo on the moon of Verne and Méliès From La colonia lunare to Un matrimonio interplanetario1 Denis Lotti

Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch09 Abstract This comparative study is the result of the analysis of the cooperation between a man of letters and an illustrator, at the beginning of the 20th century: in 1908, Enrico Novelli, aka Yambo, released La colonia lunare (The Moon Colony). Among futuristic aerospace inventions and the detailed description of a lunar city, Yambo imagines optical machines and the evolutions of cinematograph as the coeval symbol of modernity. Yambo directs for Latium film, a production in Rome, a film entitled Un matrimonio interplanetario (Marriage on the Moon) in 1910. This film, fully preserved, anticipates some elements of the Futurist cinema manifesto. It is no coincidence that Florentine Yambo attends the Futurist circle from the outset, creating a bridge between the children’s fiction of the early 20th century and the revolutionary Futurist movement. Keywords: Yambo, Novelli, Children’s Fiction, Futurism, Early Italian Cinema

1 I would like to sincerely thank the readers of this paper in progress. They offered valuable comments, corrections, and suggestions that have allowed me not to get lost in interplanetary space. I would then like to thank Gian Piero Brunetta, Michele Canosa, Giovanni Lista, and Carlo Montanaro.

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Yambo, mainly known as a writer and an illustrator,2 is one of the first Italian polygraphs to direct a film (Otello, 1909; see Bernardini, A. 1996a: 359). In 1910, he shot Un matrimonio interplanetario,3 whose subject is probably influenced by La colonia lunare,4 a science-fiction novel written by Novelli himself; the title of one of the chapters is particularly meaningful: I promessi sposi lunari (The lunar betrothed). This comparative study is the result of the analysis of the cooperation between a man of letters and an illustrator at the beginning of the 20th century. The fictional theme handled in the film belongs to a genre that was and still is rarely dealt with in Italian cinematography.5 I seek to find the common points linking Yambo’s literary, graphical, and cinematographic experiment to the Futurist avant-garde. They will present common elements both from the point of view of the ‘words in freedom’ concept, which finds an extremely rare and animated forerunner in Yambo’s film and in the Manifesti, which is dedicated to literature and cinematography.

La colonia lunare In his novel La colonia lunare (published in 1908) Enrico Novelli merges scientific elements with some adventurous, exotic, and fictional literary trends, both elitist and popular. In La colonia lunare, during a long flashback, the German main character, Otto Schauenburg, tells the story of an amazing accomplishment. The pages of his diary, whose accidental discovery is described in the first pages of the novel, in line with the narrative device 2 Yambo, originally named Enrico Novelli (Pisa, 1876 – Florence, 1943), whose versatile creativity he probably owes to his father’s activity, Ermete, well-known entertainer of the Italian theatre, made his debut in the cinema with La morte civile by Gerolamo Lo Savio in 1910; see Redi 2000: 36-38; see Bernardini 1996b: 268-271. For the reasons of the transition of the Italian ‘star actors’ from theatre to cinema, I refer you to the work of Gian Piero Brunetta (1993: 74-75). 3 The version analysed for this paper is Marriage on the Moon, Latium Film, Rome, 1910, directed by Yambo (Enrico Novelli); original length 295 m, copy duration: 12’ (18 fps). Source: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin. 4 On the title page of the copy – a first edition: ‘YAMBO | (Enrico Novelli) | LA COLONIA | LUNARE | (Storia di un’ipotesi) | CON 120 DISEGNI DELL’AUTORE | GENOVA | A. DONATH, Editore | __ | 1908’. A dedication to Ugo Ojetti is in the first pages of the copy found in Berlin (the copy consulted by the author of this paper), dating back to February 1908 (Yambo /Novelli, E. 1908). The text was republished by Vallardi in 1932. 5 With regards to the fictional aspect in the Italian silent films, Michele Canosa highlights that ‘l’immaginario italiano di massa cerca, e trova, cauzione in un altrove retrospettivo: la mitologia classica’ (the Italian collective unconsciuous finds its references in Classical mythology), Canosa, M. 1997/1998: 12-13. For a general excursus, see Costa (2002).

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adopted by Manzoni, constitute the main block of this work. The action takes place in 1910 and, in this future scenario, some Terrestrials have settled on the Moon. Yambo describes to his readers some members of the Parliament, each one representing a nation on the Earth, while they debate in the Parliament of Selenopoli: the subject of discussion is the future of the colony, menaced by some groups of rebels. From the following chapter on, Yambo gives the floor to young Otto. The contents of his diary take the readers back in time, to Friburgo in Brisgovia and they describe in great detail the first steps of the love story between Otto himself and Grëtchen, his lunar betrothed. In the diary, there are descriptions of the different stages of shipbuilding, the departure, the intermediate stop in an exotic place of the Indian Ocean, the space journey, the landing on the satellite, and, finally, of new life on the Moon. The study of Novelli’s literary work shows that the subject of La colonia lunare was, in reality, the result, yet not final, of a project on which the author was working since the time of his unpublished work Viaggi meravigliosi d’uno zio e di un nipote, written in 1888 (Cf. Novelli, M. 1982: 38); Attraverso all’infinito (1889, unpublished; Novelli, M. 1982: 38); and Dalla Terra alle stelle (Yambo/Novelli, E. 1890), the first book published by the author.6 The science-fiction background of Yambo is evident because he read the works of foreign science-fiction writers. In Yambo’s fiction, there is a hint of Wells’ Darwinism (Winthrop-Young 2007), a fundamental author for the rise of fictional literature, as well as translator and transformer of previous works: Poe and Verne in particular. The legacy of Jules Verne (Nantes, 1828 – Amiens, 1905) is paramount for Novelli’s work, in particular for the ‘lunar’ works such as De la Terre à la Lune (1865) and, later, for Autour de la Lune (1870). The first source of inspiration dates to 1884, when a text by Henry de Graffigny (Graffigny-Chemin, 1863 – Septeuil, 1934) was first published in Italy by Sonzogno. The odd elements are clear in the title itself, Dalla Terra alle stelle, the same used by Yambo in 1890 for his first published short story. In the overture, the subject is the same as in La colonia lunare, the characters are the same as those depicted in Graffigny’s text: the uncle is a scientist and the nephew is his assistant as they prepare the journey that will take them to the Moon. This detail does not appear in any bio-bibliography on Enrico Novelli.7 6 Yambo further develops the subject of the interstellar journey in Gli esploratori dell’Infinito, G. Scotti, Rome, 1906. 7 Between the nineteenthth and the 20th century, there are many instances of appropriation of literary topics by foreign authors – something that would be certainly called ‘plagiarism’ today (well-known examples are to be found in the work of D’Annunzio and Ojetti).

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Illustration from Enrico Novelli, aka Yambo (1908), La colonia lunare (Storia di un’ipotesi). Genoa: Donath, 158.

The illustrations of La colonia lunare, drawn by Yambo himself, are worth mentioning: they will be,8 in fact, very important for the scenic design of the movie.9 8 ‘[Yambo] disegnatore [sta] fra il grottesco e il liberty’ (‘The work of Yambo as illustrator is both grotesque and art nouveau’) (Silvestri 1978: 605). 9 The fact that Enrico Novelli works as an illustrator behooves him during the creation of the scenic design for Un matrimonio interplanetario. The words of Jean-Pierre Berthomé on the emancipation of scenic design in cinema from set design in theatre could refer to Novelli: ‘As the sector gets stronger, movies become more and more ambitious and set design develops

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Un matrimonio interplanetario Carlo Montanaro presents this movie produced by Latium during an exposition on the Italian avant-garde, which he defines as ‘unaware’10 (Montanaro, C. 2002: 82). For this reason, Giovanni Lista, discussing Un matrimonio interplanetario and similar works in terms of contents or historical moment, mentions ‘futuristic climate in the Italian culture’.11 References or real cinematographic quotations are extremely important: from Le voyage dans la lune and the ‘cinematography as attraction’ (Gaudreault, A. 2004): féeries set in a cosmological environment (among others, Le Voyage à travers l’impossible by Méliès, Voyage sur Jupiter by Segundo De Chomón, Voyage autour d’une étoile12 and Le petit Jules Verne by Gaston Velle) or distinctive lunar setting (Au clair de la Lune or Pierrot malheureux by Méliès,Rêve à la Lune by Velle and Ferdinand Zecca and Excursion dans la Lune again by De Chomón).13 Novelli presents a subject that deviates from the traditional production based on transposition of theatre plays and of historical characterthat the Italian cinema embraced at that time, presenting a small example of science fiction to the audience, a current that was not very successful in Italian cinematographic production, but boasted some other renowned examples anyway. For this futuristic movie, Yambo employs a comical tone,14 as did

into an element of seduction for the audience, that can reaffirm the superior nature of cinema with respect to theatre. In Italy the consequences of this new structure are very clear’ (my translation) (Berthomé 2001:629). 10 Latium was ‘founded and then sold by the Pineschi brothers and Yambo – Enrico Novelli a writer from Florence – becomes its director’ (my translation) (Prolo 1951: 37). 11 Private correspondence with the author. 12 G. Velle, Voyage autour d’une étoile, Pathé, France, 1906. The remake was looked after by Velle himself for Cines and it was entitled Un viaggio in una stella, Cines, Italy, 1906. With respect to Yambo’s film, the two versions of the movie directed by Velle should be analysed more in detail but space restraints prevent an in-depth study. 13 While Yambo is working on his film, Méliès stops the production ‘between 1909 and 1910’ (Costa 1980: 98). It is reasonable to think that the Italian author has somehow taken advantage of the absence of the master of the film ‘with tricks’. 14 It is worth quoting some of the comments about the movie reported by Bernardini: ‘Science fiction comic subject’ – ‘In this movie, the comic and fictional aspect created by Enrico Novelli’s (Yambo) genius is matched by the exact and scientifically correct reproduction of lunar landscapes, based on the famous Mappa Selenographica of Beer and Moedler, a masterpiece in lunar cartography. The marriage takes place near mount Tycho’s crater, the unique lunar mountain that stands out – beautiful and unapproachable – against a land characterized by picturesque peaks’ (my translation) (Bernardini 1996b: 253).

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Méliès (who also described an attack by selenites15 to the terrestrial visitors), but he also incorporates a love story,16 highlighted by extraordinary visual effects.17 Although the plot isnot so strong overall, the author employs narrative devices that create absurd, fictional, or exhilarating situations: an unusual setting and the use of futuristic technologies18 and elements that are typical of the comedic device in cinematography. In La colonia lunare, Yambo maintains a certain degree of plausibility. On the other hand, the movie evokes a dreamlike atmosphere,19 which mimics Méliès’ work. The element of surprise for the audience is therefore not obtained through the plot but through the extraordinary space views and the sudden (and harmless but nevertheless disturbing) alien appearances.20

15 This is the name given to the inhabitants of the Moon by Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac in L’autre monde ou Les ètats et empires de la lune, published in 1657. 16 In addition to Aelita, I also refer to the feature film by Fritz Lang Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond, Germany, 1929) for comparison. 17 To this end, I quote a bizarre 10 May 1910 statement by Ferruccio Sacerdoti: ‘The well-known Yambo […] has offered us some paintings that, given the fictional topic, could not have been more plausible’ (my translation) (Bernardini 1996b: 253). 18 Even though, in this specific case, they are close in time. I refer to the giant mortar that launches the space shuttle, which was familiar to the soldiers of the Great War in a similar model. 19 Talking about the verisimilitude or lack thereof in science-fiction movies, François Jost points out that narrative consistency supports the credulity pact entered by audience and artist (Jost 2003: 27-28). As far as Yambo is concerned, these guidelines date back to previous science-fiction movies, from Méliès to de Chomón, and they represent what Umberto Eco defines as ‘iconological foundations’, constituted by ‘figurative elements that are already typical […], iconographic elements that integrate into a wider set of norms that constitutes a real collection of symbols’ (my translation) (Eco 2001: 145-147). Applying Eco’s analysis to Un matrimonio interplanetario, it is possible to see the semantics of the first science-fiction movies translated for the first time by an author like Yambo. The standard symbols of Méliès’ movies, taken from genre literature and present in Novelli’s movies, belong to an inventory that, in 1910, is already coded and known to the audience. Yambo tries to change it slightly: for example, the Italian author uses the cliché of an anthrophomorphous Moon decorating the Martian space shuttle with a human face. 20 The first significant literary ‘encounter’ between Earth and Mars is found in H. G. Wells’ work, The War of the Worlds (1897). As suggested by the title, this encounter was not as peaceful as Enrico Novelli’s one. Mario Novelli recalls that Wells was one of the favourite authors of Yambo when he was a child.

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Aldovino, terrestrial astronomer, looks into Space; he finally points his telescope21 at Mars (Here Mars is!).22 Thanks to his instruments, he is able to magnify his view of the planet and he observes the mountainous and apparently hostile landscape, his gaze lingering on the sharp peaks and on the gigantic mushrooms. The audience can see the landscape through the astronomer’s eyes: the images are framed by a black circle, which23 indicates the shape of the telescope. Slowly moving to the right, Aldovino discovers a city characterized by spherical buildings. The astronomer then stops to magnify his view through the telescope until he is able to peep into a house, where an alien colleague of his lives with his daughter (Fur. Astronomer of Mars. And his Daughter); 24 at this point, the black round frame turns to a Moorish window, recalling a keyhole. Aldovino immediately falls in love with the girl and he starts jumping and flailing around; the astronomer rushes to a post office to send a telegram with his message of love (Wireless between [E]arth and Mars).25 The audience witnesses a miracle: the letters of the alphabet come alive and they spread into the air. The woman reads the following message: ‘Mars Doughter [sic] you are Fine. I am loving you and I should like very much to marry you. Aldovin [Terrestrial] Astronomer’.26 The father sends back a proposal to the sender: ‘If you want to marry my daughter come in a year in the Moon. Fur Astronomer of Mars’.27 The Martian woman – with her father on one side and Aldovino and his assistant on the other – watches the building of the space shuttles (The Astronomer of Mars is overlooking the [d]eparture preparatives). Aldovino and his assistant get into a round space shuttle28 and, in the meantime, the bride-to-be and Fur also board a spindle-like shuttle

21 Role probably played by Yambo himself. The analysed copy is not clear enough to identify the actor. 22 In the following notes I list the Italian intertitles of the film, taken from La Cine-Fono e la Rivista Fono-Cinematografica 96, 12 February 1910, int. 1: ‘“Ecco Marte!”’ (Bernardini 1996b: 253). 23 Cf. the similar set design in G. Méliès, le voyage dans la lune, 1902, similar to the literary and iconographic world characterized in Dante’s Inferno (Costa 2002: 33-36) and Homer’s and Virgil’s Hades. 24 Int. 2: ‘Fur… astronomo di Marte! e sua figlia’ (Bernardini 1996b: 253). 25 Int. 3: ‘Radiotelegrafia tra la Terra e Marte’ (Bernardini 1996b: 253). 26 From a scene comment. 27 From a scene comment. 28 Int. 4: ‘L’astronomo di Marte sorveglia i preparativi di partenza’ (Bernardini 1996b: 253).

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on Mars, decorated with the drawing of a face;29 they are launched into Space. The following intertitle anticipates the marriage (Marriage on the Moon) and the change of setting:30 the bride and groom, together with their friends, finally arrive at the Moon. The two shuttles, while trying to land on the Moon, almost bump into each other. The two lovers introduce themselves and they exchange presents. After that, the couple enter a sinister cave and husband and wife kiss in the midst of stalactites. All of a sudden, some presences loom over the scene: jumping selenitis31 and graceful maidens dance to celebrate their interplanetary marriage.32

The science-fiction elements of the movie go beyond space shuttles or extraterrestrial venues: the telegram travelling among the stars in the form of fast-moving alphabet letters is also a science-fiction element. In 1902, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Alexandria, 1876 – Bellagio, 1944) published a poem, entitled La Conquête des étoiles: poème épique (Editions De La Plume, Paris, 1902), which demonstrates how much its author focuses on the topic of Space – although allegorically – a topic especially appreciated by Symbolists (the poem describes the tough battle of the sea against the sky). The poem can be seen as a source of inspiration for the formulation of a refrain in the Manifesto del futurismo (Futurist Manifesto, 1909): ‘Ritti sulla cima del mondo, noi scagliamo una volta ancora, la nostra sfida alle stelle!’ (‘On top of the world, we once again defy the stars!’). In the Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (11 May 1912), there is a plank that recalls the episode described in Un matrimonio interplanetario: ‘il cinematografo ci offre la danza di un oggetto che si divide e si ricompone senza intervento umano’ (‘cinema shows us the dance of an object that divides and recomposes 29 Anthropomorphic decorative element that shows a parallelism with the human face of the Moon in Méliès’ movies and in those of his imitators. It is worth remembering a reference to the shuttle of Yambo’s film in a short story that appeared 20 years later, Viaggio nella Luna di Cretinetti e Beoncelli by Momus (pseud. of Augusto Piccioni, Florence, Nerbini, 1930), called ‘Selenite’ by Momus. The shuttle ‘assomigliava ad […] un sigaro toscano […] con due occhi aperti […] nella testa’ (‘looked like […] a Tuscan cigar […] with open eyes […] in his head’) (Zangheri 2001: 147). 30 Int. 6: ‘Matrimonio nella luna’ (Bernardini 1996b: 253). 31 The much more menacing acrobat Selenites come from G. Méliès, le voyage dans la lune whose morphology is inspired by The War of the Worlds by Wells, as Costa underlines (Costa 1980: 110-111). 32 Another famous interplanetary marriage is to be found in Viaggi straordinarissimi di Saturnino Farandola by Albert Robida. The authors tells how four Saturnian kings propose to four terrestrial queens to create ‘un’ottava specie di donne’ (‘the 8th woman species’) (Robida 1880: 461-480).

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without any human intervention’, Verdone 1990: 39). In 1912, Marinetti presents his ‘words in freedom’ or, rather, the deconstruction of tradition and the relevant ‘confusion’ of words. This is a typographical revolution that involves Paolo Buzzi and Fortunato Depero.33 Nowadays, one might think that Yambo had unconsciously foreseen – almost a century ahead – the possibility to communicate through artificial satellites, using a telegraph to cover stellar distances.34 The animated words suggest an interconnection with some artistic experiences of that period. The reference to the alphabet by Futurist literature and painting, which deconstructed and decontextualized it, might be a coincidence. As Montanaro states,35 Yambo’s film does not pursue any avant-garde effect, maybe only in its candid appropriation and/ or fictional translation of reality.36 The movie resembles more a sleight of hand to the futuristic contraptions of Verne and Méliès, than to the futurist linguistic and artistic experimentations of Marinetti or Depero. This does not prevent us from finding many common points between the ideas contained in Yambo’s movie and some declarations found in La cinematografia futurista, which I quote as an example: The Futurist cinema that we are preparing—a joyful deformation of the universe, an alogical and momentary synthesis of everyday life—will 33 Cf. P. Buzzi, L’ellisse e la spirale, 1915; F. Depero, the ‘libromacchina’ (‘machine book’), Depero futurista, 1927. 34 A curiosity: one of Yambo’s accidental forecasts is found in La colonia lunare: there is, in fact, a mysterious ‘grosso monolite di ferro meteorico forse alto due metri’ (‘huge monolith of meteoric iron, probably two meters tall’) (Yambo/Novelli 1908: 93). 35 The general analysis by Montanaro of the period before the artistic avant-gardes is extremely important: ‘Non possiamo non constatare come, attraverso il cinema, sia subentrata nella cultura visiva quella concettualità che ha fatto poi fare un determinante salto qualitativo alle arti f igurative del secolo appena passato’ (‘We cannot ignore how through the cinema our visual culture has embraced a whole set of concepts that has determined the qualitative leap of figurative arts in the last century’) (Montanaro 2002: 77). 36 In this respect, referring to comic strips and their ‘graphical stylization of dynamisms’ as well as their common aspects with some ‘solutions of Futurism’, Umberto Eco discusses the ‘parasitic’ stance of comic strips and their ‘promotional and anticipatory relationship’, an adequate argument both for La colonia lunare and for Un matrimonio interplanetario. Eco adds that ‘as far as framing is concerned, comic strips owe to the cinema each one of their possibilities and of their hallmarks’(my translation) (Eco 2001: 152-153). Some years after Yambo quit cinema, in 1915, he started a long-term career as cartoonist (‘Le avventure di Lasagna e Pippo Bietta’, on La Nazione, Florence, 1920) while remaining active as a writer until his death. There is a certain consistency in Novelli’s evolution from frames to cartoons. For example, the subject of La colonia lunare was resumed, although deeply changed, in I pionieri dello spazio, a comic strip that appeared in installments in Topolino (from 25 December 1936 until 11 March 1937).

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become the best school for children […] It will develop, sharpen sensibility, will accelerate creative imagination, endow intelligence with a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence (Marinetti et al., 1916: 230).

And then: ‘We shall set in motion the words-in-freedom that transgress the boundaries of literature as they march toward painting […] as they throw a marvelous bridge between the word and the real object.’ (Marinetti et al., 1916: 231). Finally, point 7 of the Futurist manifesto states: Filmed dramas of objects. (Objects animated, humanized, wearing make-up, dressed up, impassioned, civilized, dancing—objects taken out of their usual surroundings and put into an abnormal state that, by contrast, throws into re- lief their amazing construction and nonhuman life.) (Marinetti et al., 1916: 232)

Ultimately, in 1910, the world witnessed a very important astronomical event: the appearance of Halley’s comet,37 which movies such as The Comet, How Scroggins Found the Comet,Der Halleysche Komet kommt!, and Cines’ film La paura della cometa referenced. A curious film even promises a marriage on the comet, recalling Novelli’s film: Un matrimonio sulla cometa Halley.38 This was the cinema’s response while the lurking fear caused by the appearance of the comet finally prevailed and ‘in Europe thousands of panic-stricken people gather in churches, hundreds commit suicide or transfer their properties’ (Caneppele 2004: 38). Yambo does not seem to be worried about these events and he presents a possible future of interstellar peace in his work as well as a confidence in a technological development such as space shuttles. A Universe that shrinks and that becomes a projection screen, as shown by the later (and aggressive) work Ricostruzione futurista dell’Universo by Balla and Depero (1915) in which 37 In 1910, the appearance of Halley’s comet aroused conflicting feelings about the end of the world, as recalled by the Italian title of August Blom’s movie, La fine del mondo (Verdens Undergang, Denmark, 1916), freely inspired by the astral event that had taken place six years before. 38 There is no trace of this movie in the Italian filmography of silent movies of Bernardini and Martinelli, nor in A. Bernardini, 1991. It might be, instead, a superimposition of Yambo’s film or the translation of a foreign film still unknown to at the date of this writing. The film was shown at the Cinema-teatro Eden in Senigallia in May 1910. This information was obtained by an advertisement reproduced in La voce misena, a. II, n. 19, Senigallia, 14 May 1910, p. 3 (Angelini & Pucci 1981: 233).

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Frame from Un matrimonio interplanetario (Enrico Novelli aka Yambo, 1910). Collection of Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin.

the two artists gather, dismantle, and reinvent the Universe by combining visions, experiences, and materials – Futurist ones, of course – in one of the most advanced and pervasive avant-garde films of the 20th century.

References Angelini, V. & F. Pucci (eds.) (1981), 1896-1914. Materiali per una storia del cinema delle origini, Turin, Studio Forma Editore. Bernardini, A. (1991), Archivio del cinema italiano. Il cinema muto 1905-1931, Rome, ANICA. —. (1996a), Il cinema muto italiano 1905-1909. I film dei primi anni, Turin/Rome, Nuova Eri – Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. —. (1996b), Il cinema muto italiano 1910. I film dei primi anni, Turin/Rome, Nuova Eri – Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Berthomé, J.-P. (2001), ‘La scenografia’, in G. P. Brunetta (ed.), Storia mondiale del cinema, Vol. V. Teorie, strumenti, memorie. Turin: Einaudi. Brunetta, G.P. (1993), Storia del cinema italiano. Il cinema muto. 1895-1929, Rome, Editori Riuniti.

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Caneppele, P. (2004), La repubblica dei sogni. Bruno Schultz, cinema e arti figurative, Gorizia, Kinoatelje. Canosa, M. (1997/1998), Muto di luce, in «Fotogenia n. 4/5», Bologna, Editrice CLUEB. Costa, A. (1980), Méliès. La morale del giocattolo, Milan, Edizioni Il Formichiere. —. (2002), I leoni di Schneider. Percorsi intertestuali nel cinema ritrovato, Rome, Bulzoni. Eco, U. (2001), Apocalittici e integrati. Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa, Milan, Bompiani. Gaudreault, A. (2004), Cinema delle origini o della «cinematografia-attrazione», Milan, Editrice Il Castoro. Jost, F. (2003), Realtà/Finzione. L’impero del falso, Milan, Editrice Il Castoro. Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla & R. Chiti (1916), La cinematografia futurista, L’Italia Futurista, (I) 1: 1, translated as The Futurist Cinema in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 229-232. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Montanaro, C. (2002), L’avanguardia italiana ovvero un’avanguardia inconsapevole, in Le giornate del cinema muto 2002, XXI edizione, Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli. Morasso, M. (1905), La nuova arma (la macchina). Turin: Bocca, republished by the Centro Studi Piemontesi (Turin, 1994). Novelli, M. (1982), Ricordando Yambo. Florence: Centro Biobibliografico Scrittori e Artisti Toscani “Firme nostre”. Prolo, M.A. (1951), Storia del cinema muto italiano, Vol. I, Milan, Poligono. Redi, R. (2000), Film d’Arte e teatro. La breve parabola di Ugo Falena. Rome: Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema. Robida, A. (1880), Viaggi straordinarissimi di Saturnino Farandola nelle 5 o 6 parti del mondo ed in tutti i paesi visitati e non visitati da Giulio Verne. Silvestri, A. (1978), ‘La narrativa fantastica in Italia fino al 1945’, in M. Ashley (ed.), Porte sul futuro. Storia e antologia delle riviste di fantascienza. 1926/1945, II, 589-610. Rome: Fanucci Editore. Verdone, M. (1990), Cinema e letteratura del Futurismo, Calliano, Manfrini. Winthrop-Young, G. (2007), ‘The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells, 1898)’, in F. Moretti, The Novel: Volume 2: Forms and Themes, 189-195. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yambo/Novelli, E. (1890), Dalla Terra alle stelle. Florence: Salani —. (1908), La colonia lunare. Genova: Donath. Zangheri, M. (2001), ‘Da Firenze alle stelle: a spasso per il cielo con le edizioni fiorentine popolari e da ragazzi del primo Novecento’, in C. Gallo (ed.), Viaggi straordinari tra spazio e tempo, 143-152. Verona: Biblioteca Civica.

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About the author Denis Lotti is a researcher and scholar in the field of Film History and he is Adjunct Professor of Museology of Cinema and The Actor in Film Studies at the University of Padua, and Principles of Silent Cinema at the University of Udine. He has collaborated with Italian museums, libraries, and film libraries, particularly with the Cineteca di Bologna. His research focuses on the area of archival films and the history of cinema, with special reference to the Italian silent era.

10. An Avant-Garde Heritage Vita futurista 1 Rossella Catanese Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch10 Abstract The most important movie produced by Italian Futurists was certainly the performance film Vita futurista (Futurist Life). All known copies have been officially declared lost. Different studies about the testimonials of the film’s late audience, the division of the sequences, the further integrations to the original plot, the public screenings, the written sources, and the popular imagery have allowed us to become familiar with and to understand one of the first avant-garde experiences in cinema. All these studies have been made without ever having seen the film: the only sources are archival materials, documents, papers, and critical testimony from the past. This essay aims to reconstruct the history of this pivotal lost film by quoting diversified sources; through such sources (which include the so-called ‘non-filmic’ elements, such as public indexes, personal letters, press reviews, memorials, posters, etc.), Vita futurista can be studied philologically. Keywords: Vita Futurista, Marinetti, Ginna, Film Philology

The first Futurist film was shot in the summer of 1916. ‘Cinematographic translation of the serial (para-tactical) formula of variety theatre or of synthetic theatre’ (Strauven 2006: 162), Vita futurista was a collective work in which each one of the participating Futurists contributed, although Arnaldo Ginna received the most credit for directing. Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni Corradini, also known as Arnaldo Ginna (in association with the 1

Translated by Marika Di Canio and Zachary Wallace.

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Italian word ‘ginnastica’, gymnastic) and Bruno Corra (from the Italian ‘correre’, to run)2 respectively, were two aristocratic brothers from Ravenna, as well as eclectic artists, representatives of the heterodox area of Futurism, and aestheticians close to Cerebrist matrix. In the first decade of the 20th century, their experimental research and their theoretical writings, Musica cromatica (Chromatic Music) and Arte dell’avvenire (Art of the Future), explored the expressive possibilities of the new medium in the dynamic relationship between music and colours. The 1912 essay by Bruno Corra, Musica cromatica, furnishes evidence for the experience of the ‘music of colours’, obtained through an organ of 28 keys, each of which was connected to a corresponding coloured light bulb (Corra 1912: 246); the brothers’ experiment anticipated their decision to paint colours on film (Corra 1912: 247-251). As a matter of fact, the first experiments of ‘chromatic’ music date back to the first half of the eighteenth century (Catanese 2009: 116), but the sensibility of the Corradini brothers was inscribed in 20th-century research environments in the name of synaesthesia. It is likely that the research ushered in by this ‘chromatic music’ influenced some formal studies present in the film. While in Florence, Ginna and Corra approached the group of Futurists there. It was the famous Florentine Futurist group that operated around the periodical L’Italia futurista,3 i.e. the entourage of Settimelli, Carli, and Chiti, authors of the literary review La Difesa dell’arte (1909-1912). Some sequences of the film were shot in the park of the Cascine, on the banks of the Arno. The Futurists themselves were improvised actors: Marinetti, Corra, Ungari, Carli, Settimelli, Chiti, Balla, Nannetti, Venna, and Spina (pseudonym of Settimelli’s brother). Ginna bought a Pathé camera in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. It was a secondhand camera that did not allow for a perfect quality of the visual shooting. Furthermore, it was impossible to resort to artificial lighting and it was difficult to organize the undisciplined Futurists as actors. 4 Different sources and records document the times and places of the production in progress (Innamorati 1987: 52-53): – production of the literary journal L’Italia futurista, was suspended in September because of Ginna’s involvement in the film-making. When the 2 Pseudonyms suggested by Giacomo Balla (Verdone 1990: 6). 3 A Florentine literary and cultural review operating between 1916 and 1918, in opposition to the other Florentine journal Lacerba (1913-1915), which hosted for the contributions of the Futurist group after March 1915. 4 They were unenthusiastic, often waking up late and disappearing from the film set. Ginna had to send taxis to get them, make dozens of phone calls to talk to them, and beg them to come back (Verdone 1990: 109).

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journal resumed its publication in October 1916, with issue 8, the film was said to be ‘finished by now’, in the note Prossimamente (Settimelli 1916); – the press review through which L’Italia futurista promoted the opening of the film (Fagiolo dell’Arco 1968: 86-88; 106); – reviews from the daily newspapers La Nazione and Il Nuovo Giornale (Syrimis 2012: 66-77); – Ginna’s letter, dated 25 May 1917, to Anton Giulio Bragaglia, who was in charge of the film’s distribution (Verdone 1990: 103); – the article by Maria Ginanni, La prima a Roma della cinematografia futurista, in issue 18 of L’Italia futurista, 17 June 1917, which describes the 14 and 15 June 1917 shows at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, validating information previously released regarding a projection held in the Italian capital; – the article by Bruno Corra entitled La Risata italiana and published in L’Italia futurista, 1 July 1917 that alludes to the episode Esercitazioni per liberarsi dalla logica (Exercises to Get Rid of Logic) to establish a link with his own novel Sam Dunn è morto; – the Indice alfabetico delle pellicole cinematografiche approvate dal Ministero dell’Interno dal 1 gennaio 1916 al 31 dicembre 1921 (alphabetic index of the cinematographic films approved by the Ministry of Interior from 1 January 1916 to 31 December 1921), in which a record file dated 31 December 1916 of the film entitled Vita futurista comes to light; the producer was L’Italia futurista, the length of the footage was 990 metres, the rating was n. 12.279, but it contained the following clause: ‘censor the last part entitled: Perché Francesco Giuseppe non moriva’ (Verdone 1990: 104); – Marinetti’s article La cinematografia astratta è un’invenzione italiana (Marinetti 1926: 252), containing the testimony of Corrado Pavolini;5 – the memorial testimony of Arnaldo Ginna Note sul film d’avanguardia Vita futurista, supplied to the Centro Studi Bragaglia in 1965; – the surviving frames published by Fagiolo dell’Arco and Verdone (Fagiolo dell’Arco 1968: 86; Verdone 1990: images section);

5 Pavolini told about a bike excursion along the boulevards of the Cascine of Florence: he met three men who were stumbling along, arm in arm, and a fourth man with a camera. Pavolini recognized Marinetti and Settimelli among them, and saw them again, at a later date, projected on the screen of a film theatre in the same scene he himself had seen at the Cascine. It was a comparison between the ‘neutralist step’, oscillating, fearful, Hamletic, and the ‘interventionist step’, which Marinetti realized impetuously (Pavolini 1926: 107), within the episode Come cammina il futurista (How the Futurist Walks).

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– one of the two posters from Teatro Niccolini of Florence, concerning the first public projection of the Futurist film the 28 January 1917 in Florence, at Teatro Niccolini, during which the film was presented together with four Futurist syntheses and declamations by Settimelli and Chiti. The poster preserves the summary of the scenes actually shown. The posters are stored at the Municipal Archive of Florence and they are recorded in the Registro di Borderò e locandine anni 1911-1917 (Innamorati 1987: 53). Data contained in the register mentions 463 spectators, confirming the success and the great turnout; – the stamp of approval for the authorization of the projection, registered at the Ufficio per la censura on 2 December 1916. It was a regulation form with Pathé Freres pre-printed captions and was filled out by hand, except for the description of the script, which was a typescript and edited in extenso, with all the titles, subheadings, subtitles, etc. (Innamorati 1987: 53). One of the most interesting aspects of the philological research on the film is the matter of the order of the sequences (Strauven 2006: 177), in each of the several descriptions (that of L’Italia futurista, of the request for authorization, and of the poster of the Niccolini) the editing of the scenes turns out to be completely different. Thus, this film introduces the avant-garde practice of the ‘work in progress’, in which editing continued even after the film’s release, without an original, according to the attitude one has towards creating an uncertain work. The editing combines the sequences from time to time, according to a different order, to give a new meaning and impact to the show, similar to the Futurists’ experimentation in the changing order of theatrical synthesis. One of the aims was the idea of ‘heating up’ the medium (Lista 2010: 52) through a performativity of the projection as an event, radiating a vital breath, almost mesmeric, in the inanimate. The film was disclosed by the newspaper La Nazione in 15 May 1916; La Nazione also announced the premiere on 27 January, the day before the event. Ginna himself told an anecdote about the first projection of the film: while Settimelli was trying to convince Castellani, the owner of the Marconi cinema in Florence, to buy Vita futurista, the painter Trilluci criticized the film and, through the darkness, the spectators heard the sound of Settimelli slapping Trilluci’s face (Ginna 1965: 157). Syrimis emphasizes the incongruity of Ginna’s testimony (memories reported 48 years later) when compared to the coeval press reviews. Ginna states that cinemas were more vulnerable than theatres to the avant-garde guerrillas, and cinema owners did not like this danger because they were worried about the possible  

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damage to the screens due to the usual organic projectiles hurled by the audience, but the reviews cited in the daily newspapers did not mention any destruction during the scheduled screenings of Vita futurista. On 23 June 2017, a review by ECO (identified by Lista as Cipriano Efisio Oppo) of the screening at Teatro Costanzi in Rome was released in the journal Il Cinema Illustrato, complaining about the ‘banality and dullness’ of the film (Syrimis 2012: 74). Other newspaper did not even mention the screening in Rome, which might have been a matinée and, for this reason, it might not have appeared on the theatre’s official programme. The Futurists’ presence in cinemas removed the distance from the actor, subverting the dynamics of stardom as well as the voyeurism of the spectator, which was, at that time, still a mysterious mechanism, although later defined by the semiological studies on cinema. Again, the Marinettian utopia of the performance was materializing, in the praxis of mixing art and vital presence. Vita futurista was a ‘showcase’ for the movement, the overbearing entrance of the Futurists in film. Ginna probably considered the manifesto, La cinematografia futurista, a vehicle for the promotion of the film, deeming the formal and experimental aspects detrimental to the playful dimension of the work: among caricatured deformations and exercises to eliminate logic and cinematographic analogies, indeed the episodes of the film include many of the proposals announced in the manifesto. Therefore, it is clear how the censorship implied the suppression of a sequence: such a prohibition disrupted the coherence of the interventionist/ propagandist dimension of the film, which, with a sequence of political satire, participated in the Futurist atmosphere as explicitly provocative content. This sequence was replaced with the scene of the Colazione Futurista (Futurist Lunch), but it was not included in the description for the authorization. On the other hand,6 it was reintegrated into the definitive summary for the poster of the show on 28 January 1917 (Innamorati 1987: 53). The censorship authorities expunged the closing episode of 190 metres – reducing the film to 800 metres –, confirmed by a letter from Ginna to Bragaglia (Verdone 1990: 103). The Kaiser Franz Joseph died on 21 November 1916. On 15 November, the title Perché Cecco Beppe non muore (Why Cecco Beppe Doesn’t Die) still appears on the alleged script of the film. The new title, which showed a verb in the past tense, Perché Francesco Giuseppe non 6 Sequence mentioned in the October 1916 issue of Prossimamente, as Thè futurista – Invasione di un thè passatista (Futurist Tea – Invasion of a Passéist Tea) and mentioned by Ginna in his Note as Scena al ristorante di Piazzale Michelangelo.

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moriva (Why Cecco Beppe Didn’t Die), confirms the time of finalization of the editing, most likely concluded at the end of November (Lista 2001: 45). Ginna himself described the sequence this way: A seated caryatid, with the effigy of Franz Joseph, is invited by Death. Death is interpreted by Remo Chiti, wearing a black sweater on which a skeleton is painted. But Death is not able to take the Kaiser’s caryatid, and faints from the stench which it radiates (Verdone, 1990: 106).

The episode links again to the satire of Lacerba, which dedicated the 1915 almanac to the War.7 In 1916, Italy was in the midst of war of World War I, and the censorship authorities believed the scene could be perceived as too offensive, even though the subject of ridicule was the Emperor of the enemy.8 In fact, the period of 1900-1910 was a particularly heated moment in the history of Europe: World War I, a moment of conflict between the old European empires and the new national individualities, was perceived by the Futurists both as a moment of uproar (Zang Tumb Tuuum, a poem by Marinetti from 1914 is a blatant example of the Futurist warmonger ardor, already expressed through onomatopoeia in the title itself) as a possibility of a new European order, according to the new formula that saw youth triumphing over the conservative tradition. The Austrian ruler is seen ridiculed in an absolutely comical scene; the device of the black sweater with the painted skeleton was a witty and illusionistic idea, which conferred to Remo Chiti the visibility 7 Marinetti, like Heraclitus, found in war the symbol of, and the rule to what made men free or slaves; thus, it is military projects and technologies that make history. Marinetti sang the ‘only hygiene for the world’ and advocated with fervor, at interventionist demonstrations, the renovating power and the revolutionary reach of war, perpetrating his spectacular polemology in archetypal images of f ire and lightning, symbols of cosmic energy; war was a theatre of speed, noise, and mechanical development, a symbolic moment and activist of an innovative universal dynamism. The early attestations of the term ‘avant-garde’ report its usage in the field of military activities; in other words, the advanced military units in L’Avant-garde de l’Armée des Pyrenées-Orientales from 1794. (Estivals et al. 1968): this semantic data finds an effective validation in the aggressive and interventionist attitude of the Futurists. 8 Notwithstanding the fact that hatred towards Austria was deeply rooted in Italy since Risorgimento and in spite of the fact that the Strafexpedition (the punitive expedition that the Austrian army inflicted on the Eastern Front on 15 May 1916) had already claimed many victims. According to Strauven, the object of censorship was the flippancy shown towards ‘the seriousness of war which rendered poking fun at death quite embarrassing (and inappropriate). Since in Perché Francesco Giuseppe non moriva, Death and the Kaiser come to a cruel agreement: Death promises to renounce the taking of the Kaiser’s life, provided that he pays “the sum of 100.000 dead every week”. The Kaiser is, thus, forced to intensify the massacres all over Europe’ (Strauven 2006: 174-175).

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of an unreal figure that was deep-seated in the roots of the traditional representation of death, whose grotesque personification has always had an apotropaic function. To laugh at death, as per tradition, was to dispel its evil. The avant-gardes have broken the comical a privileged ground for breaking codes, by virtue of the greater expressive power that it possesses, in its eccentricity. The Russian theorist Bakhtin underlines the disrespectful and anti-conformist component of criticism and opposition to official genres, as inherent in the comical. Laughter symbolizes the changeability of points of view and perspectives, it is the carnival inversion of the order of the world, from which the greatest dread can become object of ridicule (Bakhtin 1993). Palazzeschi describes the utopia of a world of laughter wherein painful events are subverted into sources of hilarity in Controdolore (Manifesto Against Pain). Balla and Depero, in Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe), propose educating children to laugh without inhinition to strengthen their mental flexibility. The attitude towards the comical quality is underlined by the palatable gags present in many parts of the film, which, in the general structure of the work, correspond to a humorous and mocking spirit without deserting the formal research, genial composition, and visual choices of Vita futurista. The definition of comical was pinpointed by Bakhtin in his studies on the carnival sense of reality. Accordingly, a series of literary genres ensue, but above all, a set of general attitudes: 1. mockery towards serious aspects of reality; 2. the presence of material and physical elements, antithesis of an idyllic vision of life; 3. parody that subverts meanings, ‘decoronation’ of the king; 4. the mixing of different voices and languages; 5. ‘eccentricity’ as research into the bizarre, refusal of social rules. It is undeniable that Vita futurista had all these characteristics: 1. jokes about the figure of the ‘old-man traditionalist’, interventionism, and the recent death of the Austrian Kaiser in the historical moment of World War I; 2. physical deformations obtained with lenses and mirrors, ‘pommelings’, the lunch of the ‘traditionalist’; 3. a hilarious wedding between Balla and a chair, caricature of artists who observe carrots hanging from a thread, parody of Franz Joseph’s death; the presence of styles and images of a completely different kind such as shadows and lines in movement, dances, pommelings, grotesque deformations, parodies;

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Frames of Vita futurista (VV.AA., 1916), published on ‘Bianco e Nero’ (no. 1, Rome, 1937) – Courtesy of Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale.

4. every single sequence of the film, even those more suggestive of visual experimentation, is eccentric, extravagant, and bizarre. In the earliest cinematic comedies, all these elements are present through the gag, which contains within itself the mechanism of the roles, the processes of breaking the rules, and also includes playfulness, parody, metamorphosis, and speed. Marinetti probably considered Vita futurista a sort of heritage in reference to the early comedies of Italian cinema (Lista 2001: 52), considering the performative aspect of the film as a multimedia elaboration of Futurist synthesis and associating the editing of the sequences to a vaudeville-type ‘attraction’; indeed, Gaudreault and Gunning observed the expressive power of the show tout court (Gaudreault 1988) in cinema’s origins, from the comical jests and the visual exuberance of figuration, to the medium’s essence as a technological apparatus, to the detriment of the linearity of narration. According to Gunning, the cinema of attractions is ‘a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator’ (Gunning 1986: 64). The comic attitude of Vita futurista also implies a presentational style based on a pure sense of the spectacle, rather than on an intricate editing for visual storytelling. In those years, cinema was a very young

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means of expression, so many techniques were still developing, except for a few pioneer ones: camera movements were a novelty and were introduced by Cabiria and its tracking shot. Somehow,9 the reference to early comedies, so much valued by Marinetti, was part of an audience practice close to the one experienced at caffè-concerto10 variety shows, which vanished during the mid-1910s, when film-makers and producers instead aimed to a cultural legitimacy of cinema, with a different attention to scenography, intertitles, and dramatic acting style. The 1910s Italian comedies were built on brief and simple narrative structures, marked by stylization; the main narrative strategies were equivocations, substitutions, and parodies. Italian silent film comedians were pathfinders of the encounter between the low-class audience and the bourgeoisie, between the circus tradition and the new representation system of urban modernity. Although these films never created new representation and narration paths, they nevertheless deserve credit for an illustration of the impact of modernity on the nineteenth century bourgeois society, that was devoted to its bombastic high-flown rituals.11 Within these films, the materiality of the pretextual events of the plots meets the physicality of actions and moving bodies: these action-driven films defined a synesthetic mechanism that involved both characters and spectators. In fact, even though the silent cinema enforced a more visual than auditive reception system, the fruition of the comic film was not related to a merely visual system: instead, it was rather closer to a multisensory and ‘haptic’ (optic-tactile) perception, just

9 Cabiria, a 1914 film by Giovanni Pastrone, was the first Italian kolossal and the most successful Italian epic silent movie, inspired by Emilio Salgari’s novel Carthage in flames. Gabriele D’Annunzio was hired as scriptwriter. Furthermore, an orchestral score was composed for the purpose of the film and every detail, from the erudite epic imagery to the technological innovations, aimed togain the same prestige of operatic productions. The technological advancements introduced by Cabiria through special effects, modern machinery, and inventions, might also be read as a flash of Futurist excitement about the glorious mechanized imagery of modernity (Alovisio 2006). 10 Italian version of the French Café chantant performances. 11 Basically, these comedies aimed to spoof the symbols of social prestige as well as the taboos of public morality, bon ton, and respectability, even if they did not take on actual antagonist attitudes towards social groups. Following the theatrical tradition of the fool, the comic mask does not belong to any group: instead, it is an anomaly of the hierarchic system, which clashes with its formal rules. Among these comedians, some of the most emblematic figures were Henri André Augustin Chapais, aka André Deed, creator of the character of Cretinetti and Ferdinando Guillaume, famous for his characters Tontolini and, later, Polidor. Both scripted and directed their own f ilms: their physical dexterity and improvization abilities were the key for their expressive style, shaped by fast action and vaudevillian-based comic timing (Blom 2013: 466).

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like some contemporary theories on film perception emphasize (Marks 1999; Sobchack 2004). In spite of this focus on speed, physicality, and comical quality, we must note the deep difference between early Italian comedies and the Futurist experience: Vita futurista should actually be distinguished from the canons of early Italian comedies (and from the whole attitude of the socalled cinema of attractions), due to the Futurist group’s programmatic attitude. The self-referentiality and essayism of Vita futurista are the core of its innovations: in fact, the thematic concerns, with which the comical quality of the film is associated, are specific to Futurism (Syrimis 2012: 57). The Scena al ristorante di Piazzale Michelangelo (Scene at the Restaurant in Piazzale Michelangelo) is crucial: Lucio Venna, dressed up as an old man with a white beard is sitting at a table outside the restaurant. He is about to start his lunch with a cup of broth when some young Futurists intervene loudly, disapproving of the way the old man is eating. An Englishman, who is present at the scene, does not realise that it is a pretense and intervenes, addressing Marinetti indignantly (Ginna 1965: 156).

The unexpected lack of humour of the Englishman made the episode even more hilarious, which otherwise would have been a mere ‘Futurist provocation’. The surviving frame related to this scene shows a medium-long shot of two tables, at which the young Futurists used to lunch; behind them, it is possible to see Lucio Venna with a false white beard. Just as eccentric and bizarre was the sequence of the Discussione tra un uomo obeso e un uomo allampanato (Conversation Between a Tubby Man and a Lean Man) in which the actors are filmed in two deforming mirrors. Settimelli spoke of the application of deforming lenses in Danza dello splendore geometrico (Dance of the Geometric Splendor), in which Balla was compressed and mechanized. As with many films of that era (Yumibe 2012; Gunning et al. 2015), Vita futurista boasted a series of colour effects realized by hand directly on the positive film. During the editing, in fact, the director noticed that a portion of film was studded with white dots, caused by the settling of dust on the negative before its development. Ginna and Venna then coloured those white dots on the positive copy, aiming for the expressive use of colour to evoke mood in the episode, as happens in kinetic painting. The colours pink and blue gave an impression of romantic sentimentality in the segment of the film entitled Il futurista sentimentale (The Sentimental Futurist).

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Whereas the episode that Ginna defined as Ricerca introspettiva di stati d’animo (Introspective Research of Moods) was coloured by hand to evoke, through purple, an immediate suggestion linked to mood, as was done with the earlier experiments by the Corradini brothers in Musica cromatica as well as with the titles of the famous paintings by Umberto Boccioni. The only still existing image is an extreme close-up of Remo Chiti: an asymmetric composition, on the right side of the frame, in which Chiti had his head bandaged and his eyes closed, in a strained and painful expression. The image is quite damaged and traversed by scratches. The episode Come dorme il futurista (How the Futurist Sleeps) showed the comparison between the sleeping of a traditionalist and the incredible sleeping of the Futurist in a vertical bed, metaphor for the Futurist refusal of every kind of weakness, even the urgent physiologic ones. Kirby denotes how, in the surviving frame related to this segment, there is a sort of split screen that separates the image of the man lying in the horizontal bed to the right and the image on the left that shows Settimelli, dressed and with his hat on, ready to jump out of the vertical bed. The backgrounds, the lighting, and the corners of the two beds seem to show two separate images that have been put together in a second moment. Kirby’s12 proposal can be contradicted by the overlapping of the sheets/blankets of both beds at the bottom, and clearly by the omission of the topic in all the documents relating to the film. Being the split screen a procedure that implies a technical complexity, it seems not very plausible that Ginna himself did not talk about it. There probably is, beyond the parodic dimension of the comparison, built on the model of ethnographic comparisons, a quotation of Heraclitus’ metaphor that divides humanity among those who are awake and those who are asleep: those who sleep cannot achieve universal reason, fire, and lightning, which gives life to things. Marinetti, known as ‘the caffeine of Europe’, also refers to this dimension in the character of Garzumah, son of Mafarka, in his novel Mafarka il futurista (Strauven 2006: 185). The segment of Storia d’amore tra Balla e una sedia (Story of Love Between Balla and a Chair), evidently realized through a deforming lens, allows for the recognition of the painter Giacomo Balla while he kneels near a chair, according to a habit of associating this action with a declaration of love, from Dolce Stil Novo to Romanticism. The deformation of the image, besides being a divertissement that contributes to the comical range of the sequence, 12 ‘How the split screen effect was achieved is a problem. Ginna says that both beds are “in a room”, but the backgrounds, lighting and relative angles of the two beds seem to indicate two separate pictures joined together’ (Kirby 1971: 127).

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also postulates the refusal of sentimentalist tradition in the Italian culture and the avant-garde utopia of the demolition of Cartesian space. Another image is probably missing from this sequence: there are three surviving frames that show a girl dressed in white with a raised arm. Verdone attributed these frames to Danza dello splendore geometrico, because the woman in white seems to be dancing, but the background and the silhouette of Balla, slightly deformed in the right corner of the image, confirm its continuity within the love sequence between Balla and the chair, in which the girl is not deformed and ‘appeared’ in superimposition, slightly better defined than the first of the three frames, maybe as a parody of a spirit or a ghost of the beloved chair. The scene of Danza dello splendore geometrico demonstrates how Balla’s contribution proved to be fundamental for his research on chromatic values and iridescence. The sequence was shot outdoors: a dancer wearing a costume of carton and tinfoil off which light is reflected with little mirrors, dazzling and creating suggestive light illusions. According to Lista, it was a reference to Dance de l’Acier, presented by Loïe Fuller at the Châtelet in Paris in May 1914, in which the dancers moved themselves behind sequined materials, enlightened by dazzling lights (Lista 2001: 47). The frame of the final scene Discussione con guantoni tra Marinetti e Ungari (Discussion With Boxing Gloves Between Marinetti and Ungari) shows a medium-long shot of Marinetti while he punches Ungari, who collapses onto the floor, directly onto his face. The episode was shot outdoors and contributes to defining the filming period between summer and September, as shown by the colour of the foliage of the trees in the background. The bellicose mythology of Futurism isolates slaps and punches, actions usually considered to be vulgar and ignominious, to obtain a fetish for an aesthetic of violence.13 The high costs of developing and printing, entirely sustained by Ginna, the difficulty of finding the film within a nation at war, the awareness of a nearly nonexistent market for the distribution of the film to theatres (due to the probable risks of being destroyed by the audience) all justify the printing of only three copies of the film. Arnaldo Ginna conserved one of the three copies of Vita futurista, whereas Settimelli’s, and the one given to Lombardo Film in Naples were lost. In the 1960s in Rome, Ginna entrusted his copy to the art critic Carlo 13 Beyond various episodes of a ‘performative’ nature, as the many battles in which the Futurists were protagonists, it is worthwhile to remember Balla’s sculpture entitled Linee forza del pugno di Boccioni (Sculpture Dynamic of Boccioni’s Fist) (1915-1956).

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Page from the journal L’Italia futurista (no. 8, Florence, 1916). Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Gesellschaft.

Belloli who, however, declared that the film caught fire during a private projection in his villa in Basel. This is very plausible, considering the

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extreme precariousness of the nitrate support, the flammable film used in cinema during the first and second decade of the century. Lista touches on the existence of a living owner of the surviving frames of the film, which, therefore, is not completely lost (Lista 2010: 52). It is hoped that a restoration can bring to light the existing material and restore the antique splendor of the early avant-garde to those frames.

References Alovisio, S. & A. Barbera (eds.) (2006), Cabiria & Cabiria. Turin – Milan: Museo Nazionale del Cinema – Il castoro. Altomare, L. (1912), ‘Proiezioni’, in VV.AA., I Poeti Futuristi, Milan: Poesia, now in M. Verdone, M. (1990), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Calliano, Trento: Manfrini. Bakhtin, M. M.(1993), Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press [original edition 1941]. Belloli, C. (1964), ‘Poetiche e pratiche del cinema d’avanguardia’, La Biennale, Venice. 54. Berghaus, G. (ed.) (2000), International Futurism in Art and Literature. Berlin: New York. Bertetto, P. (ed.) (1983), Il cinema d’avanguardia, 1910-1930. Venice: Marsilio. Blom, I. (2013), All the Same or Strategies of Difference: Early Italian Comedies in International Perspective, in G. Bertellini, Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader, 465479. New Barnet, Herts, U.K.: John Libbey Publishing Ltd. Blum, J. A., G. Houle, & M. D. Turner (2011): ‘Research for Production and Production as Research in Re-Living the “Vita futurista”’, in P. J. Stoesser (ed.) Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance, 133-150. Ottawa: Legas. Bragaglia, A. G. (1980), Fotodinamismo futurista. Turin: Einaudi [original edition 1912]. Brunetta, G. P. & A. Costa (eds.) (1990), La città che sale: cinema, avanguardie, immaginario urbano. Calliano, Trento: Manfrini. Catanese, R. (2009), ‘Prospettive ed esperimenti nel cinema futurista’, Avanguardia 42: 99-118. Comin, J. (1937), ‘Appunti sul cinema d’avanguardia’, Bianco e Nero (I) 1: 6-33. Corra, B. (1916), ‘Musica Cromatica’, in B. Corra & E. Settimelli (eds.), Il pastore, il gregge e la zampogna. Bologna: Beltrami, now in M. Verdone (1990), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, 242-253. Calliano, Trento: Manfrini. —. (1917), ‘La risata italiana’, L’Italia futurista (II) 19: 1-2. Crispolti, E. (1969), Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo. Trapani: Celebes. Doane, M.A. (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity, Contingency, The Archive. Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press.

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Estivals, R., J. Gaudy, & G. Vergez (1968), L’avant-garde. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale. Fagiolo dell’Arco, M. (1968), Balla: Ricostruzione Futurista dell’Universo. Rome: Bulzoni. Gaudreault, A. (ed.) (1988), Ce que je vois de mon ciné… La représentation du regard dans le cinéma des premiers temps. Québec: Méridiens Klincksieck. Ginanni, M. (1917), ‘La prima a Roma della cinematograf ia futurista’. L’Italia futurista (II) 18. Ginna, A. (1965) ‘Note sul film d’avanguardia “Vita futurista”’, Bianco e Nero (XXVI) 5-6: 156-158; extended version in M. Verdone (1990), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Calliano, Trento: Manfrini. —. [original edition 1932], ‘Cinema futurista’, now in E. Crispolti (1969), Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo. Trapani: Celebes. Gunning, T. (1986), ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle (Vol. 8) 3-4: 63-70, now in T. Elsaesser (ed.) (1990), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative. London: BFI. Gunning, T., G. Fossati & J. Yumibe (2015), Fantasia of colour in Early Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Harte, T. (2009), Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Innamorati, I. (1984), ‘Vita futurista’, in F. Bagatti, G. Manghetti & S. Porto, Futurismo a Firenze 1910-1920, 123-125. Florence: Sansoni. —. (1987), ‘Nuovi documenti d’archivio su Vita futurista. Peripezie di una pellicola d’avanguardia’, Quaderni di teatro: rivista del teatro regionale toscano (IX) 36: 47-64. Kirby, M. (1971), Futurist Performance. New York: Dutton & Co. Lapini, L. (1977), Il teatro futurista italiano. Milan: Mursia. Lista, G. (1987), ‘Ginna e il cinema futurista’, Il Lettore di Provinia (XVIII) 69: 17-25. —. (2001), Cinema e fotografia futurista. Milan: Skira. —. (2010), Il cinema futurista. Genoa: Le Mani. Marinetti, F.T. (1914), Zang Tumb Tuuum, Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’. —. (1926), ‘La cinematografia astratta è un’invenzione italiana’, L’Impero, 1 December, Rome. —. (1927), ‘Cinematografia futurista astratta e pura’, Lo Schermo (I) 12 Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla & R. Chiti (1916), La cinematografia futurista, L’Italia Futurista, (I) 1: 1, translated as The Futurist Cinema in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 229-232. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Marks, L. U. (1999). The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitry, J. (1974), Le cinéma expérimental: histoire et perspectives. Paris: Seghers. Noguez, D. (1978), ‘Du futurisme à l’“Underground”’, in Id, Cinéma, Théorie, Lectures, 285-293. Paris: Klincksieck.

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Pavolini, C. (1926), ‘Cinematografo puro avanti lettera’, Il Tevere, in M. Verdone (1990), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Calliano, Trento: Manfrini. —. (1958), ‘Futurismo’, in G. C. Sansoni (ed.), Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo (IV). Rome: Le Maschere. Ripellino, A. M. (1959), Majakovskij e il teatro russo d’avanguardia. Turin: Einaudi. Settimelli, E. (1916), ‘L’Italia futurista’, L’Italia Futurista, (I) 1: 1, now in M. C. Papini (ed.) (1977), L’Italia Futurista (1916-1918). Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo e Bizzarri. —. (1917), ‘La prima nel mondo della cinematograf ia futurista’, L’Italia Futurista, (II) 1: 2, now in M. Fagiolo dell’Arco (1968), Balla: Ricostruzione Futurista dell’Universo. Rome: Bulzoni. Sobchack, V. (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strauven, W. (2006), Marinetti e il cinema. Tra attrazione e sperimentazione. Pasian di Prato, Udine: Campanotto. Syrimis, M. (2012), The Great Black Spider on its Knock-kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-century Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Verdone, M. (ed.) (1975), Poemi e scenari cinematografici d’avanguardia. Rome: Officina. Verdone, M. (1977), Le avanguardie storiche del cinema. Turin: S.E.I. —. (1990), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Calliano, Trento: Manfrini [original edition 1968]. Verdone, M. & Berghaus, G. (2000), ‘Vita futurista and Early Futurist Cinema’, in G. Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 398-421. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. Yumibe, J. (2012), Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

About the author Rossella Catanese (editor) is Adjunct Professor of Italian Cinema and Society at Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute (University of North Carolina – Florence branch). She took her PhD at Sapienza University of Rome, where she has worked as tutor for an academic master in Digital Audiovisual Restoration. Her publications concern issues of film restoration, media archaeology, archival films and film history, with a focus on 1910s and 1920s Avant-garde cinema and archival films.

11. Thaïs A Different Challenge to the Stars Lucia Re Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch11 Abstract This chapter discusses Thaïs (1916) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, a film that is remarkable as the only fairly well-preserved full-length Futurist film. This analysis focuses on: 1) the use of the literary myth of Thaïs in the film and the D’Annunzian figure of the femme fatale, which I see as a manifestation of a kind of ‘return of the repressed’; 2) the metacinematic character of the film related to the Futurist vision of technology; 3) the link between the apparently dated themes of the film (such as its decadent and symbolist imagery) and the historic present of the ‘technological’ war in 1916. The methodology used for my analysis combines different approaches in f ilm history, literary criticism, gender studies, and studies on spectatorship. Keywords: Thaïs, D’Annunzio, Bragaglia Metacinema

Futurist ideas yielded innovative insights into the meaning of technology in relation to art, foreshadowing new possible forms and visual strategies for the art of film-making. The Futurists were among the first avant-garde artists to recognize a regime of the spectacle and of the image in modernity, though theirs was definitely an anti-naturalistic approach. Futurist imagery involved the discovery of new ways of watching and looking. Indeed, Futurism’s1 obsession with speed and movement made the moving image of film seem like the ideal Futurist medium. The Futurist myth of the machine, 1 This is a revised, updated, and more concise version of an earlier study that appeared in Re 2008.

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which allows speed, fast movement, and visual reproduction, is, to be sure, highly relevant to cinema, as is the Futurist idea of the machine as a device that helps to enlarge human experience, both in terms of expression and in terms of perception. However, despite the strong affinity between Futurism and cinema, very few Futurist films were made; Thaïs (1916), by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, is remarkable in that it is the only fairly well-preserved full-length Futurist film. Reference for this essay is the conserved version of the film available at the La Cinémathèque française,2 which is a tinted copy that includes French intertitles.3 Bragaglia, 4 who is best known for his theory and practice of photodynamism, wrote the screenplay and filmed Thaïs in collaboration with Riccardo Cassano for the Novissima Film production company; the company was founded by Bragaglia and Emidio De Medio in September 1916.5 The film premiered in Rome on 4 October 1917, with a delay perhaps resulting from difficulties in obtaining the approval of the censorship office. Then the film could be internationally distributed, so it was screened in France with the title Les Possédées (The Possessed).6 The futurist painter and theoretician Enrico Prampolini was the art director as well as the set and costume designer.7 Indeed, Prampolini’s contribution to the film gave it the striking visual originality that made it famous, mainly for the final sequence. This specific sequence gained the interest of most critics and 2 The length of the film, which is certainly incomplete, is 756 metrrs. It lasts about 35 minutes. 3 Bragaglia’s film seems to have had a ghostly precursor or filmic doppelgänger, a 1914 feature film also entitled Thaïs, produced in the United States and directed by Arthur Maude and Constance Crawley, who also starred in the film, along with George Gebhardt. Crawley-Maude Feature was the production company, while the distributor was Arthur H. Sawyer; Crawley played the role of Thaïs, while Maude played Paphnuce. This film has vanished completely, but it is known as the only film directed by the actress Constance Crawley, who died very young in 1919 (Handy 1919: 14). 4 Anton Giulio and his brother Arturo, whose lawyer father was the manager of the Cines film studios in Rome, started practicing photodynamism and using ‘tricks’ such as photomontage and the superimposition of several negatives in their studio in Rome around 1911, inspired in part by the desire to counter the analytical positivism of Marey’s chronophotography (Bragaglia 1911; Braun 2014). 5 The name Novissima Film was a reference to the art journal Novissima. Albo d’Arti e Lettere, founded in 1900 in Milan by Edoardo Camis de Fonseca. The journal had become influential by spreading the styles of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement as well as the styles in the German journals Simplicissimus and Jugend (Boschetti 2011: 36). 6 According to Bragaglia, severe censorship was applied to any work at the time making reference to magic; cuts had to be made especially to Perfido incanto, a film that has been sometimes confused with Thaïs (Verdone 1965: 8). 7 Lista states that Bragaglia’s wife, Giuseppina Pelonzi Bragaglia, was credited to have collaborated in the design and production of the costumes (Lista 2010: 66).

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historians, due to its strong visual impact; it has often been recognized as the only truly avant-garde section of Thaïs. The other parts of the film have largely been undervalued, often perceived as a banal variation of the melodrama films patterned on D’Annunzio. The outdoor sequences are all filmed in locations throughout Rome that are both familiar and D’Annunzian locations par excellence, such as Pincio, Villa Strohl Fern (inside Villa Borghese), and the Lungotevere. According to Gian Piero Brunetta, ‘the powerful presence of Prampolini’s futurist sets in the finale entirely cancels out any interest in the dramatic plot that precedes it […] which is a typical drama of D’Annunzian culture’ (Brunetta 1993: 217); Brunetta also adds that the two parts of the film are not integrated. But if Bragaglia, as an insider of the Futurist movement, was critical of this ‘passéist’ genre, why would he simply create another D’Annunzian8 femme fatale melodrama? Actually, the mise-en-scène of the D’Annunzian melodrama in Thaïs, and the particular use the film makes of it, are not at all a predictable cliché. In my opinion, it is a mistake to read the film naturalistically by its plot or its milieu, or to read it only aesthetically for its set designs. In fact, I believe Thaïs is an extremely modern and experimental film that can be read on several levels and is structured in an allegorical manner. I think that the D’Annunzian cinematographic style has indeed been evoked, but in a parodic and ironic fashion.9 8 The rejection of the femme fatale, of decadent symbolism, and of the overwrought imagery of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s work was a central part of Futurism since its inception and the 1909–1910 manifestos; ‘For too long Italy has submitted to the enfeebling influence of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the lesser brother of the great French Symbolists, nostalgic like them, and like them hovering above the naked female body. One must at all costs combat Gabriele D’Annunzio, because with all his great skill he has distilled the four intellectual poisons that we want to abolish forever: 1) the sickly, nostalgic poetry of distance and memory; 2) romantic sentimentality dripping with moonlight that is ascending toward an ideal and fatal Woman-Beauty; 3) obsession with lechery, with the adulterous triangle, the spice of incest and the seasoning of Christian sin; 4) the profound passion for the past and the mania for antiquity and collecting’ (Marinetti 1911: 94). D’Annunzio’s elaborate literary style and the film adaptations of his works made him the symbol of ‘passéism’, and he became the favorite target of Futurist invectives. Ironically, the mimetic approach of these adaptations was far from D’Annunzio’s idea of cinema: in fact, two years before the manifesto of Futurist cinema, the poet wrote: ‘I spent several hours in a film production house to study the techniques and especially to learn whatever I could from those clever devices that people call “tricks”. I thought that the cinematograph could generate a pleasurable art whose essential element would be the “marvelous” […] Today, public taste reduces the cinematograph to a more or less vulgar industry that competes with the theatre’ (D’Annunzio 1914: 264-266). 9 I mean parody not as a ridiculing or comic mockery of another work and/or his author, but as a mode of intertextuality that allows for a critical revisiting and appropriation of the past and, in the process, generates a new (and quite opposite) meaning (Hutcheon 1985).

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Bragaglia, who was born in 1890, belonged to a generation of avant-garde artists that came after the early days of Marinetti, Balla, and Boccioni (Boccioni died in August 1916); he pursued a different kind of experimental aesthetics. In 1916, Bragaglia adapted the character of the femme fatale, transforming her into a Futurist icon by staging a sort of Futurist ‘return of the repressed’; in Freudian psychology, this is the tendency of repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, to reappear. Bragaglia evokes the femme fatale as a specter of the past, as a weapon;10 Thaïs conjures up a new model of spectatorship, which implies a critical and disenchanted approach, and exposes metalinguistically the mechanisms and tricks that the film uses to seduce us. An unknown actress, and not a diva, was hired as the protagonist: the Russian singer-dancer Tais Galizky, discovered by Bragaglia in Rome in the summer of 1916. This choice implies a rejection of the hegemonic diva culture of the silent cinema. Diva films were a specific feature of the 1910s cinema, films that usually included some adoring close-ups for the heroine and a fairly static use of the camera. Diva means ‘goddess’,11 connoting a kind of timelessness of the name, physical traits, body, and gestural language that were characteristic of each actress. Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli, etc. could reproduce their homologated acting and gestures, from one film to the next. Such traits usually obscured the individual character played in a given film, a character who served to reinforce the cult of the diva (see: Censi 2008; Dall’Asta 2008; Dalle Vacche 2008; Jandelli 2006). In a typically Futurist gesture that – echoing the first Futurist manifesto – could be defined as a ‘challenge to the stars’, Bragaglia’s film overturns the traditional paradigm of the diva, because he transforms a complete unknown, without any kind of publicity campaign, into a diva ex-nihilo. The spectator is actually unable to distinguish between the two, although the fictional character named Thaïs overshadows the diva, ironically bringing to light the vacuity of diva culture. Thus, the film reveals that the diva exists insofar as she is a filmic image, a mere simulacrum, and not a living being 10 The comparison between the weapon – specifically a machine-gun – and the femme fatale was proposed by Marinetti in The Battle of Tripoli (Marinetti 1911 b). 11 Bragaglia felt spellbound by the Russian dancer and, in July 1916, sang her praises in the journal that he edited, Cronache d’attualità. His review, entitled ‘Le canzoni dei cosacchi e Thais Galitzky’, has the tone of a decadent novel and describes Thaïs as a sensual and supernatural being. The article is illustrated with two engravings by Prampolini in (according to Lista) a quasi-liberty style reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.: ‘Inner visions of dream and dark suggestions animate the voluptuous apparent immobility [of the body]’ (Lista 2001: 62; my translation).

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whose image the screen reproduces by repeatedly offering it up for the viewer’s admiration and desire. Furthermore, Thaïs is an actress taken to the nth degree, because she plays the role of an actress/performer in the film. Hence, the film proposes not a tired variant of diva culture, but its parodic and deadly mise en abîme.12 Thaïs’ suicide at the end confirms that, with the end of the film, Thaïs, who lives only insofar as she is a filmic simulacrum (a flickering and empty image on the screen), is destined to vanish. Generated out of nothing and brought to life by the movie camera, Thaïs fulfills the Futurist desire for mechanical reproduction expressed by Mafarka at the end of Marinetti’s 1910 novel, Mafarka le futuriste. Indeed, the film aims to invert Marinetti’s gender priorities, for Mafarka sought to create a superhuman mechanical son, without any female contribution; Thaïs, on the other hand, mechanically produces a powerful female. This film reminds us that everything that we see, or believe we see, is by and large staged, an optical effect. Among Bragaglia’s peculiarities in both his photodynamism and his films, there is the pleasure he derives from presenting the image not as a recording or faithful, mimetic reproduction of the ‘real’, but as a form of magic with tricks and illusions that, in the end, are ironically revealed. The protagonist’s friends call her ‘Nitchevo’, which means ‘nothing’ in Russian. Nor does the true name of the character who goes by Thaïs in the film help to reestablish any sense of reality: the name attributed to her in the intertitle is, in fact, the ironic ‘Contessa Vera Preobajenska’, that recalls the name-pseudonym of another disquieting actress, Varia Nesteroff of Pirandello’s novel on cinema, Si gira! (1915), later entitled Quaderno di Serafino Gubbio operatore (1925), translated as Shoot!. Aside from the D’Annunzian themes, in this film we are on Pirandellian ground, too; Thaïs involves imagery that derives from plays and novels by Pirandello, a world in which the very idea of self, identity, and organicity of the ego (and of character) is questioned and supplanted by doubling and performance. Pirandello, in fact, turned to none other than Bragaglia while considering a cinematic adaptation of his Serafino Gubbio; their film would have been a very original example of ‘cinema within cinema’ (Verdone 1965: 10-11). In my opinion, Thaïs too is a seminal example of metacinema, a style in which the metalinguistic process is addressed to describe the production 12 For a different reading, see Marcus 1996: 67, who wrote that Thaïs represents the oldfashioned diva as the protagonist, with no parodic intention or irony. According to Marcus, the ‘passéist’ phenomenon of divismo is criticized only in the film’s conclusion by killing off the diva (who functions as the symbol of old-fashioned cinema and art) and the film merely points to the desire for a new Futurist aesthetic.

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mechanisms of film-making. It is a kind of cinema that is aware of itself, of its own structures and its style, revealing and laying bare its own trickery. The mysterious and unstable, mystifying identity of the protagonist renders complex the events narrated in the film: Thaïs is a true Futurist diva, and, oxymoronically, a Futurist femme-fatale.13 Unlike D’Annunzian cinematic divas, Bragaglia’s Thaïs conversely asserts her will and herself precisely through her astonishing ability to consistently create new roles for herself. The name Thaïs does not refer to a single person, but to a complex lineage of actresses and courtesans: it dates back to antiquity and a long series of theatrical and literary works based on this ancestry.14 Bragaglia’s Thaïs parodically ‘rewrites’ this tradition, reversing its meaning. While in Massenet’s opera and France’s novel the protagonist becomes a saint, the perverse Thaïs of Bragaglia’s film does not convert, but rather takes control of her own life, replacing any religious and moralistic element with magic. Thaïs’ self-destruction, a violent death, obeys an essentially Futurist logic; as Marinetti declares in Let’s Murder the Moonlight!: ‘we prefer a violent death and we exalt it as the only one worthy of man, that beast of prey’ (Marinetti 1910: 54). Yet, although Marinetti participated with enthusiasm in the making of the film Vita futurista (directed by Arnaldo Ginna in Florence in the autumn and winter of 1916, with the collaboration of a team of Futurists), he implicitly disapproved of Bragaglia’s cinema. In fact, despite the fact that Thaïs, Perfido incanto,15 and Il mio cadavere were 13 Therefore, Thaïs should be placed next to other female permutations of Futurism, more numerous and interesting than often assumed, such as the writer, dancer, and choreographer Valentine de Saint Point and the writers-actresses Fulvia Giuliani and Enif Robert. 14 The mythical figure of Thaïs, a diabolical sinner and seductress described since antiquity by the likes of Terence and Cicero, was condemned to Hell by Dante, who includes Taide among the flatterers (Inferno XVIII, 130). In the late Middle Ages, her character is softened by the hagiographic legend of the Christian, holy Thaïs: she is a sinner too, but she dies converted and redeemed. Thaïs, an impious woman capable of repentance and purification, becomes an allegory of woman’s struggle against sin. Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim and Jacopo da Voragine both use the myth of Thaïs as an example of morality. Thaïs is also the title of a 1894 opera by Jules Massenet, based in turn on a well-known 1890 novel by Anatole France, which had also been an important source for d’Annunzio and Oscar Wilde. The opera had its Italian premiere in 1903 in Milan. In both works, Thaïs is an actress, dancer, and courtesan in the corrupt and exquisitely decadent environment of Alexandria during the f irst quarter-century A.D. The imagery surrounding Thaïs also fascinated avant-gardes artists, starting with Apollinaire, who devoted an extremely learned essay to her that originally appeared in the Mercure de France (Apollinaire 1904: 1094–1106). 15 A summary of the plot of Perfido incanto was published in 1918 in three languages in the international film journal Apollon (Vigliani Bragaglia 1970: 146). A detailed summary of this film can also be found in Verdone 1965: 69–71.

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internationally distributed, Marinetti did not endorse Bragaglia through his Futurist publicity machine, nor did he provide any financial support; the production company Novissima Film was soon forced to close down. The allegorical-symbolic structure of the film, its irony, and a woman protagonist and star (with a complex role of actress-director-diva-sorceress) are a few of the factors that can explain the Futurist movement leader’s cold response to Thaïs. Marinetti, in spite of his initial misogyny, attempted to cast Valentine de Saint-Point as the prototype of female Futurism, publishing her manifestos. The leader of Futurism was interested in appropriating and absorbing the subversive force of the new women, but required that Futurist women ally themselves faithfully to him and his authority. Bragaglia’s Thaïs must have seemed to Marinetti, like Valentine herself, too independent and ironic, so he showed no interest in the ambiguous and self-reflexive ironies of Thaïs. Furthermore, beyond this film in particular, Marinetti showed a certain indifference to filmic language itself, sharing a widespread prejudice against film as an inferior, lightweight art form for the masses, as well as a business for women rather than men (the true artists). Despite ostensibly embracing the masses and wishing to go beyond the opposition between high and low art, the early Futurists still largely supported the traditional hierarchy of the arts. Futurist painters especially felt that photography and cinema posed a threat to painting (Braun 2014). Only Ginna, who experimented with cinema and abstract painting early on, along with his brother Bruno Corra (see: Verdone 1990; Lista 2001), managed to stimulate some real interest in cinema on Marinetti’s part, as is demonstrated by the 1916 manifesto that the two published together with Corra, Settimelli, Balla, and Chiti in L’Italia futurista in the middle of the war (Marinetti et al. 1916). According to Marinetti himself in 1913, cinema could be read as anti-Futurist in that even ‘The pusillanimous and sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can allow himself the inebriation of danger by going to the movies and watching a great hunt in the Congo’ (Marinetti 1913: 143). Cinematic techniques – rather than gun shooting – allowed the spectator to draw near the danger with his gaze alone, while still feeling safely in control, without any risk. The immobility and cowardly passivity of film spectatorship was, in Marinetti’s eyes, anti-Futurist. On the other hand, he emphasized the active collaboration of the spectator in the variety theatre in which the spectator is not a stupefied voyeur, but someone who noisily takes part in the action. The new Futurist Synthetic Theatre could16 ‘successfully win out 16 Marinetti suggests to ‘Give free tickets to men and women who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric and likely to provoke an uproar with obscene gestures, pinching women,

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in the competition against cinema’ (Marinetti et al. 1915: 205), through its synthesis of time and space. Instead, the new form of spectatorship that Bragaglia sought to generate through his film was quite different: the viewer was encouraged to be both seduced and critical, fascinated and yet aware of the unreality of the screened images. However innovative, this was not a model that Marinetti and most Futurists could embrace during the war, when the power of propaganda images was considered essential to rouse Italians out of their lethargy and to lead them to a revolutionary victory. Although the director gave the film a theatrical structure and feel, it was not one derived from Futurist variety and synthetic theatre, but rather from his own theory and directorial style. This style, according to many critics, included antiquated and static shooting techniques before the film’s17 final sequence. I believe, however, that the camera’s immobility is set in deliberate contrast to the protagonist’s continuous and sudden movements, often similar to a futurist dance, that shifts Thaïs in and out of our field of vision, beyond the borders of the frame: the uncontainable dynamism of the protagonist is thus all the more effective. In exposing Thaïs’ artificial and malevolent technique of seduction, the film comments on itself, disenchantedly laying bare the techniques of cinema itself and its technological essence. This is also underlined by Thaïs’ frequent changes in appearance. In a seduction scene, she sways on a swing in a Pierrot costume wearing a blonde wig. Thaïs reappears with blonde hair under Bianca’s gaze: in every pose, she stars in a kind of staged masquerade that she herself has directed, appearing as the one in control of her own spectacle and her own film. Defying a cinematic convention of traditional diva culture, Bragaglia’s diva is not an exclusively passive object subject to both directorial manipulation and the controlling male gaze behind the camera. It is interesting to note that Novissima Film, in its brief history, also produced two films directed by a woman, Diana Karenne (aka Leucadia Konstanti), entitled 18 Damina di porcellana and Justice de femmes, in which Karenne also appeared as a protagonist (Dalle Vacche 2008: 89-113). or other freakishness’ (Marinetti 1913b: 163). 17 Bragaglia theorized the magical, self-consciously artificial and anti-naturalistic theatricality of avant-garde art cinema, especially as regards the design of sets and the mise-en-scène (see: Bragaglia 1930); therefore, Prampolini’s work on the set designs must be seen as fully congruent with Bragaglia’s vision. 18 One year earlier, Francesca Bertini co-directed the famous film Assunta Spina, in which she also starred; and in 1916, Eleonora Duse starred and co-directed with Febo Mari Cenere.

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In a few scenes, it is difficult to tell Thaïs apart from her best friend Bianca, a fellow thespian, interpreted by another dancer of Russian origin, Ileana Leonidoff, who would later collaborate with Prampolini. The two actresses not only resemble each other, but are also both equally ambiguous. Both the suggestive physical intimacy that characterizes their encounters and the geometric motifs of the set designs of the scenes in which they appear together emphasize this ambiguity: for instance, in one scene, their connection is allegorically symbolized by large rings that intersect on the walls behind them. In another scene, they are both dressed as men, in what seem to be horseback riding costumes. Thus, gender identity is also questioned, nothing more than an another oscillating performance for Thaïs. One of the key themes of the theosophy dear to Bragaglia and to a large segment of the avant-garde, is indeed the bisexuality of all human beings. The lesbian or bisexual motif of the film becomes evident through an allusion to a poem from Baudelaire’s Femmes damnées (Damned Women) cycle, which can be found in the intertitles. While the theme of female homosexuality is an integral part of symbolist and decadent poetics, in the Marinettian version of the avant-garde, the ideal bisexual Futurist is Mafarka (see: Griffiths 2013 and Re 2015). In Bragaglia’s film, to the contrary, the heroine is a female figure who dominates. Her destruction is essentially spectacular, cinematic, and technological. Thaïs is, in effect, a kind of witch. A descendant of the sorceress Circe and of Villier de L’Isle-Adam’s ‘Eve future’, and female forebear of Doctor Caligari, Thaïs is the incarnation of the elements of technology that remained uncanny for the Futurists, something inhuman, dark, and uncontrollable. Next to Thaïs’ decadent boudoir there is a secret chamber, an ‘other’ space that is itself a set, a camera obscura, and a small torture chamber, where Thaïs imagines, arranges, and tries out her spectacular creations of mechanical seduction and destruction. In the film’s opening sequence, Thaïs emerges from this space, dressed in a feathered headdress, disdainfully smoking a cigarette (a foreshadowing of the large smoking mouth we see only at the end), holding a small fabric doll, called ‘le pantin’ in the intertitle. The ‘pantin’ is a totem puppet, a miniature version of the men that she manipulates as she wishes, eventually destroying them. The puppet also represents a grotesque distortion of a child: Thaïs, as an emblem of the artifice of technology, is presumed to be anti-natural and perverse. Behind Thaïs’ body, we see the door to the secret room, decorated with large black-and-white concentric triangles. These abstract decorations, designed by Prampolini and similar to those we later see at the end of the closing scene, are esoteric, hermetic, theosophical symbols.

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Frame from Thaïs (Anton Giulio Bragaglia, 1916). Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Motion Picture Department Collection and Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia (Centro Studi Bragaglia). All rights are reserved.

The influence of theosophy, spiritualism, and occultism on Futurism and on all the avant-garde movements of this period was, as has been pointed out, quite strong (see: Cigliana 1996; Galluzzi 2009); Bragaglia himself viewed cinema and photodynamism as forms of modern magic. Therefore, it is clear that if, on the one hand, the film seems to hold the decadent character of Thaïs at a distance (her sadistically tragic demise), on the other hand, Thaïs allegorically incarnates cinema itself and its magic, its illusionism, and its voyeurism. Thaïs’ secret room is uncanny because it is a space where all the horrors and agonies that constitute the hidden unconscious of art and cinematic technology for Bragaglia are allegorically concentrated. In another shot – still during the first part of the film but with a set design by Prampolini –, we see a wall of the secret room: it is completely covered with stylized drawings of large eyes that gaze at us. It is an image that brings to mind Freud’s essay on the uncanny and his interpretation of the meaning of the terrifying duplication of eyes in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story The Sandman (Freud 1919: 219-256). It also prefigures the surrealist iconography used by Salvador Dalí in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). In Thaïs, these eyes indicate either an amplified and magic ability to see as well

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as an excess of visual libido – voyeurism: both have been recognized by contemporary film criticism as fundamental characteristics of cinema (see: Elsaesser 2007; Metz 1977; Mulvey 1975). In the final scene, a large toothed female mouth is painted on another wall (a sexual symbol alluding to the terror of emasculation, or castration complex, which is, according to Freud, the origin of voyeurism). A secret mechanism hidden inside the dark room triggers the emanation of a deadly gas through the unearthly mouth, which thus appears to come to life. This secret chamber of Thaïs becomes a powerful symbol of the anxiety that silent cinema itself provokes in modern consciousness, as an art for the mechanical reproduction of human life that is dreadfully unnatural. This anxiety can also be found in Pirandello’s Serafino Gubbio (see: Syrimis 2012), in which mechanical reproduction is equivalent to death, and the actress Varia Nesteroff, with her unnatural acting caught by the mechanical eye of the camera (a monstrous tripod black spider), is both the instrument and the forerunner of death. Bragaglia too, like Pirandello, associates the uncanniness of cinematic technology with the perverse femme fatale, but, while Varia Nestoroff is essentially passive, Thaïs is a powerful agent in her own right, and an ambiguous and disquieting reincarnation of the femme fatale. Bragaglia, by reappropriating this D’Annunzian-symbolist archetype, stages a ‘return of the repressed’ for Futurism, a reemergence in the cinema of Futurism’s unconscious and its symbolist-decadent past. An inordinate amount of films featuring the femme fatale appeared during the war years in Italy, when there was a complete or nearly complete lack of films on the war itself. In these films, beautiful and dangerously voluptuous women use the perverse weaponry of seduction and often pay the ultimate price for their sins. I believe that these films represent the anxiety of a moment in Italian history when traditional gender roles were being questioned to the point of crisis and when women, who had entered the public sphere en masse, seemed to have lost their femininity and to resemble men in an ‘unnatural’19 manner. Social and sexual behavior, as well as the new way women dressed, were indicators of such ‘unnaturalness’ (see: Dalle Vacche 2002; Di Cori 1986). Men, who often returned from the front maimed and ill, felt powerless, developing a sense of resentment towards 19 For example, Augusto Genina’s Femmina (1918) starring Italia Almirante-Manzini, Mario Bonnard’s Passa la ruina (1918) with Lina Pini, Romolo Bacchini’s La tigre vendicatrice (1918) interpreted by Lydia Quaranta, La bella salamandra (1917) by Amleto Palermi with Soava Gallone, Roberto Roberti’s La piccola fonte (1917) with Francesca Bertini, Carmine Gallone’s Malombra (1917), and Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia satanica (1915) with Lyda Borelli, among many others.

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Film still from Thaïs (Anton Giulio Bragaglia, 1916). Courtesy of Archivio Prampolini at Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Museo Nazionale di Arte Contemporanea MACRO, and Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia. All rights are reserved.

the new women of the Great War. The killing of the femme fatale and the victory of the kindhearted wife in commercial wartime films therefore corresponds to the nostalgic reaffirmation of a lost normality. Bragaglia’s film should be interpreted in this context too, keeping in mind that the film-maker, who did not fight because he was declared unfit for health reasons, was profoundly distraught over the war. In fact, two of Bragaglia’s younger brothers, Carlo Ludovico and Arturo, were wounded: Arturo, his collaborator in the practice of photodynamism, entirely lost his hearing and Carlo Ludovico was in the hospital while Anton Giulio was shooting Thaïs. The war, of which Thaïs incarnates both the allure and the horror, destroys men with a monstrous technological violence, as Thaïs does. The poisonous fumes of the room of horrors and the sharp spears in the final scene, in fact, evoke death by gas and at bayonet-point in the trenches. In this sense, Thaïs allegorically represents the hidden face of the war, its terrifying, ambiguous, and sterile violence; the same that the propaganda of Marinettian Futurism rushed to exalt in the pages of the journal L’Italia Futurista. Prampolini’s black-and-white geometric sets are reminiscent of the Viennese Secessionist graphic style; the allusion, given the wartime context, takes on a political meaning beyond its aesthetic significance. The environment in which Thaïs operates, with its hybrid mix of Austrian, French, Russian, and Italian elements, does not so much represent enemy territory as the ambiguity of the so-called ‘theater of war’, where the positions of allies and enemies are often invisible, indistinguishable, or muddled. Gas, used systematically for the first time in the First World War, was a source

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of fear and anxiety not only because it represented the impersonal and inhuman nature of a new, technological violence, but also because it often killed indiscriminately. The spectacle of corpses with masked faces, uselessly covered by ineffective gas masks, was one of the most disquieting (and censored) images of the Great War. The difference between allies and enemies, between a line of defense and a line of attack came to be obscured and doubted as if in a perverse game of mirroring. The entire human perceptive apparatus, especially vision and the very possibility of seeing and being able to understand and to differentiate, faced a crisis during the Great War (see: Afflerbach & Stevenson 2012; Sondhaus 2011). The new technologies of mobilization and empowerment of the human eye brought into use by the cinema, such as the moving camera and film editing, were similar to those that the optical technology of war had to use, such as aerial photography and mobile mappings of the front (see: Virilio 1984). Thaïs’s power derives from its ability to evoke the violence, sadism, and spectacularity of both war and cinema simultaneously, at the same time as revealing the similarity and reciprocal dependence between the two. Marinetti’s lack of interest in Bragaglia’s film might, therefore, be explained by Marinetti’s insistence on proclaiming the joy and beauty of war; according to Marinetti, in fact, wartime violence provided a clear, heroic, and absolute sense of the meaning and value of human action. The surreal, abstract, dreamlike, and hallucinatory last sequence of Thaïs, full of superimpositions and optical trickery, is intensified by multiple points of view and a symbolic montage or editing style. It is, above all, a pictorial sequence, made theatrical by Prampolini’s set designs and Tais Galizky’s Futurist dance of death. The visual impact of the last sequence of the film notably affected European avant-garde cinema, by influencing the genesis of monumental, epoch-making works such as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, 1920), Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman, 1924), Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita (1924), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), as well as in the genealogy of French surrealist film (Gili 1986: 7). Although this film has been extensively discussed, it has remained a puzzle for most film historians and critics, who tend to see it as oddly anachronistic, in spite of the director’s avant-garde credentials. The film, I believe, enacts the end of mimetic cinema and the birth of an alternative, anti-mimetic, and anti-naturalistic cinema. Bragaglia combined the excessive acting of his protagonist with tricks and eccentric scenographies in order to express a metaphorical inner landscape that included the unconscious desires and anxieties of his age. The emotional impact of lighting and

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Bragaglia’s camera techniques highlight and make manifest the intensity of sensations in the spectator, at once spellbound and keenly aware of the cinematic apparatus. The focus on sensations and active spectatorship is one of the key elements of the theoretical contribution by the Futurists to cinema and all visual arts: ‘We shall put the spectator in the center of the picture’ (Boccioni et al. 1910: 65). Thaïs stimulates the audience’s involvement through both the iconic and performative effects of the moving images and a new kind of visual and metaphorical experimentation that subverts previous models of stardom and spectatorship.

References Afflerbach, H. & D. Stevenson (eds.) (2012), An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Polical Culture before 1914. New York – Oxford: Berghahn Books. Apollinaire, G. (1904), ‘L’Exil de la voluptè’, in Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2. Paris: Gallimard (1991), 1094–1106. Boccioni, U., C. Carrà, L. Russolo, G. Balla, & G. Severini (1910), ‘Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista’, (independent leaflet; catalogue to the first Exhibition of Futurist Paintings shown in Paris, London, Berlin, and Brussels, 1912), translated as ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 64-67. Boschetti, C. (2011), ‘A scuola di buon gusto. Edoardo de Fonseca e “Novissima”’, Charta, 20: 36-41. Bragaglia, A. G. (1911), Fotodinamismo futurista. Turin: Einaudi (1970). —. (1930), Esplorazione del mimo. Milan: Ceschina. Braun, M. (1996 ), ‘Fantasmes des vivants et des mortes: Anton Giulio Bragaglia et la figuration de l’invisible’, Études Photographiques 1 (November): 40–55. Braun M. (2014), ‘Giacomo Balla, Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Etienne-Jules Marey’, in V. Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1900-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,. New York: Guggenheim Foundation: 95-101. Brunetta, G. P. (1993), Storia del cinema italiano. Il cinema muto 1895–1929, 1. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Censi, R. (2008), Formule di pathos: genealogia della diva nel cinema muto. Ancona: Cattedrale. Cigliana, S (1996), Futurismo esoterico. Contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento. Roma: la Fenice Edizioni. D’Annunzio, G. (1914), ‘Del cinematografo considerato come strumento di liberazione e come arte di trasfigurazione’, Il Corriere della Sera (February 18th), translated as ‘On the Cinematograph as an Instrument of Liberation and an

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Art of Transiguration’, in R. Abel (ed.) (2013), Early Cinema. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, IV. New York: Routledge: 262-267. Dall’Asta, M. (2008), Non solo dive: pioniere del cinema italiano. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna. Dalle Vacche, A. (2002), ‘Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Silent Italian Cinema’, in J. M. Bean, D. Negra (eds.), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press: 444-475. —. (2008), Diva. Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema. University of Texas Press: Austin. Di Cori, P. (1986), ‘Il doppio sguardo: visibilità dei generi sessuali nella rappresentazione fotografica’, in D. Leoni & C. Zandra, La grande guerra. Esperienza, memoria, immagini. Bologna: Il Mulino: 755–800. Elsaesser, T. & M. Hagener (2007), Filmtheorie. Zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag GmbH, translated as Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New York: Routledge (2009) Freud, S. (1919), ‘Die Unheimliche’, translated as ‘The Uncanny’, J. Strachey (1978), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 17. London: Hogarth Press: 219-256. Galluzzi, F. (2009), ‘Fantasmi moderni. Implicazioni del pensiero futurista su fotografia e cinema’, Aperture, 24-25: 57-73. Gili, J.A. (1986), ‘Thais’, Immagine. Note di storia del cinema, 2 (Spring): 1–7. Handy, T. B. (1919). ‘Constance Crawley’, Los Angeles Times (March 23rd), II: 14. Hutcheon, L. (1985), A Theory of Parody: the Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen. Jandelli, C. (2006), Le dive italiane del cinema muto. Palermo: L’Epos. Lista, G. (2001), Cinema e fotografia futurista. Milan: Skira. Marcus, M. (1996), ‘Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs, or the Death of the Diva + the Rise of the Scenoplastica = The Birth of Futurist Cinema’, South Central Review, 13. 2–3 (Summer–Fall): 63–91. Marinetti, F. T. (1909), ‘Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna!’, Poesia, 5, 7–8–9 (August–September–October),translated as ‘Let’s Murder the Moonlight!’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 57-61. —. (1911), ‘Noi rinneghiamo i nostri maestri simbolisti ultimi amanti della luna’, Le Futurisme, translated as ‘We Abjure Our Symbolist Masters’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 93-95. —. (1911 b), ‘La bataille de Tripoli’, L’Intransigeant (December 25th-31st), translated as La battaglia di Tripoli vissuta e cantata da F. T. Marinetti. Rome: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia (1912).

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—. (1913), ‘Distruzione della sintassi – immaginazione senza fili – parole in libertà’, translated as ‘Destruction of sintax – radio imagination – words-in-freedom’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press: 143-151. —. (1913b), ‘Il Teatro di Varietà’, Lacerba, I, 19 (October 1st), translated as ‘The Variety Theatre’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press: 159-164. Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, & E. Settimelli (1915), ‘Il teatro futurista sintetico’, in Teatro futurista sintetico. Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, translated as ‘The Futurist Synthetic Theatre’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press: 204-208. Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla, & R. Chiti (1916), La cinematografia futurista, L’Italia Futurista, (I) 1: 1, translated as The Futurist Cinema in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 229-232. Metz, C. (1977), Le signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinema. Paris: Union generale d’editions, translated as The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Mulvey, L (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, XVI, 3. Re, L. (2008), ‘Futurism, Film and the Return of the Repressed: Learning from Thaïs’, MLN, 123: 125–150. —. (2015), ‘Enif Robert, F.T. Marinetti e il romanzo “Un ventre di donna”: bisessualitoà, trauma e mito dell’isteria’, California Italian Studies, 5 (2). Sondhaus, L. (2011), World War One: The Global Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Syrimis, M. (2012), The Great Black Spider on its Knock-kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-century Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Verdone, M. (ed.) (1965), Bianco e Nero XXVI, 5-6 (April). Vigliani Bragaglia, A. (ed.) (1970), ‘Regesto’ in A. G. Bragaglia (1911), Fotodinamismo futurista. Turin: Einaudi. Virilio, P. (1984), Guerre et cinéma: logistique de la perception. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, translated as War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso (1989).

About the author Lucia Re is Professor at UCLA; she specializes in nineteenth and 20th-century Italian literature and culture, with an emphasis on the fin-de-siècle, Modernism, and avant-garde, silent, and neorealist cinema, as well as the cultural history of

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Italy under fascism and during the Reconstruction. Her book Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement (Stanford 1990) was awarded the MLA Marraro prize for the best book in Italian studies in 1990-1992.

12. Velocità, a Screenplay by F.T. Marinetti From Futurist Simultaneity to Live Streaming Media Carolina Fernández Castrillo

Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch12 Abstract This contribution introduces an archaeological approach to the study of the Futurist reception of cinema at the beginning of the 20th century based on the important role of the principle of immediacy as a milestone for new collaborative and immersive environments of interaction in the digital age. It also provides a richer horizon for understanding the impact of new technologies in their multifaceted and often contradictory roles in the contemporary media ecosystem. Through their manifestos, artistic projects, and public interventions, Futurists tried to capture the acceleration of every single aspect of daily life. One of the most interesting and unknown Futurist documents is Velocità, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s cinematographic script, written between 1917 and 1918. The documentation selected has been collected from research conducted by the author at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University, USA) and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italy). Keywords: Marinetti, Velocità, Futurism, Media Interaction, Media Ecosystem

Introduction Futurism became famous for being the main avant-garde that promoted the assumption of new technologies and scientific discoveries into the cultural sphere. At the beginning of the 20th century, Albert Einstein proved that the traditional notions of space and time turned out to be inevitably obsolete

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due to the vertiginous rhythm of a reality in a continuous process of transformation. Inspired by everyday life and the theory of relativity, Futurists demonstrated how central the experience of speed was to modern aesthetics. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his colleagues grasped the full impact of the emergence of industrialization, new transportation, and communication systems on the artistic field. From the dynamist paintings of Umberto Boccioni to the first experimental ‘noise music’ performed by Luigi Russolo, Futurist intellectuals produced creations inspired by a new artistic impulse based on mechanical velocity. In the founding manifesto, we read: ‘We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed’1 (Marinetti 1909: 51). Marinetti constantly insists on the ‘acceleration of life’ and the impact of technology and new media in the Modern lifestyle: ‘Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, for we have already created velocity which is eternal and omnipresent.’ (1909). By doing so, he laid the foundations for the beginning of the Information Age and the current globalizing processes that affect economics, politics, socio-cultural dynamics, and the environment. Indeed, Futurist aesthetics were deeply affected by the advent of mainstream media. Cinematography was conceived of as ‘the ideal instrument of a new art’ (Marinetti et al. 1916: 230) and radio programs were meant ‘to multiply a hundredfold the creative genius of the Italian race and to abolish the old nostalgic torment of distances’ (Marinetti & Masnata 1933: 292). Among the large amount of existing testimonies, this study focuses on the analysis of the last film scene of the manuscript Velocità (1917-18), entitled ‘The Futurist man in 100 years’. This is Marinetti’s only screenplay in which he is the sole author; Vita futurista (1916) was signed as a collective project together with Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra, and Giacomo Balla. In this unique document, he predicts the future of the telecommunication system and also anticipates several of Marshall McLuhan’s theories as the key role of the ‘global village’ and the ‘universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow’ or the distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media, among others. The visionary nature of that approach provides an original framework for understanding the evolution of media and the cultural implications of the technological advancements up to the global digital network.2

1 English translations of Futurist manifestos are based on Rainey et al. 2009. 2 The documentation selected has been collected from research conducted at Yale University (New Haven, USA) and at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale (Rome, Italy).

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F.T. Marinetti, Velocità (n.d.). Unpublished manuscript. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University).

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Velocità, a screenplay by F.T. Marinetti The 1996 release of a previously-unknown Futurist screenplay by Marinetti came as a revealing surprise. Giovanni Lista shed some light on the Futurist leader’s position towards the cinema. After the death of film-sceptic Umberto Boccioni, Marinetti published The Futurist Cinema manifesto (1916); in the same year, he also contributed to the collective drafting of Vita Futurista, the official Futurist film production. In his article, Lista ventured to date Velocità around the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, a period in which Anton Giulio Bragaglia was in touch with Società Italiana Cines to promote Futurist films (1996: 10). Unfortunately, after examining the original manuscript at Yale University (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), I cannot securely confirm the drafting date of this document but I agree that it must have been written after 1916 and before 1930. On the one hand, there are several references to the main contents published in the cinematographic manifesto and the screenplay is based on the structure of Vita Futurista. Above all, it is unlikely that Marinetti, who was eager to raise awareness among his achievements, refused to mention his script in the cinematographic founding manifesto. On the other hand, there is no reference to the homonymous film Vitesse (1930) shot by fellow Futurists Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero, and Guido Martina. However, what is really striking is that Marinetti neither alluded to this film project in subsequent writings such as Abstract cinematography is a Futurist invention (1926), Fascist moral of cinema (1934), or The Cinematography (1938), which is an updated version of The Futurist Cinema manifesto. Some theorists such as Wanda Strauven (2006) also suggest that the movie script might even have been written after 1938. Another possibility is that Marinetti may have regretted this creation or perhaps his lack of interest towards film as a medium led him to reformulate this text as a source of inspiration for theatrical synthesis. In any case, it is probably not a coincidence that, exactly four months before the circulation of the aforementioned manifesto, Marinetti published The New Religion-Morality of Speed (1916) in which he approaches some evocative images that reappear in Velocità: Places inhabited by the divine: trains, dining cars (eating while speeding). Railroad stations; especially those of the American West, where trains speeding at 140 km. an hour can take water and pick up mail sacks without stopping. Bridges and tunnels. The Place de l’Opéra in Paris. The

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Strand in London. Automobile races. Films. Radiotelegraphic stations […] (Marinetti 1916: 226).

In fact, the last scene of the screenplay, titled ‘The Futurist man in 100 years’, pays tribute to the ‘Ubiquity and a hundredfold life of a politician’ by showing ‘High-speed working train cab. Telegraph keyboard and many telephone receivers.’ (Marinetti n.d.: 42-43). Through an analysis of the script, it becomes evident that Marinetti does not only extol the means of locomotion and communication of the moment, but he also provides a vision of the future, announcing some key ideas on an increasingly interconnected world. Nevertheless, when dealing with the analysis of the cited fragment, the concept of ‘speed’ as a thematic point of reference as well as a cornerstone of the Futurist ideology should be highlighted. This way, contextualization and assessment of the importance of this screenplay in relation to the contributions of the main ideologues and artists of this movement is possible.

The glorification of speed and simultaneity As in the case of Vita Futurista, the dichotomy between speed (Futurism) and slowness (passéism) remains the main conceptual framework of Velocità. This approach culminates in the final scene, the focus of this study, as the glorification of the ‘acceleration of life’3. The myth of speed was a source of inspiration throughout the foundation and development of Futurism. It was the central pillar for the renewal of different artistic disciplines. Some of the most significant examples related to this point were: the imagination without strings, words in freedom, and the multilineal lyricism in poetry and literature; the force-lines adopted by painters and sculptors; or Luigi Russolo’s noise-tuners (intonarumori) and the musicological work of Francesco Balilla Pratella, who pushed for atonality and for the acceptance of new systems of tuning and rhythm. There are numerous documents and artworks that corroborate this, for example, the discourse raised by Boccioni in Absolute Motion + Relative Motion = Dynamism (1914): 3 As Wanda Strauven (2006: 203) suggests, the plot is structured in thematic couples of scenes, apart from the first one that is an autonomous short film: the second and fifth scene on art; the eighth and ninth on war; the third and fourth on work; the sixth and seventh on urban landscapes; and, finally, the tenth and eleventh are utopic visions of the future.

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Futurist art, it must be remembered, marks another step in the larger process of interpenetration, simultaneity, and fusion which humanity has been achieving for thousands of years through speed […] With dynamism, then, art rises toward a higher ideal level; it creates a style and expresses our age of speed and simultaneity (Boccioni, 1914: 191).

Also of note is the important contribution of Anton Giulio Bragaglia, whose research in the field of photodynamism was based on the study of the movement through the analysis of its intermediate states. The main objective of this artist was to translate time into space by creating a transcendental picture of the movement (Bragaglia 1970). He tried to achieve a representation of the movement as duration, that is, as a continuous spatial and temporal flow. In this way, Futurists identif ied the fragmentary vision and the ‘poly‑expressive’ reconstruction of reality as two basic principles achievable through the editing process and the techniques of collage. Therefore, it is not surprising that Marinetti and his colleagues identified in cinema ‘the possibility of an eminently Futurist art and the expressive medium most adapted to the complex sensibility of a Futurist artist’ (Marinetti et al. 1916). However, despite being considered the ideal medium to capture the reality in movement, cinema was not received with great enthusiasm by Futurists, who waited until 1916 to publish their first film manifesto.

Understanding media: Towards immediacy Although Futurist cinema has been considered an acte manqué, Marinetti’s position toward the seventh art gives us a pioneer model of communication inspired by the principles of dynamism, simultaneity, and instantaneity. His interest in film as a medium dates back to the origins of the movement and culminates in the publication of The Futurist Cinema manifesto (1916) with the announcement of a sociocultural renewal project, based on an interdisciplinary model of action. In other words, he expresses his intention to reformulate the role of the old artistic disciplines by making use of the reviving power of cinema: We must liberate film as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and nimbler than all the existing arts […] In short, it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colours, lines, and forms, a clash of objects

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and realities thrown together at random. We shall offer new inspiration for painters who are attempting to break out of the limits of the frame. We shall set in motion the words-in-freedom that transgress the boundaries of literature as they march toward painting, music, the art of noises […] (Marinetti et al. 1916: 231).

Foreshadowing current communication theories, Marinetti outlined an innovative distinction between old and new media. Current media critics remain captivated by this proposal. In fact, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance by paying tribute to, rivaling and refashioning earlier media, a process that they call ‘remediation’. Therefore, the Futurist agenda also constitutes a pioneer contribution to the theory of intermediality (Fernández Castrillo 2013), as the participation of more than one medium or sensorial channel in a given piece of work (Wolf 1999: 35-36). Aside from the principles of remediation and intermediality, Marinetti’s relationship with cinema was clearly influenced by the desire for instantaneous communication. As Ardengo Soffici pointed out, the introduction of speed in the artistic creation aimed to achieve a new system of perception based on the concept of ‘simultaneity’ (1920). Benedetta Cappa – also aligned with this argumentation – summarizes the sensitivity of the Futurist artist as follows: He creates in immediacy. Hence he eliminates intermediary stages between conception and actualization. He brings conception and creation as close together as he can. […] [he] renders with immediacy his universe, using those absolute elements that will make his creation live. (Benedetta 1927: 54). As Futurists principles were based on improvisation and direct contact with the audience, they seemed to be incompatible with a passive approach towards reality. As Enzo Nicola Terzano points out, there is a contradiction among Futurists about the incapability to choose between the traditional (primary) and electromechanical means (secondary) (1992: 74). This important dilemma has also been identified by Giovanni Lista, who mentioned that, even though the mechanic image was considered a model of Futurist art capable of combining dynamism, kinetics, and energy, it was excluded as an aesthetic medium (2007: 34). With the aim to find a solution to this contradiction, Marinetti explored different options to ‘warming up’ the cinematic medium based on the remediation of old disciplines, for instance, by the projection of films in

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theatre sessions. Therefore, he generated intermedia and performative processes to allow an open communication system. This contribution was an inspiring milestone to define the levels of audience participation and the subsequent differentiation between ‘hot and cool media’ (McLuhan 1964).

‘The Futurist man in 100 years’: The age of networked village The final scene of Velocità confirms the desire to establish a communication system on real time and on a global scale. Marinetti shows the ‘ubiquity and hundredfold life of a politician’ in a ‘high-speed working train cab’ from which he gives a speech that is reproduced in the Parliament and all the public squares of the state. In this way, Marinetti again anticipates some fundamental tenets of the Canadian theoretician who, in the 1960s, announced the contraction of the globe into a village by electric technology (McLuhan 1962) and he made the idea of a simultaneous planetary event a part of our popular culture. In Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without strings – Words in freedom (1913) he pointed out that: The earth shrunk by speed […] Today man possesses a sense of the world; he has only a modest need to know what his forebears have done, but a burning need to know what his contemporaries are doing in every part of the globe. Whence the necessity, for the individual, of communicating with all the peoples of the earth […] (Marinetti, 1913a: 144).

One of the most significant aspects of Futurist revolution was the aim to reach a vast audience, another step towards some of the current communication strategies in the globalization era. To achieve this, Marinetti stated many times during his life that he had found inspiration in his own experiences with the transportation means: ‘An airplane’s or an automobile’s great speed lets us embrace and rapidly compare different distant points on the earth, a mechanical form of the labor of analogy.’ (Marinetti 1916: 226). Overcoming a static vision of reality also led him to develop further theories on simultaneity by the use of the editing process: ‘Cinematic simultaneity and interpenetration of different times and places. We shall project two or three different visual episodes at the same time, one next to the other.’ (Marinetti et al. 1916). We can identify an example of this postulate in the texts of the mentioned script, by the coexistence of different times and spaces. On one hand,

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Marinetti shows the different reactions of the audience while the minister delivers his speech in different geographical areas. On the other hand, he also gives the possibility to check the impact of the minister’s words in the lives of two or three different individuals. Marinetti was fully conscious of the unbeatable technological progress and he shared his vision of the socio-communicative panorama of ‘The Futurist man in 100 years’. Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1913) also imagined the possibility that, in the year 2000, the cinema would be able to film and project the image of a person 300 kilometers away instantaneously. Some other film-makers at that time were also fascinated by the visualization and control of far-away realities by using new technologies; for instance, the fight between two robots operated and followed on big screens from remote control rooms in Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1924). Nowadays, from that foreseen future, we can confirm that new technology achieved and overcame the prototype of synchronous communication announced by Marinetti. The evolution from the model of traditional mass communication ‘one-to-many’ to an open communicative act ‘many-tomany’ favours the reformulation of creative processes, production, and diffusion of cultural contents on real time through the Internet. The evolution of streaming media is closely related to the development of social media, which relies on the interaction among net users all over the world. They play a decisive role in creating and turning viral live transmedia content (webcasts, podcasts, blogs, wikis, etc.) across social platforms and networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, Blogger, MySpace, etc. over the Internet. As mentioned previously, the evolution from dynamism to simultaneity led Futurists to look for an instantaneous communication. In the second decade of the 21st century, we can add one more state to this model: intercreativity, which means that ‘[…] we should be able not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people’ (Berners Lee 1999: 182) on the web. The consolidation of a participatory culture has created a new media landscape characterized by collaborative practices based on the search for new creative sources (crowdsourcing) and economic support (crowdfunding). We live in an era of an increasing number of User Generated Content (UGC) projects that fulfill some of the Futurist premises that Marinetti predicted at the beginning of the Information Age. As has been proven throughout this study, the Futurist leader prefered real-time communication instead of representational technologies, as he clearly expressed when he highlighted the importance to include the audience during the development of the show itself:

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The Variety theatre is the only spectacle that makes use of audience collaboration. The public is not static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the action […] since the audience collaborates in this way with the actors’ imaginations, the action develops simultaneously on the stage, in the boxes, and in the orchestra. And then it continues beyond the performance […] (Marinetti, 1913b: 160).

Therefore, Marinetti’s attempt to intensify the involvement or participation of the audience is nowadays exceeded due to existing technological developments. Indeed, it is not only possible to have instantaneous communication, but collaborative and fully antipasséist as well.

Conclusion The idiosyncrasy of Futurism and the life and work of its leader were, in essence, linked to the emergence of mass media. However, Marinetti never felt he had reached an instant communication through Futurist film productions. This frustration led him to project his ideas toward a future in which the overcoming technological barriers allowed an innovative communication system based on the principle of immediacy. The seventh art was the starting point for a new model of communication that anticipated some of the most noteworthy aspects of digital culture. Consequently, predictions must be taken into account since there is currently a growing interest in developing new collaborative and immersive environments of interaction. In fact, the aim to achieve unmediated communication constitutes, even today, an endless source of inspiration and sets the framework for current and future media research (Fernández Castrillo & Girlanda 2011). That means the possibility of technology advancing to the point at which we can experience others, an artwork or a film production through all of our senses in a physically different location. There are new predictions that might remain science fictional or they may become reality in the very near future. In this regard, Raymond Kurzweil (2005) states that, as the speed of technological change increases exponentially, we will be able to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies in the year 2045. As a consequence, Vernor Vinge states that, in the future, men will have the ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, ‘including ones far higher than speech or written messages’ (1993).  

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Therefore, even if many of the premises that were stated in the beginning of 20th century have been achieved and overcome, there is still a long way to go in the upcoming future.

Appendix 4 Scene 11th: The Futurist man in 100 years The ubiquity and hundredfold life of a politician. High-speed working train cab. Telegraph keyboard and innumerable telephone receivers. Under his mouth, once and again the receiver turns into a workshop indoors, a meeting room, an elegant living room, an astronomical observatory, a room of the Stock Exchange, an arsenal, a generalissimo’s tent. He gives a speech in front of the telephone equipment. Afterwards, there is a phonographic reproduction in the Parliament, and beyond, in all the public squares of the State, where his words are spread by large trumpets of gramophones. Provide the enthusiasm of one crowd, the insurrection of another and the impact of the minister’s will on two or three spectators’s lives. Upside-down. Disaster. Luck. Changes of direction. As soon as the minister has concluded his speech, make him quickly step into the toilette cab and the dining room without servants (to copy the Maison électrique that exists in Paris, on the Boulevard des Italiens). Bedroom. Massage device. Describe the devices for concentrated sleep. In five minutes, as a result of electricity, the body has regained its agility. Show an extremely slow life of 100 years ago (coach, province, sleep, reverie) and make it pass through a sequence of express trains that pass over eight different platforms.

References Benedetta [i.e. Benedetta Cappa] (1927), ‘Sensibilità futurista’, Vetrina futurista di Letteratura – Teatro – Arte 2: 54. Berners-Lee, T. (1999), Weaving the Web. New York: HarperCollins. Boccioni, U. (1914), ‘Moto assoluto + moto relativo= dinamismo’, Lacerba, II (6) (15 March), translated as ‘Absolute Motion + Relative Motion = Dynamism’, in 4

My translation from Quadro 11°: L’uomo futurista fra 100 anni.

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L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 187-194. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Bolter J.D. & Grusin, R. (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press. Bragaglia, A.G. (1913), ‘Nell’anno 2000’, Patria (26 January). —. (1970), Fotodinamismo futurista. Turin: Einaudi. Fernández Castrillo, C. & E. Girlanda (2011), ‘McLuhan and New Communication Technologies: From Posthumanism to Neuromedia’ in M. Ciastellardi, C. Miranda de Almeida & C.A. Scolari (ed.), McLuhan Galaxy Conference. Understanding Media, Today, 529-537. Barcelona: Editorial Universidad Oberta de Catalunya. Fernández Castrillo, C. (2013), ‘Intermedialities in Visual Poetry: Futurist “Polyexpressivity” and net.art’, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 36: 107-121. Kurzweil, R. (2005), The Singularity is Near. New York: Viking. Lista, G. (1996), ‘Un inedito marinettiano. “Velocità”, film futurista’, Fotogenia 2: 6-11. —. (2007), ‘Il riscaldamento dei media. Cinema e fotografia nel futurismo’, in G. Celant & G. Maraniello (ed.), Vertigo. Il secolo di arte off-media dal Futurismo al web, 33-38. Milan: Skira. Marinetti, F.T. (n.d.), Velocità. Unpublished manuscript. Source of the collection: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University). Marinetti, F.T. (1909), ‘Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo’, Le Figaro (20 February 1909). —. (1913a), ‘Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza f ili – Parole in libertà’, Lacerba I (12) (15 June) and (22) (15 November). —. (1913b), ‘Il Teatro di Varietà’, Lacerba I (19) (1 October). Marinetti, F.T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla & R. Chiti (1916), ‘La cinematografia futurista’, L’Italia Futurista I (9) (11 September). Marinetti, F.T. (1916), ‘La nuova religione morale della velocità’, L’Italia Futurista I (1) (11 May). —. (1926), ‘La cinematograf ia astratta è un’invenzione futurista’, L’Impero (1 December). Marinetti, F.T. & P. Masnata (1933), ‘La radia’, La Gazzetta del Popolo (22 September). Marinetti, F.T. (1934), ‘Morale fascista del cinematografo’, Sant’Elia, III (65) (15 April). Marinetti, F.T. & A. Ginna (1938), ‘La Cinematografia’, Bianco e Nero, II (4). McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Rainey, L., C. Poggi & L. Wittman (ed.) (2009), Futurism: an anthology. New Haven: Yale University. Soffici, A. (1920), Primi principi di una estetica futurista. Florence: Vallecchi. Strauven, W. (2006), Marinetti e il cinema. Tra attrazione e sperimentazione. Pasian di Prato: Campanotto Editore. Terzano, E.N. (1992), Il futurismo cinematico. Il modello cinematico di comunicazione nell’estetica, nell’arte e nello spettacolo futurista. Arcidosso: Shang-Shung Edizioni. Vinge, V. (1993), ‘Technological Singularity’, Whole Earth Review 81, 88-95. Wolf, W. (1999), The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.

About the author Carolina Fernández Castrillo is Professor of Media Studies at Madrid Open University (UDIMA) and she is Invited Professor of the Master in Visual and Digital Media at IE School of Communication. She has been a professor at both universities and a visiting researcher at Yale University (USA), ZKM Center for Art and Media (Germany), and Utrecht University (Netherlands). Currently, she is the coordinator of the research group SIIM-Studies on Intermediality and Intercultural Mediation and she is Guest Professor of the Doctoral Program on Media Culture at Universität Bayreuth (Germany). She has written several publications on Futurism, Media Archaeology, and Digital Culture.

13. Velocità/Vitesse Filmed Dramas of Objects and ‘avant-garde integrale’ Rossella Catanese Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch13 Abstract The film Velocità – also known as Vitesse among the Parisian avantgarde circles – is an experimental film realized in 1930 by Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero, and Guido Martina, held in Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. It is an avant-garde film that, starting with the cliché of the love-triangle, goes on to dismantle the bourgeois drama model, elaborating Marinettian-like dramas of object and offering several tributes to avant-garde art and cinema. The link between the avant-garde compositional originality and the intertextual reference clearly recalls the dialogue started with other works, the programmatic will to collocate the film in a network of relationships, and inspiration that attests the participation of its authors to the cultural atmosphere of those years. This essay aims to process an analytic interpretation of the film starting from a reflection on the intertextual and inter-semiotic references to Futurist painting and to avant-garde French cinema, between iconology and visual culture. Keywords: Vitesse, Oriani, 1930s Futurism, Avant-garde, Intermediality

Vitesse In 1930, the married couple Guido Martina and Tina Cordero founded the society Futurista Film and became acquainted with the aero-painter Pippo Oriani, author of a screenplay also published in a critical edition by Cineteca

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Nazionale1 (Verdone 1996). However, in the film’s opening titles, the screenplay is ascribed to Cordero and Martina, whereas Oriani is credited only as scenographer and co-director.2 The manifesto of Futurista Film was published in the Parisian review Comœdia on 5 March 1931 with the title Avant-garde integrale: Marinetti et le film futuriste: here the precepts of Futurist cinema are declared, according to a line that continues from the manifesto La cinematografia futurista dated 1916. In their manifesto, Cordero and Martina explain the programmatic objective of not providing a screenplay for the film; this discredits the hypothesis of an out-and-out screenplay foregoing the film. The innovations in the film make it a rare example of ‘integral avant-garde’; to cite the definition given by its authors in Comœdia: the inventive experiments on the use of the device found a perspective of intermediality, until the first radical experiment of ‘cinematographic aero-painting’, the cinematographic implementation of the lively Futurist dynamism. Even the French title of this film, shot in Turin, refers to its circulation and conception, resulting in contaminations and intermedial references, in the environment of the artistic contexts in Paris. Nevertheless, the meaning of the title creates a semantic short circuit: sure enough, there are no experimentationss with the segmentation of the editing time, nor fast sequences with short shots in the film. This aspect causes problems for the meaning of the title of the film: why give a film the title Velocità in which ‘there is very little real “velocity”’ (Lista 2010: 83)? Because velocity is, in any case, a symbol (Harte 2009): it is the leitmotiv of the mechanized world, the dynamic motor of modern life.3 Lista suggests several hypotheses on the authorship of the film and its genesis, which should have involved the personalities of Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, and Pippo Oriani, as well as a possible collaboration with Eugène Deslaw, who may have taken part in the experience in order to create 1 Cineteca Nazionale also edited the restoration of the film recovered from the National Film and Television Archive of London, 65 years after its realization. Giovanni Lista notices that the published screenplay does not correspond to the film’s frames, even though some elements that refer to some figures present in the film are indeed described in the film the sequences (matches, dancing mannequins, flames). These are actually structured in a different way compared to the description found in the screenplay (Lista 2010, 82). 2 Lista elaborates a extremely detailed and valuable analysis of the f ilm, which detects references, sources, intentions, and documents (Lista 2010: 81-112). 3 ‘Speed is the law of the modern world. The eye must “be able to choose” in a fraction of a second or it risks its existence, whether it be driving a car, in the street, or behind a scholar’s microscope’ (Léger 1924: 35).

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a hybridization between different projects. 4 Oriani approaches Futurism at the end of the 1920s, at the moment when the pictorial path of the movement focuses on the aero-painting issues. Martina and Cordero, on the contrary, are writers, who collaborate with Formica editions.5 Oriani recalls that most of the film’s shooting was realized in Cordero’s apartment, between 1930 and 1931. Surely, the ‘cinematographic aero-painting’ sequence must come after the Manifesto dell’Aeropittura futurista dated 1929 and signed by Giacomo Balla, Benedetta Cappa, Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Fillia, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, Mino Somenzi, and Tato.

Integral avant-garde The film opens introducing a predominance of graphic elements, visualized in an alternation of positive and negative, and finalized to the presentation of the information on the film, as titration. At the same time, the titles, realized with different fonts, express a patent aesthetic will. A typographical urban landscape is presented, elaborated on a sort of architectonic model composed of body types, in a kind of research on titration that reflects the iconography of Futurist architecture. Among these notices, the words ‘CINEMATOGRAFICA FUTURISTA’ appear as in a free-wordist table, where letters are diagonally arranged and they pop up in the painting in different orders and positions. In the background and superimposed, two plastic white words ‘SANT’ELIA’ appear, an homage to the deceased Futurist architect. The recourse to an architectonic-urban model recalls a celebration of the metropolitan dimension of avant-garde, which sings of the urban imagination and the mechanized world as motifs of a new poetry of modernity (Brunetta & Costa 1990). The display of a camera alternated with the titles is a programmatic element, joining the forms and contents of avant-garde cinema, through the suggestion of meta-cinema. Namely, it offers a metalinguistic function typical of cinema that shows a direction that is aware of itself as well as of its structures and productive mechanisms, concentrated in the deconstruction 4 In 1962, Deslaw sends a letter to Mario Verdone. This letter witnesses Cordero and Martina’s involvement in Deslaw’s documentary on Luigi Russolo and attests Deslaw with the realization of the editing of a version of the film lasting 45 minutes (Verdone 1990: 118). 5 Lista hypothesizes that Tina Cordero was familiarly related to Cordero di Montezemolo, writer from Turin in the early 20th century, fascinated by subjects related to aeronautics and flight. This could also justify a further interest in the elaboration of the aero-painting model and in the writer’s inclination in the production of the film and in its financing (Lista 2010: 83).

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Frame from Velocità /Vitesse (Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, 1930). Courtesy of Fondazione Oriani – Centro Diffusione Arte and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. All rights are reserved.

of the mystification and the conventions of fruition. Furthermore, the exhibition of the mechanical eye of the camera is a recurring theme in the avant-garde cinema because it is a reflection on technology as an extension of visual procedures. Several avant-garde films interrupt the illusion of the impersonal character of the cinematographic look through the unveiling of the technological aspect of cinema. The graphic animation of the titles, which insists on the black-and-white and positive-negative contrast, makes the image more dynamic according to the Futurist theory of simultaneity and interpenetration: ‘Futurist cinema will develop, sharpen sensibility, will accelerate creative imagination, endow intelligence with a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence […] It must become anti-graceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wordist’ (Marinetti et al, 230). The notice ‘MARINETTI FUTURISMO VITA VELOCE’ on a white background clearly recalls a free-wordist table: the presence of intertextual references to the Futurist movement is also evident in another sequence, set in an art studio, where the will to honour the great Futurist artists is expressed, claiming an artistic dimension intrinsic in the film. Lista lists, among the works of art, Mino Rosso’s sculptures and Tullio D’Albisola’s

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pottery. The sculptures are arranged in an order that recalls a theatre scene: a naked woman introduces a character, in an epiphany of feminine essence.6 The feminine character is, then, metaphorically evoked through a cloth bag containing jewelery. It is an explicit shot of the manifesto La cinematografia futurista from 1916, on the section on cinematographic analogies, strengthening and rendering extreme the figure of speech of the metaphor: in literature as well as in cinema ‘Analogy is nothing other than the deep love that binds together things that are remote, seemingly diverse or inimical’ (Marinetti 1912: 120). In cinema, particularly, analogy is the first contact point between Futurist theory and the reflection on the filmic language.7

Mechanical dances and avant-garde citations Some film sequences present a sort of analogy with the film Ballet mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, for the constant presence of swirling movements in the shooting and for the obsession with the concreteness of motionless objects, as willing to evoke a mechanical dance of inactivity. Thus, if Ballet mécanique was an exploration of images of modern life, consisting of close-ups, repetitions, oscillations, and odd views of objects, Vitesse likewise aims to step programmatically forward through similar motifs, to integrate itself in the Olympus of the cinematographic avant-garde. Probably, for many artists, the moving images are the heritage of a visual study on kinetism, kinesis, and on energy, dynamis, shared by Balla and Boccioni’s paintings and by Bragaglia’s Fotodinamismo (Elsaesser, 1987: 14). Following the model explored by Léger, Murphy, and Man Ray, the filming in Vitesse also focuses on dynamisms and plastic objects and includes many sequences of objects that come to life by shaking. These choreographies of 6 Sculptures by Mino Rosso, Architettura femminile dated 1928, Giocatori di palla ovale dated 1930, and Uomo in movimento dated 1930; by Tullio D’Albisola, Sfinge dell’Avvenire dated 1930 (Lista 1990: 88). 7 The first point in the manifesto La cinematografia futurista refers to the cinematographic analogies: ‘Cinematic analogies that make direct use of reality as one of the two elements in an analogy. Example: If we should want to express a character’s state of anguish, instead of showing him in various stages of suffering, we would give an equivalent impression with the view of a jagged and cavernous mountain. Mountains, seas, woods, cities, crowds, armies, squadrons, airplanes—these will often be our terrible expressive words: the universe will be our vocabulary’ (Marinetti et al. 1916: 231).

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lifeless objects are realized by the stop-motion technique,8 an act of respect for the seventh point of the manifesto of Futurist cinematography (‘Filmed dramas of objects’), promoting a dance of objects with their own life. Among the stop-motion scenes, a hat dances; it moves, spins, and flips.9 Another sequence shows a parade of espresso cups (anticipated by a close up of two cups with a glass, possible reference to the ménage à trois of the plot) is introduced by a close up of a decorated ceramic tea set, ‘antiquated’ allusion, which, in a quick editing, leads to an extreme close up of a Neapolitan coffee pot, a Futurist metaphor: coffee, an imported product, although typically Italian, is always among Futurist predilections, as a stimulant concentrate, short and synthetic. Luciano Folgore dedicates a poem to the coffee pot entitled Moka Sensazione Fisica.10 Several models of coffee pots were designed by famous Italian designers influenced by the Futurist movement, such as Giò Ponti, Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni. Marinetti, nicknamed ‘the caffeine of Europe’, joined a sort of panteistic vitalism, borrowed from Heraclitus’ panta rei; he shared with the philosopher a dichotomy of humanity between ‘awake’ and ‘sleeping’, as proposed by the episode of the film Vita futurista entitled Come dorme il futurista. The presence of geometrical backgrounds, with abstract graphic compositions, 8 The stop-motion technique is a cinematographic and animation procedure that exploits the possibility of the camera to expose one frame at a time. The object is slightly moved between frames, creating the illusion of movement in the continuity of the sequence given by the series of frames: the aim is to physically manipulate objects or people to make them seem to move independently. 9 The black bowler hat, traditional symbol of bourgeois male connotation, is mocked and overturned by the director in an explicit homage to the Dadaist avant-garde. The image of the hat is, indeed, central in Hans Richter’s film Vormittagspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast, translated in Italian as Gioco di cappelli), dated 1928, in which the bowler hat fully recaptures the Dadaist spirit as destruction of meaning and of communication in a grotesque and surreal atmosphere, in a creative, quick, and intense process of editing. Here, the morning bourgeois personal grooming routine is twisted and ridiculed. Protosurrealist topic, it is central in Max Ernst’s C’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme (le style c’est le tailleur) and in L’homme au chapeau melon by René Magritte. Furthermore, the hat is one of the objectual elements that also recurs in the film Ballet mécanique, in an extreme close up in quickly alternated editing with an extreme close up of a moccasin. 10 Moka Pot. Physical Feeling: ‘Dark. Darker. Too Dark./ Moka pot./ Tired slumber tumbles/ down the stairs./ A loony fancy around/ the nerves/ spins, spins, spins./ Desire – the unequaled acrobat -/ turns somersaults in the brain./ Ideas: big, big,/ stemless/ bunches of flowers,/ pushed into the flowerpot of the brain./ Enormous eyes in tumult/ behind the outlines of strange things./ Comfort./ A sharp shiver./ Maybe dizziness./ Sudden bewilderment./ Then, resumption at full gallop, for each fiber,/ of the whirlpool of stimulant heat./ Finally, a hand massage/ from dark ugly hands/ all over my skin,/ the hilarity of the light touch/ of a saggy breast over my back./ Moka pot./ Black black.’ (Folgore 1914). Inedited translation by Patrizio Ceccagnoli.

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leads to the graphic motif in Ballet mécanique, cited in the drawing in the coffee cups and in the graphic composition of the background (the backdrop design, with black circles and triangles, is a transposition of the abstract and geometric design present in the decoration of the coffee cups), by mixing the shooting with the practices of a ‘graphic’ cinema (Willoughby 2009). There is an extreme close up that tends towards an absolute unlikelihood: a hand holding a glass vial containing water that flows upwards – re­alized through backwards editing – against the law of gravitation. This is a reference to the Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista from 1912, in which Marinetti glorifies the countless expressive possibilities of the editing process, among which the recomposing of broken objects without any human intervention or backwards jumps of swimmers from a diving board. The representation of nature becomes, for the avant-garde artists, the object of research towards a formal line oriented towards abstraction. The medium shot of a mill wheel, filmed in three quarters, is used to show the trajectory of a gush of water. The extreme frontal close up of the wheel fulcrum shows all the bolts, as the archetype and evocation of all forms of technology. A process of analogical editing associates the close up of another castor wheel on a proto-industrial background. A series of close ups of mechanical devices, we then see the details of a typewriter, which introduces the lettering in the notice in black letters on white background: ‘Velocità, Sec. 1, 2, 0, Rec’ and a large black X that diagonally cuts the screen in four parts: an example of ‘free-wordist’ cinema. The extreme close up of a black triangle on a white background, canonized metaphor of adultery, introduces three human faces that stand out from the black background up to the three apexes of the triangle; they are the faces of two men and a woman, the usual triangle of the bourgeois drama. The man’s head on the top apex, Guido Martina, observes the two faces on the bottom, of which we can only see the detail of the eyes, namely Pippo Oriani on the left and Tina Cordero on the right.

Cine-aeropainting Moreover, the film presents the first and only example of cine-aeropainting, an experiment on the cinematographic transposition of the motifs and of the Futurist imagination in the ‘visionary and sensual drama of flight’ (Balla et al. 1929: 285), reference to a series of works inspired by air flight and suggestive of the dynamic sensations. Indeed, in those years, aero‑painting elaborated the myth of flight expressing the poetic abstraction of aerial perspective in

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a concretion of modernity, through the Italians’ ‘technological imagination’ (Berghaus 2009). Marinetti promotes, with a number of conferences and declamation all over Europe, the film Lo stormo atlantico (1931), a dynamic documentary produced by the Istituto LUCE on the flight across the Atlantic by Italo Balbo (Marinetti 1931). Since the myth of Icarus, flight is the protest of man against gravity, the passing over the limit and of the impossibility of reaching the sky; cinema, crossroad invention between recording of time and representation of the impossible, suggests possible paths to explore the sky.11 Cinema and aviation were born in the same period, at the end of nineteenthth century: according to the philosopher Paul Virilio, with the conquest of the sky, the fantasy of the expansion of perception has been accelerated.12 According to Virilio, a view from above and from a distance, allowed a new view of the world; it allowed, as the proud Futurists dreamed, to escape Earth, the filthy mass where humanity drags itself along: the innovation of the absence of gravity goes together with the cinematographic projection (Virilio 1986). According to Virilio, Italian Futurists saw every vehicle or technical vector as an idea, as a vision of the universe, more than its image. Italian aeromythology, with aeropoetry soon followed by aerosculpture and aeropainting in 1938, is a new fusionconfusion of perception and object which already foreshadows video and computer operations of analogous simulation. It also revitalises the technical mix of origins, the aeroplane, and more especially the seaplane, taking the place of the ship of nautical mythology […]Again the debate surrounding the invention of the snapshot is not unrelated to the growth of this ultimate hybrid. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had been radically transforming the very nature of representational systems (Virilio 1988: 29).

11 The film Ascension d’un Ballon by Georges Méliès (1897) anticipates the invention of the airship Zeppelin and of Wilbur Wright’s airplane, foreboding the conquest of the sky. In cinema, it is also possible to observe, among its very first experiences, the scientific and technologic events regarding flying, transforming them into shows. Just one year after the first Italian film (La presa di Roma, Filoteo Alberini, 1905): ‘Gare aereonautiche (1906) by Giovanni Vitrotti, together with the coeval Gare di palloni all’Arena di Milano, housed in Cineteca Italiana in Milan, and Inaugurazione del parco aeronautico di Milano as the first Italian cinematographic documents dedicated to flying experiments, and they probably show how much these events were able to attract that odd and composite and new audience that was crowding the shacks of itinerant movie theatres’ (Lotti 2011: 328-330). 12 The title of a chapter of Guerre et cinéma by Virilio is ‘Cinema Isn’t I See, It’s I Fly’ (Virilio 1984).

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Luigi Colombo, aka Fillia, Mistero aereo (1930-1931), watercolour and tempera on paper, 48.6 cm x 68.7 cm. Courtesy of Museo dell’Aeronautica Gianni Caproni. All rights are reserved.

Gerardo Dottori, Volo su paese (1930), mixed media on cardboard, 48.5cm x 50.5 cm. Courtesy of Archivio Gerardo Dottori. All rights are reserved.

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The figures of the scale models of five airplanes are introduced by the shooting of the gems that are arranged in line in the dark background; they change order and place themselves in a triangular shape. The model of an airplane, lightly blurred, is filmed from behind in a semi-subjective shot that introduces a map and the photo of a statue with Asian features, we can then see a photo of an iron bridge, prelude to a series of maps, and a photo of the moon’s surface. The superimposition of a sparkling texture – according to Lista, created using criss-crossed tar paper – evokes a formal analogy with the starry sky where the airplane flies. A fade-out leads the image to the circular lights on black background. A rotating sphere in the middle of the image, drawn and intentionally similar to Earth, is surrounded by shiny paper in the background.13 Five airplanes arranged in a triangle rotate to the right on the top part of the framing, and then they go down again and they spin counter-clockwise around the rotating sphere. The airplanes distance themselves from Earth moving towards the deep Universe; seen in contre-plongée, the two airplanes acquire the same bright texture, as in a transformation into the same substance of the universe.

Symphony of the city The following sequences are among the most arduous experiments of ‘symphony of the city’ in the tradition of Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt by Walter Ruttmann (1927) and Ménilmontant by Dimitri Kirsanoff (1926), which exalt the urban landscape buzzing with vitality. To impress those swirling movements on the images, the directors tied the Debrie camera to a rope and they threw it from the window, turning the rope to bestow it with a rotational motion. The camera is not managed by direction that decides the points of view – it has its own life, independent and unpredictable. The object of the filming is a representation of the contingent; the ontological vocation14 of the cinema is not denied, but reinterpreted according to a new canon: that of risk, the absolute unpredictability of chance in cinema that Man Ray explored earlier in Le rétour à la raison from 1924 (Bouhours & de Haas 1997). Thus, the camera films the urban dynamism with arbitrary 13 One of the materials used in Oriani’s multimedia aero‑paintings (Lista 2010: 97). 14 The definition of ‘ontologic vocation’ of cinema harks back to the perspective offered by André Bazin, according to whom cinema is linked to the essence of reality and therefore it does not limit itself to reproducing reality, but it participates in it, and it gets so intertwined with it that the two mix together, becoming an identifying mirror (Bazin 1962).

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sussultatory and rotational movements and with unusual points of view. While the camera is left to swing, the shadows of three people, two of them wearing men’s hats, are visible on the cobblestones of the square in Turin we can perceive: they are undoubtedly the three directors of the film, in a meta-cinematographic unveiling. Another framing shows a short-medium shot of the road filmed obliquely, in a rotational motion so fast to make indistinguishable the pro-filmic, which becomes almost abstract. Then the camera is placed on the ground, filming from an innovative angle, the life of the city, later made faster by accelerated editing. This is followed by a medium shot of the image of the rotational sphere surrounded by the star-gems. It alternates variations of the frame, with an intermitting effect. The juxtaposition of the terrestrial globe in the middle of a cosmic space links the microcosmos of the metropolitan vitality to the macrocosmos of the sidereal spaces.

Automatic dance The dance of the mannequin in the final sequence is a jubilation of Futurist motifs, a big party of vitalistic enthusiasm. A mannequin with round joints, a painting model, is filmed full-length, dances extending and crossing its arms and legs, between pirouettes and jumps. It seems like an homage to Giorgio De Chirico’s painting or to the composition of Alberto Savinio Le Chants de la mi-mort, but it recalls the Futurist dance in the emulation of the machine, formal model for excellence.15 The opening and closing of arms and legs recalls the form of the ‘anti-graceful’ tradition inaugurated by Ballets Russes. During the dance, the mannequin pulls off its head, and then returns complete, put back together, while it continues to dance; the film ends with a frontal-medium shot of the motionless mannequin. The film takes to the extreme the Futurist idea of an evolution of human beings in mechinic entity. In the avant-garde cinema from the 1920s, like in Ballet mécanique, the metaphor of the mechanized world aims to highlight how the human face and body were reduced to plastic objects, emphasizing the similarities between human features and machines 15 See also: Depero’s Balli Plastici. Moreover, in the Manifesto della Danza Futurista, F.T. Marinetti states: ‘One must go beyond muscular possibilities and aim, in the dance, for that ideal multiplied body of the motor that we have so long dreamed of. Our gestures must imitate the movements of machines assiduously paying court to steering wheels, tires, pistons, and so preparing for the fusion of man with machine, achieving the metallism of Futurist dance’ (Marinetti 1917: 234).

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(Turvey, 2002: 45); in Vitesse, this process is taken to the extreme. The android-mannequin in Vitesse is apotheosis of formal research that tends to a vitalistic experience, emblem of the new art of the Futurist dream, starting from the unconditioned exaltation of technology as an evolutionary force, the film determines a ‘in-becoming’ of the Futurist matter, another chapter among the moving images that praise modernity.

References Balla, G., B. Cappa, F. Depero, G. Dottori, Fillia, F. T. Marinetti, E. Prampolini, M. Somenzi, & Tato (1929), ‘Manifesto dell’Aeropittura futurista’, Gazzetta del popolo 22 September, translated as ‘Manifesto of Aeropainting’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism: An Anthology, 283-286. New HavenLondon: Yale University Press. Bazin, A. (1962), Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?. Paris: Les Éditions du CERF. Berghaus, G. (2009), Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. Bouhours, J.-M. & P. de Haas (1997), Man Ray: directeur du mauvais movies. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. Brunetta, G. P. & A. Costa (eds.) (1990), La città che sale. Cinema, avanguardie, immaginario urbano, Calliano, Trento: Manfrini. Cordero, T., G. Martina, & P. Oriani (1931), ‘Avant-garde integrale: Marinetti et le film futuriste’, Comoedia, March 5th, Paris. —. (1931), ‘Futurisme et film americain’, Comoedia, May 11th, Paris. —. (1931), ‘Le Cinéma d’avant-garde en Italie’, Comoedia, April 19th, Paris. De Berti, R. (2012), Il volo del cinema. Miti moderni nell’Italia fascista. Milan-Udine: Mimesis. Elsaesser, T. (1987), ‘Dada/Cinema?’ in R. Kuenzli (ed.), Dada and surrealist film. New York: Locker & Owens. Folgore, L. (1914), ‘Ponti sull’Oceano’, Poesia, Milan. Harte, T. (2009), Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Léger, F. (1965), Fonctions de la peinture. Paris: Gonthier, translated as Functions of painting. New York: Viking (1973). Lista, G. (2010), Il cinema futurista, Genoa: Le Mani. Lotti, D. (2011), ‘Da Icaro a De Pinedo. Il mito del volo alle origini del cinema italiano’, in G. P. Brunetta (ed.), Metamorfosi del mito classico nel cinema. Bologna: il Mulino, 327-364.

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Marinetti, F. T. (1912), ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’, Edizioni futuriste di Poesia, translated as ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 119-125. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F. T. (1917), ‘Manifesto della danza futurista’, translated as ‘Manifesto of Futurist Dance’ in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 234-240. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F. T. (1931), ‘Alla squadra aerea di Balbo omaggio della Nuova Poesia’, L’Impero d’Italia, Rome. Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla, & R. Chiti (1916), La cinematografia futurista, L’Italia Futurista, (I) 1: 1, translated as The Futurist Cinema in L. Rainey, C. Poggi, L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 229-232. New Haven-London: Yale University Press Turvey, M. (2002), ‘The Avant-Garde and the “New Spirit”: The Case of “Ballet mécanique”’, October (102). Turvey, M. (2011) The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s. Cambridge – MA: MIT Press. Verdone, M. (1990), Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Calliano, Trento: Manfrini [original edition 1968]. Verdone, M. (1996), Velocità di Pippo Oriani: un film futurista, Rome: Centro Sperimentale. Virilio, P. (1984), Guerre et cinéma: logistique de la perception. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, translated as War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso (1989). Virilio, P. (1986), ‘Futurismo e fascismo’, in VV.AA. Futurismo – Futuristi, in Alfabeta – La Quinzaine littéraire supplement to Alfabeta n. 84. Virilio, P. (1988), La machine de vision. Paris: Editions Galilée, translated as The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1994). Willoughby, D. (2009), Le cinéma graphique: Une histoire des dessins animés: des jouets d’optique au cinéma numérique. Paris: Textuel.

About the author Rossella Catanese (editor) is Adjunct Professor of Italian Cinema and Society at the University of North Carolina – Florence branch (Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute). She took her PhD at Sapienza University of Rome, where she has worked as tutor for an academic master in Digital Audiovisual Restoration. Her publications concern issues of film restoration, media archaeology, archival films and film history, with a focus on 1910s and 1920s Avant-garde cinema and archival films.

14. From Science to the Marvellous The Illusion of Movement, Between Chronophotography and Contemporary Cinema Francesca Veneziano Catanese, Rossella (ed.), Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789089647528/ch14 Abstract The Futurist manifesto Distruzione della sintassi is not only an invitation to dismember traditional linguistic structures and to bend verbs and words to the needs of aesthetic perception. Between the graphic method developed by Marey, through which the French physiologist inaugurated the recording of the most imperceptible human and animal movements, and the psychic and transcendent movement that Bragaglia’s dynamic photography aims to capture in the snapshot; between the dispersal of the observer’s point of view advocated for in Futurist manifestos and the impossible point of view sought by Paolo Gioli; between antithetical positions and historical periods as far apart as pre-cinema and contemporary Italian experiences, this article will trace a convergence on the same unfinished research, halfway between science and wonder: the search for the invisible and its endless visible variations. Keywords: Marey, Chronophotography, Futurist Manifestos, Bragaglia, Gioli

In conclusion to his manifesto The Futurist Cinema, Filippo Marinetti encourages the resort to cinema as a tool to ‘decompose and recompose the universe’ according to the ‘marvellous whims’ of the Futurist artist (Marinetti et al.: 233). Such an invitation (at the same time a programmatic declaration and a playful publicity manoeuvre) calls for a subversion of the criteria that regulates cinematographic production, inscribes itself in the wider Futurist project of destruction of the syntax of traditional art and its consequent revision and reinvention through an imagination without

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strings. We find here the principle of analogy, which Marinetti borrows from the literary field and restores to the entire range of experience, promising the renewed imaginative combination of distant (and possibly antithetic) universes, undoubtedly without a connecting thread. ‘Analogy is nothing other than the deep love that binds together things that are remote, seemingly diverse or inimical’ (Marinetti 1913: 120), it is asserted in the manifesto Destruction of Syntax. Analogy must not make do with the easy approach to which it is accustomed in traditional poetry. The Futurist artist shall use it, on the contrary, to create unprecedented bonds and fuse incompossible universes, in order to achieve the short circuit of meaning that art must ensure. We believe that cinema – as an analogical tool of decomposition and reinvention of universal syntax – represents the ideal place to investigate the relationship between the scientific dimension of the Futurist research and the sensorial and perceptive one. Our enquiry will focus on the influence of scientific technologies Futurism claimed or was subjected to, and on the broadening of imagination it simultaneously postulated. We will analyse the privileged relationship of this avant-garde movement with science and marvel in the field of cinema and photography for these arts presuppose a scientif ic source, as opposed to the others to which Futurism dedicated itself. The detailed experience of EtienneJules Marey’s chronophotography will provide a bridge for us between the Futurist movement and the scientif ic and artistic acquisitions of the time. Following the ideal governing principle that Futurism extends between science and art, in a second part of the analysis we will establish a dialogue between these experiences and the work of film-maker Paolo Gioli, to show in which ways the paradigms of Futurism persist (and are hence distorted, or integrated with, different practices or devices) in contemporary Italian cinema. It is in the form of analogy that, according to Marinetti, scientific transformations allow to operate the most audacious and innovative combinations and dispositions. ‘Futurism is based on the complete renewal of human sensibility that has occurred as an effect of science’s major discoveries’ (Marinetti 1913: 143), writes the founder of the movement in Destruction of Syntax, just before listing the most recent technological progresses of the beginning of the century, among which he mentions cinema. Film becomes, therefore, a fast means of transportation among others, an invention among inventions – even before its theorization (and official investiture) in the manifesto The Futurist Cinema. Just like the train, the airplane, or the telegraph, cinema kills distances and creates visual syntheses. Through

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Étienne-Jules Marey, Double ellipse créée par un point lumineux agité dans l’obscurité (n.d.) photography. Courtesy of La Cinémathèque française, collection des appareils. All rights are reserved.

montage, it juxtaposes conflictual images, showing their intrinsic ‘power to astound’ (Marinetti et al.: 120). This is where the decomposition of the universe to which Marinetti alludes in his programmatic text on cinematography finds its meaning. The fragmentation of syntax allowed by cinema is not a mere demolishing force or an aleatory imbalance, but a true and proper decomposition effort that follows the scientific principles upon which the illusion of movement rests. If the language of cinema is the very movement, this is what will have to be analysed, decomposed, and then recomposed according to the logic of free association or of abstraction. The studies carried out in France and Italy by Etienne-Jules Marey during the last decades of the nineteenth century were well-known by Futurists. Doctor, physiologist, and ingenious scientist, thus knowledgeable in mechanical laws, the ‘polymorphic and bulimic’ (Didi-Huberman & Mannoni 2001: 53) Marey developed a series of instruments to register what was the central object of his research since the beginning: movement. In his investigation, many instruments potentially concurred to the rendering of movement. In 1850, Marey developed his well-known graphic

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method, with which he transcribed (on paper or other sensitive surfaces) the most unperceivable moves produced by human and animal bodies, or by mobile objects. In 1882, he develops his first chronophotographic gunshot, an instrument that allows him to register – before switching to film seven years later, thereby prefiguring cinema – the different positions occupied by a moving body in time on a fixed plate. The development of a lens that opened and closed non-stop made it possible for the chronophotographic image to render the phases of a motion. When a fixed aperture was employed, the movement found itself – using Didi-Huberman’s expression – revealed, freed (Didi-Huberman & Mannoni 2004: 53). The marvellous chronophotographic studies of a horse and a seagull realized by Marey in 1886, as well as the image of the Double ellipse created by a luminous spot that stirs in darkness, are examples of an heuristic attitude open to experimentation, on one side, and sensitive to the beauty inherent to the irregularity of the tracing, on the other. What remains of the horse – or of the seagull, the luminous spots, and the many subjects photographed by Marey – is the passage, the trace, the luminous trail that witnesses the interval. Both the prolonged aperture of the lens and the fast intermittence of its shutting allow, in different yet specular ways, Marey’s obsession to come to life: to see the invisible. And to intervene from the outside in human perception by way of an exposure to a ‘new temporality [opening to] the unknown because never seen’ (Frizot 2001: 17; emphasis in original). The ambiguous attitude of the Futurist movement towards cinema and photography has often been discussed. It’s a double ambiguity, in a way, since it not only involves photography and cinema per se – as forms of expression external to their proposal – but also the artists who, whilst respecting the codes of Futurism, try pioneeringly to import these technologies into the movement and to show their deep coherence with its poetics. The case of Anton Giulio Bragaglia and his research on photodynamics – the ‘transcendental photography of movement’ (Bragaglia 1913: p. 34; emphasis in original – Apollonio 1973: 38-45) – is exemplary of this. Giovanni Lista states that ‘photodynamism was the most typical expression of Italian Futurism in the field of photography’1 (Lista 2001: 137). Such recognition of Bragaglia’s studies inside the movement comes, however, with an important

1

My translation.

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and revealing delay.2 The fact that photodynamism was detached from Futurism by its exponents reflects, curiously, the mistrust that Bragaglia himself harboured towards photography and its chronophotographic prodromes. ‘We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality […] For us this is a harmful and negative element, whereas for cinematograph and chronophotography it is the very essence. They in their turn overlook the trajectory, which for us is the essential value’ (Bragaglia 1970: 27; my emphasis – Apollonio 1973: 38-45). In a way, the object of Bragaglia’s complaint is precisely the lack of what Futurist painters reproach about his research. Bragaglia and his detractors simultaneously fail to notice is the deeply dialogic nature of both chronophotography and photodynamism: their capacity to inscribe the essence of movement in a fixed image; to compose unprecedented and singular con-fusions between the steadiness of the support and the represented (moving) action, as well as between the use of technology as a vector and the investigation of perception that arises. It is no accident that Lista defines photodynamism as ‘the first modern revolution in photography’ (Lista 2001: 151); it represents an answer (and a further development of) to Futurism’s dynamic painting and foresees the reproduction of moving images. A far cry from a blurry photograph, according to Bragaglia, photodynamism stems from the development of a complex device, producing an image of refined detail. The luminous beam of three projectors was diffused on a moving body so all that remained from it – once 2 If the photodynamist research began in 1910 and was officially diffused three years later with the text “Futurist Photodynamism”, Bragaglia was nevertheless stigmatized and alienated from the movement he was trying to bring a new openness to. Only four months after the publication of ‘Futurist Photodynamism’, the magazine Lacerba incisively announces its distancing from Bragaglia’s proposals: ‘Due to the general ignorance concerning art, and to avoid misunderstandings, we Futurist painters declare that all things related to photodynamics concern exclusively certain innovations in the field of photography. Such purely photographic researches have nothing to do with the Plastic Dynamism we invented or with any other dynamic research in the field of painting, sculpture or architecture’ (Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, & Ardegno Soffici, ‘Avviso’, Lacerba, 1 October 1913, 1). The ‘excommunication’ of Bragaglia and his research carried out by Boccioni and company reveals the pronounced mistrust towards the acceptance of photography as a form of art – sign of a time that will come to an end with the Dadaist experience. The artists of Plastic Dynamism, who adhere to, among others, Henri Bergson’s stances in L’Évolution créatrice (1907), expand the philosopher’s thoughts in their artistic practice, supporting that this alone can restitute the élan vital: the creative evolution, the impulse that fulfils the becoming. For them, snapshot photography (and what Boccioni defines as its aggravating stance, the cinematograph), since it is deprived of the creative instrument par excellence (the artist’s hand), freezes the vital impulse otherwise inherent to painting, sculpture, and architecture.

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both the detail and the materiality of the subject were sacrificed – was its trajectory. What emerged was, according to Bragaglia’s description, ‘inner, sensorial, cerebral and psychic emotions’ (Bragaglia 1913: 36 – Apollonio 1973: 38-45): an external projection of the memory or of the action. Or, as Marta Braun describes it, a memory made visible that ‘manifests, at the same time, the scientifically attested shape of a particular movement, striking us with the transcendent power of art’ (Braun 1996). Anton Giulio Bragaglia had a detailed knowledge of Marey’s studies; the physiologist’s images had previously been diffused at the Third Italian Congress of Photography, held in Rome in 1911. At the origin of Bragaglia’s photodynamism, writes Braun, is Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography. If this is an undeniable assumption, it is equally true that Bragaglia’s studies are engraved in counter-relief from Marey’s; he deconstructs their principle and affirms indeed the (artistic and psychic) superiority of photodynamism. Marey’s scientific path is obviously more complex than what Bragaglia sought to assert, above all in relation to his own research and to Futurism’s, which is precisely what interests us. Also, the Frenchman’s work represents a sort of premature reconciliation between photodynamism (a heterodox experience refused by the movement) and Marinetti’s parallel rejection of photography as an instrument that, according to his statements, deprives the shapes of dynamism. Between Bragaglia’s photodynamism and Marey’s chronophotography, there are solid and inescapable contact points, which hide in the folds of the lesser-known research of the physiologist and in his works in film. At the same time, between these and the cinematograph art proposed by Futurists, there is an undeniable continuity. As if, in a way, the film Marinetti demanded to exist were (also) modelled on the works of the French physiologist; and, conversely, the unconscious of movement observed by the latter foresaw the Futuristic expectations. Futurism’s concern with speed and simultaneity takes on the entire range of human experience: the ones offered by the external world and its progress, and those related to inner states of conscience. ‘Acceleration of life, which today has a rapid rhythm’, writes Marinetti in Destruction of Syntax. ‘Multiple and simultaneous states of mind within the same individual’ (Marinetti 1913: 144): the assumption would henceforth apply to the means of transportation, to scientific progress, and to the incessant metamorphosis of thoughts and perceptions. Marey’s research, Bragaglia’s photodynamism and Marinetti’s cinema, all converge in the same desire: to cheat the ‘errant mathematics of our transitory eyes’ (Marinetti 1909: 50) through the systematic distortion of temporality. To fulfil, through the indispensable support of machines and

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of a ‘victorious science’, freed from a passéist vision, ‘today’s life, incessantly and tumultuously transformed’ (Boccioni et al. 1910a: 64). Marey himself stated that his images ‘show movements that our eyes can barely see’ and ‘are addressed to the spirit, not the senses’ (Marey 1873: 34). He affirms thus the (implicit and necessary) connection between science and the investigation of perception and manifests his awareness of – as written by Didi-Huberman – opening ‘the physical world to perspectives that were until then inconceivable, or only imagined in a metaphysical order’ (DidiHuberman & Mannoni 2001: 183). He was the first to register the fusion of different temporalities and definitively the first to experiment with the possible variations in the rendition of time in the images. If his chronophotographic shots, like Bragaglia’s photodynamic ones, effect a condensation of different moments, they also disperse the observer’s point of view. In images such as those of the horse or the seagull (whose movements evolve throughout the entire photograph), it is in fact impossible to determine the place where the photo was taken. Marey’s look, like the observer’s, is therefore internal to the event (the action) unfolding in the images. In doing so, he foresees the Futuristic principle of immersion in the artistic event, of putting ‘the spectator in the centre of the picture’ (Boccioni et al. 1910b: 64) – to quote the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910). The chronophotography on film continues the research on perceptive distortion, through an alteration of the registered movement. While Marinetti calls for a ‘joyful deformation of the universe’ (Marinetti et al: 230), Marey performs in his films an operation of distinct intentions (scientific, not ludic) but equivalent proportions. Differently to what Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers would do in their work, the French physiologist rejects the faithful reproduction of movement in favour of extreme velocities. Marey himself stresses the irregularity inherent to movement, as evidenced by chronophotography, which allows the emerging of ‘extreme “shapes”’ or ‘“movements”’ (Marey 1894: 58) that lend, as Didi-Huberman notices, a greater intensity to images (Didi-Huberman 2001 & Mannoni: 240). In the films made by Marey showing the fall of an animal’s body, the movement is slowed down in order to better analyse (unearth) its unperceivable principles; or else the movement of a starfish, for example, is accelerated to observe (discover) its invisible and intermediate phases. These films introduce, in general, an opening and a widening to the possibilities of human perception, as they place vision in a privileged position in the apprehension of movement, by deconstructing it and cheating the physical laws at its basis. They reproduce – as Marinetti would have written – the

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ungraceful side of the movements, since, as Marey soon (before anyone) realizes, the alteration of movement unveils its ugliness (or its strangeness, as the physiologist puts it). ‘What can I say? That ugliness would be nothing but the unknown […]?’ (Marey 1894: 240), Marey asked himself while observing a decomposing action that, in doing so, gradually lost its naturalness, unlocking an until-then unprecedented experience. Unknown (Sconosciuti) is the title of a series of photographs taken in 1994: an ensemble of anonymous passport photos from the 1950s that Paolo Gioli illuminated with an oblique light, so as to reveal the incisions of matter and its emulsion. These same images have been gathered into a movie in 2009: Face Caught in the Dark (Viso sorpreso al buio) – a small ‘impossible film’, according to the artist’s words. The passport photos then undergo a further metamorphosis, imposed by the running of the film: they lose the memory of the visage to which they belonged. Already worn out by the intervention on the material, the memory then neglects, with the fast unreeling of the film, its individual feature. The anonymous face is disfigured and gradually lacerated; its outlines are thereby dissolved into those of the visages that precede or follow it, in order to delineate a single, monstrous and ‘fluctuating’ human face. In the very core of Paolo Gioli’s film lies a desire of movement that embraces, and seems to further develop, the works of Etienne-Jules Marey, as well as those of the Futurist movement. Venetian painter, photographer, video artist, and film-maker, Gioli has been following, since the 1960s, a tireless path of artistic and technical exploration. ‘He acts on a cognitive dimension, which is at once rigorously technological’ (Fragapane 2009: 246; emphasis in original), since the artistic experience (particularly in the fields into which Gioli bursts) cannot ignore the device it is subjected to, and that makes it possible at the same time. Face Caught in the Dark constitutes an example of this, as well as a test bed. The impossibility Gioli evokes regarding this film should be understood as the bringing back into play (with a contemporary awareness of the device) of the same invisibility that Marey and Bragaglia expected from the artistic experience. Working with existing material, Gioli transfigures reality; availing himself of the technology, he stresses all the perturbing potential of this very reality. Just like Marinetti did, he resorts to cinematographic language – ‘with its capacity to accelerate and dematerialize the image’ (Lista 2001: 57) – to enact a ‘metamorphosis […] of the almost oneiric imaginative tension’ (Lista 2001: 56). Finally, through the principle of analogy, he accomplishes a close dialogue among arts, artists, techniques, and temporality.

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‘I find fascinating that a completed work becomes part of another work’ (Fragapane 2009: 220), stated Gioli. The series of impure tributes created by the artist in reference to ‘those artists who dreamed of creating images in which there was only just a glimmer of movement’ (Fragapane 2009: 224) also includes the Polaroid cycle of 1982/1983: Marey/Eakins (Eakins/ Marey. L’uomo scomposto). Gioli performs a multi-layered dialogue between contemporary photography and its greatest forerunners, as well as between its protagonists themselves: Marey and Thomas Eakins. It is all about con-fusions and condensations of sensorial experiences and incompossible moments that short circuit no matter their distance in time, just as the manifesto The Futurist Cinema pledged: ‘two or three different visual episodes at the same time, one next to the other’ (Marinetti et al. 1916: 232). Just as it happens in his Little Decomposed Film (Piccolo film decomposto, 1986) – recently donated to the Marey Museum in Baune –, in which Gioli gives movement to images cut out of catalogues, magazines, and books. In doing so, he not only reanimates the chronophotography of Marey and of Eadweard Muybridge but also realizes a tribute to the rhythmic iteration of the Futuristic collage, moving backwards in time once more. In Flicker (Farfallìo, 1993), static images of butterflies are combined at ‘the rhythm of some erotic film images’ (Gioli 2009: 212), with the artist not only restituting movement (where it seemed impossible), but also transfiguring the image in a ‘cinematic paradox’ (Cf. Fragapane 2009: 222). The butterflies are superimposed on pornographic images and therefore confused with those of human eyes, in a significant double exposure in which the flickering of the image assures the sensorial immersion. ‘The image is no longer the analogon of the represented thing’, writes JeanMichel Bouhours about Gioli’s work, but rather ‘the metonymy […] of a mental process’ (Bouhours 1996: 197; my emphasis). It is a process in action, a metamorphosis of the perceptive experience, an analogy between representation and evocation. Finally, it is a projection, just as in The Graven Face (Il volto inciso), in which the image is emblematically projected on the forehead of the filmed character. Gioli accomplishes his path of a gradual distancing from (physical and sensorial) immobility and brings figuration into question through a work of ‘extreme kinetization’ (Bouhours 2001: 38). Dominque Païni (2009: 230) writes that his films remind mechanical ballet. They are machine-like films where the human body is subject to a profound revision of status: it is no longer the protagonist, but rather the material support (the screen) or the technical instrument of vision (the camera). The immense work on devices

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Paolo Gioli, from the series Eakins/Marey, L’uomo scomposto (1982). Composition of Polaroid type 59 and Polaroid transfer on silk, graphite on paper. Courtesy of Paolo Vampa. All rights are reserved.

to see the invisible carried out by Marey and the Futurist hymn to science (with its parallel urge to refuse the resort to human body as a narrative vector) are indissolubly connected in his work. Paolo Gioli, who always declared to be ‘dismayed in front of the extraordinary analogy between the elements of nature and the elements of technology’ (Valtorta 2000), transforms his own body into a machine. In Pinhole Film (The Man without a Movie Camera) (L’uomo senza macchina da presa – Film stenopeico, 1973/1989), he follows a path

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Frames from Filmstenopeico – l’uomo senza macchina da presa (Pinhole-film – The Man Without A Movie Camera), (Paolo Gioli, 1973-1981-1989), 16mm. Courtesy of Vampa Productions. All rights are reserved.

tended towards an emancipation from the element interposed between art and the instrument that makes it possible. Gioli creates an alternative way of registering images: the mere use of his own hand. The artist substitutes the camera with a two-metre long metallic rod with 50 stenopeic holes: the 16mm film flows manually inside the rod and is then collected in two boxes at its extremities. With this ingenious device, Gioli makes a film that displays an otherwise impossible movement: an unprecedented, trembling, blurred, and unsure vision that no machine would know how to replicate. A simultaneous view, in which several parts of the filmed body are ‘framed’ at the same time, through the multiplication of the stenopeic holes. If ‘the essence of the image must pass through the instrument’ (Bouhours 2009: 234), the instrument itself holds an antique function and vocation: on one side, that of registering

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Paolo Gioli, Pinhole movie-camera, 1983. Lens photograph. Courtesy of the artist. All rights are reserved.

the invisible through a mechanized and non-existent vision, and on the other, that of making an homage to science through the body itself, by making it technique. Gioli proceeds thus to ‘electrify, or liquefy [his] style, making it live the very life of matter’ (Marinetti 1913: 147), as Marinetti wrote in Destruction of Syntax. For all of his films are stories of perception and constitute, at the same time, a direct emanation of the technique that made them possible. ‘The essence of the image is that of containing something eternal’, wrote Walter Benjamin (1938: 262), addressing the principle of the perdurability of images, their capacity to persist and be reflected by unspecified imagery elsewhere, to anticipate or remind others hidden in the past or in the future. The analogy is thus accomplished in the very images, at times despite themselves, at times more consciously, in terms of a tribute a posteriori or of a will to follow a beaten aesthetic path by the means of today’s technological possibilities – transfiguring it and making it persist. Therefore, the

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Futurist movement reveals itself as an inexhaustible laboratory of suggestion, memory, and anticipation – in relation to Marey, who registers the invisible trajectory of a movement, and to Gioli, who accomplishes the very impossibility of movement. It is the visionary analogy of two impossibilities, of two astounding powers in perpetual movement.

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Gioli. Un cinema dell’impronta, 246-248, Roma: Kiwido/Federico Carra/Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia. Fragapane, G. D. (2009), ‘“If I Want to Have fun I don’t Go to See the Movies”. A Conversation with Paolo Gioli’, in S. Toffetti & A. Licciardello (eds.), Imprint Cinema. Paolo Gioli. Un cinema dell’impronta, 219-225, Roma: Kiwido/Federico Carra/Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia. Frizot, M. (2001), Etienne-Jules Marey, Paris: Nathan. Gioli, P. (2009), ‘I film/Films’, in Toffetti & A. Licciardello (eds.), Imprint Cinema. Paolo Gioli. Un cinema dell’impronta, 199-214, Roma: Kiwido/Federico Carra/ Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia. Lista, G. (2001), Cinema e fotografia futurista, Milano: Skira. Marey, E.-J. (1873), La Machine animale, Locomotion terrestre et aérienne, Baillière: Paris. Marey, E.-J. (1894), Le Mouvement, Paris: Masson. Marey, E.J (1891), ‘La chronophotographie, nouvelle méthode pour analyser le mouvement dans les sciences physiques et naturelles’, Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées 21 (2): 689-719. Marinetti, F. T., B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla & R. Chiti (1916), The Futurist Cinema in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.) (2009), Futurism. An anthology, 229-232. New Haven-London: Yale University Press. Païni, P. (2009), ‘Paolo Gioli: a Cinema « a fresco »’, in S. Toffetti & A. Licciardello (eds.), Imprint Cinema. Paolo Gioli. Un cinema dell’impronta, 228-229, Roma: Kiwido/Federico Carra/Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia. Toffetti, S. & A. Licciardello (eds.) (2009), Imprint Cinema. Paolo Gioli. Un cinema dell’impronta, Roma: Kiwido/Federico Carra/Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia. Valtorta, R. (ed.) (1996), Paolo Gioli. Fotografie dipinti grafica film, Udine: Artet. Valtorta, R. (2000), ‘Se hai una perforazione hai già un’immagine’, Count Down 2. http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/100

About the author Francesca Veneziano is a Conférencière de La Cinémathèque française. She completed her PhD at University of Pisa and she has been Adjunct Professor of Film Theories at Sapienza University of Rome. Her publications intercept insightful perspectives about experimental films and cultural studies.

Section 3 Shop Windows Of Filmed Ideas, Events, Types, Objects

Chronology Fernando Maramai Italian Futurism 1900

1901 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti starts his activity as a poetry declaimer in France and Italy. 1902 Marinetti publishes La conquête des étoiles (The Conquest of the Stars) in Paris. 1903 Marinetti publishes D’Annunzio intime.

1904 Marinetti publishes Destruction.

1905 Marinetti publishes Le Roi Bombance in Paris and founds the international magazine Poesia in Milan.

1906 Giovanni Papini publishes Il crepuscolo dei filosofi (The Twilight of the Philosophers). 1907

Historical and Artistic Context Umberto I of Savoy is assassinated by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci. He is succeeded by Vittorio Emanuele III. Henri Bergson publishes Le rire (Laughter). Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), appeared the year before, but was postdated to 1900 by the author. Thomas Mann publishes Buddenbrooks.

Benedetto Croce publishes Estetica. George Méliès shoots Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). Giovanni Giolitti becomes Prime Minister: the ‘Giolittian Era’ begins. Gabriele D’Annunzio publishes Alcyone. Luigi Pirandello publishes Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal). Virgilio Talli stages La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Iorio) by D’Annunzio. Konstantin Stanislavsky directs Vishnevy sad (The Cherry Orchard) by Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre. Albert Einstein formulates the special theory of relativity, developed in 1915 into the general theory relativity. La nuova arma. La macchina (The New Weapon: the Machine) by Mario Morasso. Filoteo Albertini shoots La presa di Roma (The Taking of Rome), the first Italian movie with a complex plot. Exhibition of the ‘Fauves’ at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. The artistic movement ‘Die Brücke’ is born in Dresden.

Ettore Petrolini starts to perform his caricature sketches with Oh Margherita! Pablo Picasso paints Les Damoiselles d’Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon).

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Italian Futurism

Historical and Artistic Context

Raffaele Viviani becomes a star of the Variety Theatre. The essay L’umorismo (On Humor) by Pirandello appears. The magazine La Voce is founded in Florence. Georges Sorel publishes Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence). 1909 January: staging of La donna è mobile by La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper) by Sem Benelli obtains an extraordinary Marinetti at the Alfieri Theatre in Turin. success. On 20 February, Marinetti publishes Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo (The Come Cretinetti paga i debiti (How Foolshead Founding and Manifesto of Futurism) Pays His Debts) by André Deed comes out. in the Parisian daily Le Figaro. In April, Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna! (Let’s Murder the Moonlight), and Roi Bombance is staged by Aurélien Lugné-Poë at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris. Marinetti’s novel Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist) is published. Paolo Buzzi publishes Aeroplani (Airplanes). Giacomo Balla paints Lampada ad arco (Street Light). Enrico Novelli, aka Yambo, shoots Un 1910 12 January: the first Futurist ‘serata’ is performed at Politeama Rossetti in matrimonio interplanetario (A Marriage in Trieste, followed by other events in the Moon). Milan, Turin, Naples and Venice, where Giorgio De Chirico paints his first the Manifesto Contro Venezia passatista metaphysical work Enigma di un (Against Past-loving Venice, 27 April) is pomeriggio d’autunno (The Enigma of an dropped from the top of the Clock Tower. Autumn Afternoon). Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra publish Cubist painters’ exhibition at the Salon Arte dell’avvenire (Art of the Future) in d’Automne. Ravenna. The budetliane circle around Michail Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto Matiushin and Elena Guro releases Sadok of the Futurist Painters, 11 February) and sudey (Trap for Judges). La pittura futurista (Futurist Painting: Vasily Kandinsky writes Über das Geistige Technical Manifesto, 11 April ) signed in der Kunst (The Spiritual in Art). by Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, 11 October) signed by Francesco Balilla Pratella. Boccioni paints La città che sale (The City Rises) and Rissa in galleria (Riot in the Galleria). First edition of poetry book L’Incendiario (The Arsonist) by Aldo Palazzeschi. October: the trial against Marinetti’s Mafarka begins; the novel will be banned for obscenity. 1908 Marinetti publishes La Ville Charnelle (City of Flesh) and Les Dieux s’en vont, d’Annunzio reste (The Gods Depart, and D’Annunzio Remains). Umberto Boccioni paints Officine a Porta Romana (Factories at Porta Romana).

227

Chronology

Italian Futurism 1911 Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights, 11 January) by Marinetti. Manifesto La musica futurista (Futurist Music: Technical Manifesto, 11 March) by Pratella. Palazzeschi publishes the novel Il codice di Perelà (The Man of Smoke), Corrado Govoni Poesie elettriche (Electrical Poems). Carrà paints I funerali dell’anarchico Galli (Funeral of the Anarchist Galli), Boccioni Stati d’animo (States of Mind) and La risata (The Laugh), Luigi Russolo La musica (Music). Marinetti publishes a collection of speeches and manifestos in France entitled Le futurisme and leaves for Libya as war correspondent for L’Intransigeant. 1912 February: Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla and Severini write the Prefazione al Catalogo delle Esposizioni di Parigi, Londra, Berlino, Bruxelles, Monaco, Amburgo, Vienna, ecc. (Preface to the Catalogue of the Exhibitions in Paris, London, Berlin, Bruxelles, Munich, Hamburg, Wien, etc.). Manifestos La scultura futurista (Futurist Sculpture, 11 April) by Boccioni, Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of the Futurist Literature, 11 May) and Risposte alle obiezioni (A Response to the Objections, 11 August) by Marinetti, and La distruzione della quadratura (The Destruction of Quadrature, 18 July) by Pratella. Publications: Le monoplan du pape (The Pope’s Monoplane), novel in free verse by Marinetti; the anthology I poeti futuristi (The Futurist Poets); Il canto dei motori (Song of the Engines) by Folgore. Balla paints Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash), La mano del violinista (The Hand of the Violinist) and Bambina che corre sul balcone (Girl Running on a Balcony); Russolo paints Solidità nella nebbia (Solidity of Fog); Boccioni paints Materia (Materia); and Severini paints Autoritratto (Self-Portrait).

Historical and Artistic Context In September, Italy declares war on Turkey and begins operations in Tripoli. The artist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) is founded in Munich. Gordon Craig directs, together with Stanislavsky, Hamlet at Moscow Art Theatre.

Universal male suffrage in Italy for all men over 30. October: beginning of the First Balkan War. Enrico Guazzoni shoots Quo vadis?, first ‘blockbuster’ in cinema history. December: Russian Futurist Manifesto Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Face of Public Taste) is published. The Ballets Russes represent in Paris L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), starring Vaslav Nijinsky with sets and costumes by Léon Bakst. Marcel Duchamp paints Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 (Nude Descending a Staircase no.2).

228 

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Italian Futurism The Berlin magazine Der Sturm publishes a series of Futurist manifestos. Futuristische Dichtungen (Futurist poems) is also published in Berlin. In October, Marinetti travels to Sofia and witnesses the siege of Adrianople during the First Balkan War. 1913 In March, the Futurists begin their partnership with the Florentine magazine Lacerba. Serate at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome (21 February and 9 March) and at the Verdi Theatre in Florence (12 December). June: Russolo and Ugo Piatti present the first Intonarumori (Noise Intoner) at the Storchi Theatre in Modena. Inno alla vita (Hymn to Life) by Pratella is performed at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome; the composer starts to work on L’aviatore Dro (Dro, the Aviator). Exhibition of Futurist painters in Florence. Anton Giulio Bragaglia publishes Fotodinamismo futurista (Futurist Photodynamism). Boccioni realizes the sculpture Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space); Balla paints Automobile in corsa (Speeding Car) and Velocità di motocicletta (Speed of a Motorcycle); Severini paints Ritmo plastico del 14 luglio (Plastic Rhyhtm of the 14th of July); Carrà paints Il cavaliere rosso (Red Horseman). Manifestos published: L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises, published: 11 March) by Russolo; Distruzione della sintassi. Immaginazione senza fili. Parole in libertà (Destruction of Syntax. Radio Imagination. Words in Freedom, 11 May ) and Il teatro di Varietà (The Variety Theatre, 1 October) by Marinetti; L’antitradition futuriste (Futurist Anti-tradition, 29 June) by Guillaume Apollinaire; La pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori (The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells, 11 August ) by Carrà; Il Controdolore (Anti-Pain, 29 December) by Palazzeschi. 11 October: Programma politico futurista (Futurist Political Program). September: the tour of Elettricità (Electricity) began.

Historical and Artistic Context

In Russia, the Futurist group Osliny khvost (Donkey’s Tail), formed by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Burlyuk brothers David and Nikolay, and the painters Michail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova, realizes the film Drama v K abare futuristov n. 13 (Drama in the Futurists’ Cabaret no. 13). Duchamp starts to work on Readymades. Marcel Proust starts to publish À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The Ballets Russes stage the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Stravinsky in Paris.

229

Chronology

Italian Futurism 1914 January-February: Marinetti’s conferences in Russia. On this occasion, Vadim Šeršenevič translates and publishes a collection of the Italian Futurist manifestos, some of which were already translated and known in Russia since 1909. March-April: first dynamic and synoptic declamations Piedigrotta and I funerali del filosofo passatista (Funeral of the Traditionalist Philosopher) at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome. April: Marinetti’s performance at the Doré Gallery in London and Russolo’s concerts with Intonarumori (Noise Intoners) at Dal Verme Theatre in Milan; in June, at London’s Coliseum. Marinetti, Boccioni and Russolo arrested during interventionist demonstrations in Milan. Zang Tumb Tuuum by Marinetti. Luciano Folgore publishes Ponti sull’oceano (Bridges over the Ocean)and Ardengo Soffici publishes Bïf§ Zf + 18 = Simultaneità – Chimismi lirici (Bïf§ Zf + 18 = Simultaneity and Lyrical Chemistry). Boccioni publishes Pittura e scultura futuriste (Futurist Painting and Sculpture). Manifestos published: Pesi, misure e prezzi del genio artistico (Weights, Measures and Prices of Artistic Genius, 11 March) by Corra and Emilio Settimelli; Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica (Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility, 18 March) by Marinetti; L’architettura futurista (Futurist Architecture, 11 July) by Antonio Sant’Elia; Il vestito antineutrale (The Antineutral Clothing, 11 September ) by Balla; Sintesi futurista della guerra (Futurist Synthesis of the War, 20 September); and In quest’anno futurista (In This Futurist Year, 29 November) by Marinetti. First architectural projects by Mario Chiattone; Sant’Elia’s project for La città nuova (New City) begins. Severini paints Mare=Ballerina (Sea=Dancer).

Historical and Artistic Context 28 June: Serbian student Gavrilo Princip assassinates archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife. 23 July: Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Outbreak of hostilities, involving Germany, Russia, France and Great Britain. Cabiria by Giovanni Pastrone premiers, with intertitles by D’Annunzio, whose name bestows artistic and cultural value to the cinematographic product. Aldo Molinari directs Mondo Baldoria (Revelry World), which bears the subtitle ‘First Futurist Movie’. Amor pedestre (Love Afoot), a movie by Marcel Fabre premiers.

230 

Fernando Maramai

Italian Futurism 1915 14 February: the article Futurismo e marinettismo (Futurism and Marinettism), signed by Papini, Soffici and Palazzeschi, states the split between the Futurists and the Florentine avant-garde gathered around Lacerba. More interventionist demonstrations: Marinetti is arrested in Rome in February and April. First stagings of Futurist synthetic plays. Petrolini stages the revue Zero meno zero (Zero Minus Zero) by Luciano Folgore. Manifestos published: Il teatro futurista sintetico (The Futurist Synthetic Theatre, 11 January – 18 February) by Marinetti, Corra, and Settimelli; Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, 11 March) by Balla and Fortunato Depero; Scenografia e coreografia futurista (Futurist Stage Design, 12 May) by Enrico Prampolini. Marinetti publishes Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War: the Only Hygiene of the World). L’ellisse e la spirale. Film + Parole in libertà (The Ellipse and the Spiral. Film + Wordsin-Freedom), novel by Buzzi is published. Mario Carli publishes the novel Retroscena (Backstage) with preface by the actress Lyda Borelli. Publication of Teatro futurista sintetico (Futurist Synthetic Theatre), a collection of plays. Balla designs the Futurist ballet Macchina tipografica (The Typographic Machine) and realizes Linee forza del pugno di Boccioni (Dynamic of Boccioni’s Fist). Between November and December, Marinetti, Boccioni, Russolo, Piatti, Sant’Elia and Mario Sironi volunteer for service and enlist in the Lombard Volunteer Cyclist Battalion.

Historical and Artistic Context 24 May: Italy declares war on AustriaHungary and enters the World War I. The Birth of a Nation by David Wark Griffith is released. Ezra Pound starts to write his Cantos. Kazimir Malevich paints Chernyi kvadrat (Black Square).

231

Chronology

Italian Futurism 1916 June: first issue of the magazine L’Italia futurista. The movie Vita futurista (Futurist Life) is directed in Florence by Ginna. A.G. Bragaglia shoots Thaïs with scenes by Prampolini. Marinetti writes the film script Velocità (Speed). Manifestos published: La declamazione dinamica e sinottica (Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation, 11 March) and La nuova religione-morale della velocità (The New Religion-Morality of Speed, 11 May) by Marinetti; La cinematografia futurista (The Futurist Cinema, 11 September) by Marinetti, Corra, Settimelli, Ginna, Balla, and Remo Chiti. Boccioni and Sant’Elia die in the war. November: Depero does costume and set design for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale), with music by Igor Stravinsky. Francesco Cangiullo publishes the ‘free-wordist’ poem Piedigrotta. Sironi paints Il ciclista (The Cyclist). 1917 27 January: premiere of Vita futurista at the Niccolini Theatre in Florence. 12 April: at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome Balla creates the lights and stage design for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), music by Stravinsky. Manifesto La danza futurista (The Futurist Dance, 8 July) by Marinetti is published. Sam Dunn è morto (Sam Dunn is Dead), novel by Corra. Sironi paints Aeroplano con paesaggio urbano (Urban Landscape with Airplane) and Depero paints Rotazione di ballerina e pappagalli (Rotation of Dancer and Parrots).

Historical and Artistic Context Febo Mari directs the movie Cenere (Ashes), starring Eleonora Duse. Success of the play La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face) by Luigi Chiarelli and beginning of the season of ‘grotesque’ authors (Rosso di San Secondo, Enrico Cavacchioli, Luigi Antonelli, Chiarelli). Pirandello publishes the novel Si gira… (Shoot!), later renamed Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio: Cinematograph Operator). February: Cabaret Voltaire opens in Zurich. Griffith directs Intolerance. George Grosz paints Metropolis.

April: the United States declares war on Germany. October: Italian defeat at Caporetto. Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Diaghilev stages the ballet Parade, with music by Erik Satie, and scenes and costumes by Picasso. Viktor Shklovsky publishes Iskusstvo kak priëm (Art as Device), defining the concept of ‘defamiliarization’ in art. Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian found De Stijl in Leiden. Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in New York. De Chirico paints Le muse inquietanti (The Disquieting Muses). Il re, le torri, gli alfieri (The King, the Rook, the Bishop) ‘parafuturist’ film by Ivo Illuminati premiers.

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Italian Futurism 1918 Manifesto del partito futurista italiano (Manifesto of the Italian Futurist Party, 11 February) by Marinetti is published. December: foundation of the Fasci politici futuristi (Futurist Political Fasces). Depero creates and stages Balli plastici (Plastic Dance) at Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome, choreography by Gilbert Clavel and music by Alfredo Casella. Teatro aereo (Aerial Theatre) by Fedele Azari. 1919 Big Futurist Exhibition in Milan, Genoa and Florence. Marinetti publishes Democrazia futurista (Futurist Democracy), 8 anime in una bomba (8 Souls in a Bomb), and Le mots en liberté futurists (The Futurist Words in Freedom). Cangiullo publishes Caffeconcerto. Alfabeto a sorpresa (Café-Concert: Unexpected Alphabet). Manifesto Teatro aereo futurista (Futurist Theatre of the Skies, 11 April) by Azari. A.G. Bragaglia works with ‘psychological light’ in his theatrical directions of Per fare l’alba (To Make the Dawn) and La Bella addormentata (Sleeping Beauty) by Rosso di San Secondo. Sketches and paintings by Virgilio Marchi for Città fantastica (Fantastic City).

Historical and Artistic Context 3 November: the Armistice of Villa Giusti ends warfare between Italy and Austria-Hungary. Foundation of the magazine Valori plastici in Rome. Tristan Tzara writes Manifeste Dada 1918 (Dada Manifesto 1918). Mayakovsky writes screenplays and the drama Misteria-Buff, staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold.

March: Benito Mussolini founds the Fasci di combattimento (Fasces of Combat). 12 September: Italian nationalists and irredentists led by D’Annunzio to occupy the former Austro-Hungarian city of Fiume. Vincenzo Cardarelli founds the magazine La Ronda. The weekly newspaper L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order), directed by Antonio Gramsci, appears. Mario Bonnard directs Mentre il pubblico ride (While the Audience Laughs), starring Petrolini, based on Radioscopia (Radioscopy) by Cangiullo and Petrolini. Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus in Weimar. Tatlin projects Pamyatnik III Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International, also known as ‘Tatlin’s Tower’). The League of Nations is established 1920 March: Prampolini and Achille Ricciardi stage at the Argentina Theatre Teatro del at the initiative of the victorious Allied Powers at the end of World War I. coloure (The Theatre of Colour). Marinetti publishes Al di là del comunismo September: general strike and factory (Beyond Communism) and resigns from occupations in Italy. Erwin Piscator founds Proletarisches the Fasces of Combat. theatre (Proletarian Theatre). Manifestos published: Il teatro visionico (‘Visionic’ Theatre, 14 November) by Das Cabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet Pino Masnata and Contro tutti i ritorni in of Dr. Caligari) by Robert Wiene. pittura (Against all Revivals in Painting, 11 January) by Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Russolo, and Sironi. Thayaht invents the ‘Tuta’ (Taglio della tuta. Modello Thayaht a linee rette), known as Coveralls.

233

Chronology

Italian Futurism

Historical and Artistic Context

January: the Italian Communist Party is founded in Livorno. Mussolini is elected in Milan on the lists of the National Fascist party. Debut of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) by Pirandello is met with controversy. L’uomo meccanico (The Mechanical Man), a film by André Deed, premiers. Alban Berg composes Wozzeck. Horizontal-Vertical Mass, directed by Viking Eggeling premiers. Max Ernst paints L’éléphant Célèbes (The Elephant Celebes). October: March on Rome; King Vittorio 1922 Marinetti presents his ‘tavole tattili’ (Tactile Tables) during the tour of Teatro Emanuele III appoints Mussolini Prime Minister. della sorpresa (Theatre of Surprise). May: Marinetti stages Il tamburo di fuoco The artistic movement ‘Novecento italiano’ founded in Milan. (The Firedrum) and publishes the novel Meyerhold stages Le cocu magnifique Gli Indomabili (The Untamables). (The Magnificient Cuckold) and develops Manifesto dell’arte meccanica futurista constructivism and biomechanic in (Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art, theatre. 20 June), signed by Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini (later also by Prampolini), Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg found FEKS group (Factory of the who stage the Ballo meccanico futurista Eccentric Actor). (Futurist Mechanical Dance) at the Casa Das triadische ballet (The Triadic Ballet) by d’Arte Bragaglia in Rome. Oskar Schlemmer. November: the acting company Art et Ulysses by James Joyce is published. Action stages a selection of Futurist synthetic plays in Paris. Ivo Pannaggi paints Treno in corsa (Speeding Train). Italo Svevo writes La coscienza di Zeno. 1923 A. G. Bragaglia opens the Teatro degli (The Conscience of Zeno). Indipendenti in Rome, hosting Bianca e Rosso (Bianca and Rosso) by Marinetti in Freud publishes Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id). April. Man Ray shoots Le retour à la raison Psicologia delle macchine (Psychology of Machines) shows at Odeon Theatre (Return to Reason). in Milan with music by Silvio Mix and Arnold Schoenberg develops the scenes by Prampolini. dodecaphonic tecnique. Fillia founds the Sindacati artistici futuristi Duchamp decides not to finish La Mariée (The Futurist Union of Artists) in Turin. mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even), begun in 1915. 1921 Manifestos Il tattilismo (Tactilism, 11 January) by Marinetti and Il teatro della sorpresa (The Theatre of Surprise, 11 October) by Marinetti and Cangiullo. Italian tour of the acting company Teatro della sorpresa (The Theatre of Surprise). Petrolini performs a selection of Futurist works in São Paulo in Brazil. December: the Svandovo Theatre in Prague represents a selection of Futurist synthetic plays with scenes by Prampolini. Marinetti publishes L’alcova d’acciaio (The Steel Alcove).

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Italian Futurism 1924 Marinetti publishes Futurismo e fascismo (Futurism and Fascism). November: Futurist Congress in Milan. Solemn honours granted to the founder of the movement, Marinetti. New tour of Teatro della sorpresa (Theatre of Surprise), during which the ballet Anihccam del 3000 (Anihccam 3000) by Depero and Franco Casavola is staged. Manifestos published: La musica futurista (Futurist Music), Le atmosfere cromatiche della musica (Chromatic Atmospheres of Music), Le sintesi visive della musica (Visual Synthesis Of Music), Le versioni scenicoplastiche della musica (Scenoplastic Versions of Music) by Casavola, and L’atmosfera scenica futurista (Futurist Scenic Atmosphere) by Prampolini. Gerardo Dottori exhibits at the Venice Biennale. Depero paints Treno partorito dal sole (Train Born Out of the Sun), Benedetta Cappa Marinetti paints Velocità di motoscafo (Speeding Motorboat). 1925 Marinetti moves to Rome with his wife Benedetta. Anthology I nuovi poeti futuristi (New Futurist Poets) is published. Ruggero Vasari publishes L’angoscia delle macchine (The Anguish of Machines). Teatro Magnetico (Magnetic Theatre) by Prampolini wins the Grand Prix at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts) in Paris. Fillia paints Paesaggio meccanico (Mechanical Landscape).

Historical and Artistic Context 21 January: Lenin dies. 10 June: the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti is murdered. The writers that gathered around Mino Maccari’s journal Il Selvaggio found the antimodernist group ‘Strapaese’ in Florence. André Breton publishes Manifeste du Surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism). Cinema: Entr’acte by René Clair is presented with the ballet Relâche by Francis Picabia, music by Erik Satie; Ballet mécanique by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy; L’Inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman) by Marcel L’Herbier; Kinoglaz (Cine-Eye) by Dziga Vertov; Aelita by Yakov Protazanov; Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) by F.W. Murnau; Symphonie Diagonale by Eggeling.

March: Conference of Fascist Culture in Bologna. Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti (The Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals) is written. After ruling constitutionally for three years, Mussolini sets up the fascist dictatorship. Ossi di seppia (Bones of the Cuttlefish), a poetry collection by Eugenio Montale, is published. Pirandello begins the activity of Teatro d’Arte (Art Theatre) in Rome. Totò makes himself known in Caffè Concerto performing the ‘marionetta’ created by Gustavo De Marco. Eisenstein directs Bronenosets Potëmkin (Battleship Potemkin) and Stachka (Strike); Charlie Chaplin directs The Gold Rush. Der Prozess (The Trial) by Franz Kafka appears posthumously.

235

Chronology

Italian Futurism 1926 Vulcano (Volcanoes) by Marinetti is staged at Valle Theatre in Rome, directed by Pirandello. Marinetti on tour in Argentina and Brazil. Depero writes the screenplay of the movie project Il futurismo italianissimo (The Very Italian Futurism). Exhibition of Futurist paintings at the Venice Biennale. Dottori paints Trittico della velocità (Triptych of Speed), Pannaggi Funzione architettonica h 03 (Architectonic Function h 03); Farfa paints Antenna futurista (Futurist Antenna). 1927 Théâtre de la pantomime futuriste by Prampolini is presented in Paris. Art et Action stages L’angoscia delle macchine by Vasari in Paris. Vinicio Paladini designs the imaginist movie Luna-park traumatico (Traumatic Luna Park).

Historical and Artistic Context Massimo Bontempelli launches the movement ‘Novecento’ and its journal. Cinema: Anémic Cinema (Anemic Cinema) by Duchamp and Man Ray; The General by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman. Warner Bros. produces Don Juan by Alan Crosland, the first commercial movie with synchronized musical score and sound effects. Meyerhold stages Revizor (The Government Inspector) by Nikolai Gogol.

EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche), the first Italian public service broadcaster, is established. Cinema: Metropolis by Fritz Lang; Oktyabr (October) by Eisenstein; Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Synphony of a Great City) by Walter Ruttmann; La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) by Carl Theodor Dreyer; Napoléon by Abel Gance. The Jazz Singer by Alan Croslan is the first ‘talkie’. Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius designs the Total Theatre. Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac found the Théâtre Alfred-Jarry. 1928 Fillia, Prampolini, and Nikolay Diulgheroff Stalin presents his first five-year plan in USSR. design the Futurist Pavilion at the Bertolt Brecht stages Die DreigroschenInternational Exhibition in Turin. oper (The Threepenny Opera) in Berlin, Diulgheroff paints L’uomo razionale with music by Kurt Weill. (Rational Man). Cinema: L’étoile de mer (The Sea Star) by Man Ray ad Robert Desnos; The Cameraman by Edward Sedgwick and Keaton. First Italian Exhibition of Rational Architecture promoted in Rome by Group 7.

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Italian Futurism 1929 Marinetti is elected member of the Royal Academy of Italy. Il suggeritore nudo (The Naked Prompter) by Marinetti is staged at Teatro degli Indipendenti. Manifesto Prospettive di volo (Perspectives of Flight, 22 September) is written by Marinetti – published in 1931 as L’aeropittura futurista (Futurist Aeropainting) – and signed by Balla, Benedetta, Depero, Dottori, Fillia, Prampolini, Mino Somenzi and Tato. Fillia paints Tendenze spirituali (Spiritual Tendencies).

1930 Manifesto La fotografia futurista (The Futurist Photograph, 11 April) by Marinetti and Tato, and Manifesto della cucina futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, 28 December) by Marinetti are published. Depero is in New York where he creates the scenes and costumes for the ballet The New Babel and paints Folla nel Subway (Subway. Crowd to the Underground Trains). Bruno Munari starts to work on the Macchine inutili (Useless Machines). 1931 February: first exhibition of aero‑painting in Rome. Pippo Oriani, Guido Martina, and Tina Cordero realize the movie Velocità (also known as Vitesse). Martina and Cordero publish the Manifesto Avant-garde integrale: Marinetti et le film futuriste (The Integral Avantgarde: Marinetti and Futurist Film) in the magazine Comœdia in Paris. Manifesto dell’arte sacra futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art, 23 June) is published by Marinetti and Fillia; Manifesto dell’aeropoesia (Manifesto of Aeropoetry, 22 October) is published by Marinetti, who also publishes Spagna veloce e toro futurista (Fast Spain and Futurist Bull). Benedetta publishes Viaggio di Gararà (Garara’s Journey).

Historical and Artistic Context 11 February: Lateran Treaty between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See is signed. 24 October: Wall Street Crash and beginning of the Great Depression. André Breton writes Second Manifeste du Surréalisme (Second Manifesto of Surrealism). Piscator publishes Il teatro politico (The Political Theatre). Cinema: Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) by Vertov is released; Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí shoot Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). Meyerhold stages Klop (The Bedbug) by Mayakovsky. Alberto Moravia publishes Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference). First Italian talking picture: La canzone dell’amore (The Song of Love) is directed by Gennaro Righelli. March: Meyerhold stages Banya (The Bathhouse) by Mayakovsky, who commits suicide a month later, on 14 April. Cinema: L’âge d’or (The Golden Age) by Buñuel; Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) by Joseph von Sternberg, Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) by Jean Cocteau are released.

Spain: after the elections, the new Constitution establishes the Second Republic. Que viva Mexico!, unfinished film by Eisenstein. Dalì paints La persistencia de la memoria (The Persistence of Memory).

237

Chronology

Italian Futurism 1932 Somenzi founds and directs the journal Futurismo. Antonio Marasco proclaims the ‘Futurismo Italiano Indipendente’ (Italian Indipendent Futurism) and founds the Gruppi Futuristi di Iniziative (Futurist Groups of Initiative), who launch the Manifesto sulla cinematografia futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Cinematography), signed by Giuseppe Lega, Marisa Mori, and Fernando Raimondi. Vasari publishes the drama Raun. La cucina futurista (The Futurist Cookbook), recipe book by Marinetti and Fillia is published. Prampolini paints Forme-forze nello spazio (Forms Forces in Space). 1933 Manifestos Il teatro totale futurista (Manifesto of Total Theatre) and La Radia (The Radia) are written by Marinetti (the latter is co-written with Masnata), who also writes a series of radio synthesis and reports for EIAR the return of Italo Balbo from his transatlantic flight. Marinetti publishes Il fascino dell’Egitto (Fascination with Egypt). Prampolini creates some reliefs for the film project Mani (Hands), never realized. 1934 February-March: aero‑painting exhibition in Hamburg and Berlin, organized by Vasari. Manifesto tecnico dell’aeroplastica futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Aeroplastics) by Munari, Carlo Manzoni, Gelindo Furlan, Ricas and Regina Cassolo. Dottori paints A 300 km sulla città (300 Km over the City). Depero publishes Liriche radiofoniche (Radiophonic Poems). 1935 Marinetti publishes L’aeropoema del Golfo della Spezia (Aeropoem of the Gulf of La Spezia) and volunteers for active service in the Italo-Ethiopian War.

Historical and Artistic Context First Venice International Film Festival. Mario Camerini directs Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! (What Scoundrels Men Are!). Artaud writes Le Théâtre de la Cruauté (The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto). Louis-Ferdinand Céline publishes the novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night).

Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany and starts the campaign against ‘degenerate art’, which leads to the end of the Bauhaus. Ruttmann directs Acciaio (Steel), subject by Pirandello.

Alessandro Blasetti shoots 1860 and directs in Florence the ‘mass theatre’ play 18 BL, performed outdoors with 2000 amateur actors. October: Fourth Volta Conference, dedicated to the dramatic theatre. L’Atalante is directed by Jean Vigo.

The Kingdom of Italy starts the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Scuola Nazionale di Cinematografia (Italian National Film School, later known as Experimental Film Centre) and Accademia d’Arte Drammatica (Academy of Dramatic Art) are founded in Rome. Chaplin directs Modern Times.

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Fernando Maramai

Italian Futurism 1936 Tullio Crali paints Aerocaccia II.

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942

Historical and Artistic Context

Beginning of Spanish Civil War. Pirandello, Fregoli and Petrolini die. Walter Benjamin publishes Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). The Fascist regime establishes the Il poema africano della Divisione ‘28 ottobre’ (African Poem of the ‘28 October’ Ministry of Popular Culture, commonly abbreviated as MinCulPop. Division) is written by Marinetti. La grande illusion (Grand Illusion) by Jean Renoir. Picasso paints Guernica. Marinetti and Ginna write the manifesto Italian racial laws against Jews are La cinematografia (Cinematography). established. Hitler occupies Austria. Crali paints In picchiata sulla città May: Pact of Steel between Italy and (Nosedive on the City). Germany. August: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and USSR. 1 September: Germany invades Poland; the Second World War starts in Europe. Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children) is written by Brecht. Marinetti publishes Il poema non umano June: Italy declares war against France and Great Britain. dei tecnicismi (The Inhuman Poem of September: Germany begins massive Technicalities). aerial raids over London and other British cities. The Great Dictator is directed by Chaplin. February: Meyerhold is sentenced to death by the Soviet government. Max Ernst starts to paint L’Europe après la pluie II (Europe after the Rain II). June: Germany invades USSR. December: Attack on Pearl Harbor. Citizen K ane is directed by Orson Welles. Marinetti publishes the aeropoem Canto August: Beginning of Battle of Stalingrad. eroi e macchine della guerra mussoliniana Blasetti directs Quattro passi tra le nuvole (Song for the Heroes and Machines of the (Four Steps in the Clouds). Mussolinian War). In July, he joins Italian Michael Curtiz directs Casablanca. troops in the USSR in the capacity of a military journalist. Gerardo Dottori paints Inferno di battaglia sul paradiso del golfo (The Hell of the Battle over the Paradise of the Gulf).

239

Chronology

Italian Futurism 1943 Back from Russia, Marinetti writes the memoirs La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista. Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto (Great Traditional and Futurist Milan. An Italian Sensibility Born in Egypt), that will be published posthumously.

1944 2 December: Marinetti dies in Bellagio.

Historical and Artistic Context January-February: debacle of ARMIR in USSR. July: Allied invasion of Sicily; King Vittorio Emanuele III orders Mussolini’s arrest. 8 September: Armistice between Italy and the Allied Armed Forces and the beginning of Italian partisan resistance. Ossessione (Obsession) is directed by Luchino Visconti. June: D-Day, Normandy landings of Allied forces. Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) is directed by Eisenstein.

About the author Fernando Maramai is a researcher and scholar in the area of Performing Arts and 20th-Century Italian Literature. He completed his PhD at the University of Siena and he has published volumes and several essays on Futurist Theatre, Marinetti, Palazzeschi, Ruggero Vasari and Antonio Marasco.

Filmography Marcello Seregni This filmography was compiled with the aim of creating an easy-to-use tool for film scholars. To facilitate consultation and bring into focus the key issues that emerge from a reading of the book, it was decided to divide the filmography into three sections. The first two sections comprise films produced from the origins of cinema through to 1939, the year that can be considered the ideal conclusion of the Futurist trajectory in cinema. The first part is dedicated to Futurist films and thus includes only titles that are conventionally regarded as such. The second part is dedicated to films that influenced the Futurist movement, films that, in one way or another, were crucial – visually or in terms of content – for the formation of a Futurist cinema. It also contains films that were influenced by Futurism and developed clear links with it. The third and final part deals with the films cited in the essays in this book. The result is based on a series of studies of documents and materials in which no precise references are given this is because we preferred not to provide uncertain or hypothetical indications. This list owes a great deal to previously published research on the subject, such as the foundational works by Mario Verdone and Giovanni Lista.

Futurist Filmography – Accordo di colore (1911), D.: Arnaldo e Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, Italy, 180 m. – Studio di effetti tra quattro colori (1911), D.: Arnaldo e Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, Italy.1 – Canto di primavera (1911), D.: Arnaldo e Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, Italy.2 – Les Fleurs (1911), D.: Arnaldo e Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, Italy.3

1 2 3

The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length. The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length. The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length.

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Marcello Seregni

– Quindici motivi cromatici (1911-1912), R.: Arnaldo e Bruno GinanniCorradini, Italy. 4 – L’arcobaleno (1912), D.: Arnaldo e Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, Italy, 200 m. – La danza (1912), D.: Arnaldo e Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, Italy, 200 m. – Thaïs (1916), D. & Sc.: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Ph.: Luigi Dell’Otti, P.: Novissima Film, Rome, Italy, 1446 m. – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Velocità (1930), D.: Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, Pippo Oriani, P.: Futurista Film, Italy, 364 m. – Musica – La gazza ladra (1934), D.: Corrado D’Errico, P.: Istituto Luce, Rome, Italy, 82 m.

Influed/influential films – La Danse serpentine de Loïe Fuller, different versions produced by Edison, Méliès, Lumière, Guy, and others, 1893-1898, between 15 and 25 m. – I Bagni di Diana (1896), D. & Ph.: Giuseppe Filippini, P.: Lumière, Lyon, France, 20 m. – Fregoli dietro le quinte (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?),5 11.60 m. – Fregoli al ristorante (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?), 11 m. – Una burla di Fregoli (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?), 15.40 m. – Il sogno di Fregoli (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?), 12 m. – Fregoli prestigiatore (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?), 14.70 m. – Il segreto di Fregoli (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?), 9.20 m. 4 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length. 5 The authorship of Fregoli’s films is not fully clarified yet. Some studies point to Luca Comerio as a cinematographer. These data come from the section presented at the festival Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone (Italy): L’avanguardia italiana ovvero un’avanguardia inconsapevole by Carlo Montanaro of 2002 and Early Cinema by William Barnes of 2015.

Filmogr aphy

243

– Un viaggio di Fregoli (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?), 9.20 m. – Fregoli trasformista (1898), D. & P: Leopoldo Fregoli, Ph.: Luca Comerio (?), 14.7 m. – Gare di palloni all’Arena di Milano (1906), P.: Luca Comerio (attribuite), Milan, Italy, 23 m. – Max veut apprendre à patiner (1907), D.: Louis Gasnier, P.: Pathé Frères, France, 125 m. – Le fiabe della nonna (1908), P.: Cines, Rome, Italy, 230 m. – Come Cretinetti paga i debiti (1909), P.: Itala Film, Turin, Italy, 160 m. – Cretinetti che bello! (1909), P.: Itala Film, Turin, Italy, 97 m. – La storia di Lulù (1909), D.: Arrigo Frusta, Ph.: Giovanni Vitrotti, P.: Società Anonima Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy, 153 m. – La journée d’une paire de jambes (1910), P.: Gaumont, France, 109 m. – Storia di un paio di stivali (1910), D.: Marcel Fabre, P.: Società Anonima Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy, 63 m. – Un matrimonio interplanetario (1910), D. & Sc.: Enrico Novelli, P.: Latium Film, Roma, Italy, 295 m. – Milano dalle guglie del Duomo (1910), P.: Luca Comerio, Milan, Italy, 42 m. – Vittoria italiana. L’idroplano Forlanini raggiunge la velocità di 80km all’ora sull’acqua (1910), P.: Luca Comerio, Milan, Italy, 180 m. – Le avventure di Pinocchio (1911), D.: Giulio Antamoro, P.: Cines, Roma, Italy, 1086 m. – Il Re in dirigibile (1911), P.: Luca Comerio, Milan, Italy.6 – Riprese dall’a ereo di Mario Calderara (1911), P.: Luca Comerio, Milan, Italy, 98 m. – Drama v kabare futuristov n. 13 (1913), D.: Vladimir Kas’janov, P.: Toporkov, Winkler, Urss, 431 m. – Le avventure straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola (1913), D.: Marcel Fabre, Luigi Maggi, Sc.: Guido Volante, Ph.: Ottavio De Matteis, P.: Società Anonima Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy, 3660 m. – Excelsior (1913), D. & P.: Luca Comerio, Milan, Italy, 2000 m. – Mariage de Mademoiselle Fort, fille du poete Paul Fort, avec le peintre futuriste Severini. Une oeuvre de l’a rtiste italien (1913), da Gaumont Journal, P.: Gaumont, Paris, France, 25 m. – Italie. Grande manifestation en faveur de la guerre (1915), da Journal Gaumont, P.: Gaumont, Paris, France, 25 m. 6 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length.

244 

Marcello Seregni

– Les futuriste italiens (1913), da Pathé Journal, anno III, n. 97, serie 299, P.: Pathé, Paris, France, 30 m. – Amor pedestre (1914), D.: Marcel Fabre, P.: Società Anonima Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy, 140 m. – Dick futurista (1914), P.: Milano Films, Milan, Italy.7 – Ja choču byt’ futuristom (1914), D.: Vitalij Lazarenko, P.: Urss.8 – Filibus, il misterioso pirata dell’a ria (1915), P.: Corona Films, Turin, Italy, 1424 m. – Storie vecchie e fatti nuovi (1915), P.: Società Anonima Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy.9 – Milan: les Cyclistes volontaires italiens partant pour la guerre sont acclamés par la population (1915), da Journal Gaumont, P.: Gaumont, Paris, France, 27 m. – Kri Kri modernista (1916), P.:Cines, Rome, Italy, Distribution.: Fileti, 159 m. – Il Re, le torri, gli alfieri (1916), D.: Ivo Illuminati, Lucio D’Ambra, P.: Medusa Film, Rome, Italy, 2206 m. – Polidor nel 2500 (1916), D.: Ferdinand Guillaume, P.: Caesar, Rome, Italy, 377 m. – La guerra e il sogno di Momi (1916), R.: Segundo De Chomon, P.: Itala Film, Turin, Italy, 833 m. – Rapsodia satanica (1917), D.: Nino Oxilia, P.: Cines, Rome, Italy, 905 m. – La moglie e le arance (1917), D.: Luigi Serventi, P.: Do.Re.Mi., Rome, Italy, 1504 m. – Il mio cadavere (1917), D.: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Riccardo Cassano, P.: Novissima Film, 1380 m. – Perfido incanto (1917), D.: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Riccardo Cassano, P.: Novissima Film, 1389 m. – Proekt inzhenera Prayta (1918), D.: Lev Kuleshov, P.: Aleksandr Khanzhonkov, Urss, 810 m. – Zakovannaya Filmoi (1918), D.: Nikandr Turkin, Scr.: Vladimir Mayakovsky, P.: David Burlyuk, Urss.10 – Nye dlya deneg radivshisya (1918), D.: Nikandr Turkin, Scr.: Vladimir Mayakovsky, P.: David Burlyuk, Urss, 1920 m. 7 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length. 8 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length. 9 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length. The length of the censure visa is not included. 10 To date, only 15 meters of the film have remained.

Filmogr aphy

245

– Il volo su Vienna (1918), 110 m. – Il mistero di Galatea (1918), D. & P.: Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Italy, 1200 m. – L’Odissea di Don Giovanni (1919), D.: Vasco Salvini, P.: Olympus Film, Rome, Italy, 1660 m. – Fantasia bianca (1919), D.: M.A.S.P. [Alfredo Masi, Severo Pozzati], P.: Alfredo Masi, Italy, 1273 m. – Mentre il pubblico ride (1919), D.: Mario Bonnard, P.: Celio Film, Rome, Italy, 1134 m. – L’illustre attrice Cicala Formica (1920), D.: Lucio D’Ambra, P.: D’Ambra Film, Rome, Italy, 576 m. – Prométhée… banquier (1921), D., Scr. & P.: Marcel L’Herbier, Paris, France, 450 m. – La principessa Bebè (1921), D.: Lucio D’Ambra, P.: D’ambra Film, Rome, Italy, 2110 m. – L’uomo meccanico (1921), D.: André Deed, P.: Milano Films, Milan, Italy, 1821 m. – Opus I. (1921), D. & P.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Germany, 320 m. – Opus II. (1921), D. & P.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Germany, 78 m. – Manhatta (1921), D.: Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, P.: New York, Usa, 198 m. – Exécution du futurisme et du cubisme par les élèves de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1922), Journal Gaumont, P.: Gaumont, Paris, France, 30 m. – Rhythmus 21 (1923), D.: Hans Richter, P.: Germany, 82 m. – Faits divers (1923), D.: Claude Autant-Lara, P.: Cinégraphic, Marcel L’Herbier, Paris, France, 420 m. – The Fugitive Futurist (1924), D.: Gaston Quiribet, P.: Hepworth, United Kingdom, 304 m. – Opus III. (1924), D. & P.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Germany, 66 m. – Opus IV. (1924), D. & P.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Germany, 70 m. – Symphonie diagonale (1924), D. & P.: Viking Eggeling, Sweden, 192 m. – Kinoglaz (1924), D.: Dziga Vertov, P.: Urss, 1627 m. – Photogénie mécanique (1924), D.: Jean Grémillon, France.11 – Pochozdenija Oktjabñny (1924), D.: Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, P.: Sevzapkino & Feksilm, Urss, 970 m. – Entr’acte (1924), D.: René Clair, P.: Rolf de Maré, Paris, France, 600 m.

11 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length.

246 

Marcello Seregni

– Ballet mécanique (1924), D.: Fernad Léger, Dudley Murphy, P.: Paris, France, 321 m. – L’Inhumaine (1924), D.: Marcel L’Herbier, P.: Cinégraphic Films L’Herbier, Paris, France, 2500 m. – Aelita (1924), D.: Jakov Aleksandrovič Protazanov, P.: Mežrabpom-Rus’, Urss, 2841 m. – Lingotto Fiat (1924), P.: Società Anonima Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy, 199 m. – La bambola vivente (1924), D.: Luigi Maggi, P.: Roasio, Turin, Italy, 1033 m. – Film/Kipho (1925), D.: Julius Pinschewer, Guido Seeber, P.: Werberfilm GmbH, Berlin, Germany, 111 m. – Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925), D.: Henri Chomette, P.: Paris, France, 200 m. – Gloria (1925), P.: Istituto Luce, Rome, Italy, 1862 m. – Madrid en el año 2000 (1925), D.: Manuel Noriega, P.: Ediciones Maurente, Madrid, Spain.12 – Filmstudie (1926), D.: Hans Richter, P.: Germany, 190 m. – Anémic Cinéma (1926), D.: Marchel Duchamp, P.: France, 190 m. – Rien que les heures (1926), D.: Alberto Cavalcanti, P.: Paris, France, 1250 m. – Al Hollywood madrileño (1927), D. & P.: Nemesio Manuel Sobrevila, Madrid, Spain.13 – Etudes des mouvements à Paris (1927), D.: Joris Ivens, P.: Paris, France, 110 m. – Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), D.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Deutsche Vereins-Film, Germany, 1466 m. – Combat de boxe (1927), D.: Charles Dekeukeleire, P.: Belgium, 215 m. – La marche des machine (1927), D.: Eugène Deslaw, P.: Paris, France, 246 m. – Moskva (1927), D.: Mikhail Kaufman, Ilya Kopalin, P.: Sovkino, Moscow, Urss, 1750 m. – Vormittagsspuk (1927), D.: Hans Richter, P.: Germany, 165 m. – The last moment (1928), D.: Pál Fejös, P.: Samuel Freedman-Edward M. Spitz, New York, Usa, 1642 m. – Impatience (1928), D.: Charles Dekeukeleire, P.: Belgium, 1000 m. – Inflation (1928), D.: Hans Richter, P.: Germany, 80 m. 12 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length. 13 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length.

Filmogr aphy

247

– Rennsymphonie (1928), D.: Hans Richter, P.: Germany, 191 m. – Les nuits électriques (1928), D.: Eugène Deslaw, P.: Paris, France, 350 m. – Circolare esterna (1928), D.: Francesco Di Cocco, Italy.14 – Alles Dreht sich, alles bewegt sich (1928), D.: Hans Richter, P.: Germany, 82 m. – De Brug (1929), D.: Joris Ivens, P.: Rotterdam, Netherlands, 420 m. – Studie [No. 1-13] (1929-1934), D.: Oskar Fischinger, P.: Germany. – Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929), D.: Dziga Vertov, P.: Vukfu, Urss, 1889 m. – El sexto sentido (1929), D. & P.: Nemesio Manuel Sobrevila, 1600 m. – Montparnasse (1929), D.: Eugène Deslaw, P.: Paris, France, 400 m. – Thèmes et variations (1929), D.: Germaine Dulac, P.: Paris, France, 196 m. – Skyscraper Symphony (1929), D.: Robert Florey, P.: New York, Usa, 200 m. – Melodie der Welt (1929), D.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Tobis Filmkunst, Germany, 1128 m. – Wochenende (1930), D.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Germany, 300 m. – Mechanical principles (1930), D.: Ralph Steiner, P.: Usa, 320 m. – Ein Lichtspiel schwarz weiss grau (1930), D.: László Moholy-Nagy, P.: Germany, 100 m. – Noticiario de Cine Club (1930), D.: Ernesto Giménez Caballero, P.: Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Spain, 270 m. – Rotaie (1930), D.: Mario Camerini, P.: S.A.C.I.A., Milan, Italy, 2469 m. – Nerone (1930), D.: Alessandro Blasetti, P.: Cines Pittaluga, Rome, Italy, 2222 m. – Lo stormo atlantico (1931), P.: Istituto Luce – Tobis Melofilm, Rome, Italy, 329 m. – La notte insonne di Topolino (1931), D.: Goffredo Alessandrini, P.: Cines – Pittaluga, Rome, Italy, 956 m. – Il ventre della città (1931), D.: Francesco Di Cocco, P.: Cines – Pittaluga, Rome, Italy, 400 m. – Sotto i tuoi occhi (1931), P.: Fiat, Turin, Italy, 159 m. – Philips Radio (1931), D.: Joris Ivens, P.: Netherlands, 1000 m. – A Bronx Morning (1931), D.: Jay Leyda, P.: New York, Usa, 300 m. – Pacific 231 (1931), D.: Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, P.: Urss, 320 m.

14 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length.

248 

Marcello Seregni

– I° Quadriennale d’Arte Internazionale (1931), P.: Istituto Luce, Rome, Italy, 380 m. – I cantieri dell’Adriatico (1932), D.: Umberto Barbaro, P.: Cines – Pittaluga, Rome, Italy, 280 m. – Lingotto produzione vetture (1932), P.: Fiat, Turin, Italy, 82 m. – Svetlo proniká tmou (1932), D.: Otakar Vávra, P.: Czechoslovakia, 109 m. – Le monde en parade (1932), D.: Eugène Deslaw, P.: Paris, France.15

Cited Filmography The Poetics of Futurist Cinema by Giovanni Lista – Mondo baldoria (1914), D.: Aldo Molinari, P.: Vera Film, Rome, Italy, 900 m. – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Velocità (1930), D.: Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, Pippo Oriani, P.: Futurista Film, Italy, 364 m. – Stramilano (1929), D.: Corrado D’Errico, P.: Istituto Luce, Rome, Italy, 396 m. – Manhatta (1921), D.: Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, P.: New York, Usa, 198 m. – Rien que les heures (1926), D.: Alberto Cavalcanti, P.: Paris, France, 1250 m. – Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), D.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Deutsche Vereins-Film, Germany, 1466 m. – Metropolis (1927), D.: Fritz Lang, P.: UFA, Berlin, Germany, 4174 m. – Ballet mécanique (1924), D.: Fernad Léger, Dudley Murphy, P.: Paris, France, 321 m. – Entr’acte (1924), D.: René Clair, P.: Rolf de Maré, Paris, France, 600 m. – La storia di Lulù (1910), D.: Arrigo Frusta, P.: Società Anonima Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy, 153 m. – Impressioni di vita n. 1. Ritmi di stazione (1933), D.: Corrado D’Errico, P.: Istituto Luce, Rome, Italy, 272 m. – L’Inhumaine (1924), D.: Marcel L’Herbier, P.: Cinégraphic Films L’Herbier, Paris, France, 2500 m. 15 The film is considered lost and there is no information about its length.

Filmogr aphy

249

– Musica – La gazza ladra (1934), D.: Corrado D’Errico, P.: Istituto Luce, Rome, Italy, 82 m. – Fiera di tipi (1934), D.: Leone Antonio Viola, P.: Cineguf, Padua, Italy, 500 m. – Jeux de reflets et de vitesse (1925) D.: Henri Chomette, P.: Paris, France, 191 m. Speed and Dynamism. Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avantgarde by Paolo Bertetto – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Drama v kabare futuristov n. 13 (1913), D.: Vladimir Kas’janov, P.: Toporkov, Winkler, Urss, 431 m. – Zakovannaya Filmoi (1918), D.: Nikandr Turkin, Scr.: Vladimir Mayakovsky, P.: David Burlyuk, Urss. – Dvevnik Glumova (1923), D.: Sergei M. Eisenstein, P.: Proletkult, Urss, 120 m. – Stachka (1925), D.: Sergei M. Eisenstein, P.: Goskino, Urss, 1969 m. Futurism and Film theories. Manifesto of Futurist Cinema and Theories in Italy in the 1910-20s by Valentina Valente – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. Film Aesthetics Without Films by Sabine Schrader – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Mondo baldoria (1914), D.: Aldo Molinari, P.: Vera Film, Rome, Italy, 900 m. – Cabiria (1914), D.: Piero Fosco [Giovanni Pastrone], P.: Itala Film, Turin, 4000 m.

250 

Marcello Seregni

Marinetti’s Tattilismo Revisited: Hand Journeys, Touch Screens and Tactile Cinema in the 21st Century by Wanda Strauven – Touching Reality (2012), D.: Thomas Hirschhorn, P.: Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, 4’ 45”.16 Dance and Futurism in Italian Silent Cinema by Elisa Uffreduzzi – La danza (1912), D.: Arnaldo & Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, Italy, 200 m. – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Thaïs (1916), D. & Sc.:Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Ph.: Luigi Dell’Otti, P.: Novissima Film, Rome, Italy, 1446 m. – La Danse serpentine de Loïe Fuller, different versions product by Edison, Méliès, Lumière, Guy, and others, 1893-1898, between 15 and 25 m. – Effetti di luce (1916). D.: Ercole Luigi Morselli & Ugo Falena, Production: Film d’Arte Italiana. Italy, 715 m. The human in the fetish of the human: cuteness in futurism cinema, literature and visual arts by Giancarlo Carpi – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Fantasia (1940), D. & P.: Walt Disney Company, Usa, 3300 m. – Water Babies – Silly Symphonies(1935), D.: Wilfred Jackson, P.: Walt Disney Company, Usa, 232 m. Futurism and the Cinema in the 1910s: a Reinterpretation Starting from McLuhan by Antonio Saccoccio – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m.

16 Digital audiovisual work: only the duration is shown.

Filmogr aphy

251

Yambo on the moon of Verne and Méliès. From La colonia lunare to Un matrimonio interplanetario by Denis Lotti – Un matrimonio interplanetario (1910), D. & Sc.: Enrico Novelli, P.: Latium Film, Roma, Italy, 295 m. – Le voyage dans la lune (1902), D.: George Méliès, P.: Star Film, France, 257 m. – Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904), D.: George Méliès, P.: Star Film, France, 430 m. – Voyage sur Jupiter (1909), D.: Segundo de Chomón, P.: Pathé, France, 195 m. – Voyage autour d’une étoile (1906), D.: Gaston Velle, P.: Pathé, France, 220 m. – Viaggio in una stella (1906), D.: Gaston Velle, P.: Cines, Rome, Italy, 220m. – Le petit Jules Verne (1907), D.: Gaston Velle, P.: Pathé, France, 120 m. – Au clair de la Lune (Pierrot malheureux)(1903), D.: George Méliès, P.: Star Film, 60 m. – Rêve à la lune (1905), D.: Gaston Velle, Ferdinand Zecca, P.: Pathé, France, 164 m. – Excursion dans la lune (1908), D.: Segundo de Chomón, P.: Pathé, France, 191 m. – Aelita (1924), D.: Jakov Aleksandrovič Protazanov, P.: Mežrabpom-Rus’, Urss, 2841 m. Frau im Mond (1929), D.: Fritz Lang, P.: UFA, Germany, 4356 m. – The Comet (1910), P.: Thomas Edison Inc., Usa, 300 m. – How scroggings found the comet (1910), D.: David Aylot, P.: Cricks & Martin Films, Great Britain, 167 m. – Der Halleysche Komet Kommt! (1910), P.: Erste Bayerische Filmfabrik Ludwig Neumayer, Germany, 85 m. – La paura della cometa (1910), P.: Cines, Rome, Italy, 56 m. – Un matrimonio sulla cometa Halley (1910), P.: Italy.17

17 From the note 92 in Denis Lotti’s essay Yambo on the Moon of Verne and Méliès From La colonia lunare to Un matrimonio interplanetario: There is no trace of this movie in the Italian filmography of silent movies of Bernardini and Martinelli, nor in A. Bernardini, 1991. It might be, instead, a superimposition of Yambo’s film or the translation of a foreign film still un-known to at the date of this writing. The f ilm was shown at the Cinema-teatro Eden in Senigallia in May 1910. This information was obtained by an advertisement reproduced in La voce misena, a. II, n. 19, Senigallia, 14 May 1910, p. 3 (Angelini & Pucci 1981: 233).

252 

Marcello Seregni

An Avant-Garde Heritage. Vita futurista by Rossella Catanese – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Cabiria (1914), D.: Piero Fosco [Giovanni Pastrone], P.: Itala Film, Turin, 4000 m. – Drama v kabare futuristov n. 13 (1913), D.: Vladimir Kas’janov, P.: Toporkov, Winkler, Urss, 431 m. Thaïs: A Different Challenge to the Stars by Lucia Re – Thaïs (1916), D. & Sc.: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Ph.: Luigi Dell’Otti, P.: Novissima Film, Rome, Italy, 1446 m. – Thais (1914), D.: Arthur Maude and Constance Crawley, S.: Arthur Maude, from the novel Thais by Anatole France, P.: Loftus Features and/or Crawley-Maude Features, Usa.18 – Perfido incanto (1917), D.: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Riccardo Cassano, P.: Novissima Film, Rome, Italy, 1389 m. – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Il mio cadavere (1917), D.: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Riccardo Cassano, P.: Novissima Film, Rome, Italy, 1380 m. – Damina di porcellana (1917), D.: Diana Karenne, P.: Novissima Film, Rome, Italy, 1403 m. – Justice de femme! (1917), D.: Diana Karenne, P.: Novissima Film, Rome, Italy, 1815 m. – Assunta Spina (1915), D.: Gustavo Serena, P.: Caesar Film, Rome, Italy, 1690 m. – Cenere (1916), D.: Febo Mari, P.: Ambrosio Film, Turin, Italy, 914 m. – Bolscevismo (1922), D.: Daisy Silvan, P.: Daisy Film, Florence, Italy, 1800 m. – Spellbound (1945), D.: Alfred Hitchcock, P.: Selznick Company, Usa, 3048 m. – Femmina (1918), D.: Augusto Genina, P.: Itala, Turin, Italy, 1835 m. – Passa la ruina (1918), D.: Mario Bonnard, P.: Electa Film, Turin, Italy, 1590 m. – La tigre vendicatrice (1918), D.: Romolo Bacchini, P.: Armenia Film, Milan, Italy, 1611 m. 18 No clear information about the length of the film is available.

Filmogr aphy

253

– La bella salamandra (1917), D.: Amleto Palermi, P.: Cosmopoli, Italy, 1229 m. – La piccola fonte (1917), D.: Roberto Roberti, P.: Caesar Film, Rome, Italy, 1900 m. – Malombra (1917), D.: Carmine Gallone, P.: Cines, Rome, Italy, 1705 m. – Rapsodia satanica (1915), D.: Nino Oxilia, P.: Cines, Rome, Italy, 905 m. – Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), D.: Robert Wiene, P.: Decla, German, 1703 m. – L’Inhumaine (1924), D.: Marcel L’Herbier, P.: Cinégraphic Films L’Herbier, Paris, France, 2500 m. – Aelita (1924), D.: Jakov Aleksandrovič Protazanov, P.: Mežrabpom-Rus’, Urss, 2841 m. – Metropolis (1927), D.: Fritz Lang, P.: UFA, Berlin, Germany, 4174 m. Velocità, a screenplay by F.T. Marinetti: From Futurist simultaneity to live streaming media by Carolina Fernández Castrillo – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Velocità (1930), D.: Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, Pippo Oriani, P.: Futurista Film, Italy, 364 m. – L’Inhumaine (1924), D.: Marcel L’Herbier, P.: Cinégraphic Films L’Herbier, Paris, France, 2500 m. Velocità/Vitesse: Filmed Dramas of Objects and ‘avant-garde integrale’ by Rossella Catanese – Vita futurista (1916), D.: Arnaldo Ginna, P.: Giornale Italia Futurista, Florence, Italy, 990 m. – Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929), D.: Dziga Vertov, P.: Vukfu, Urss, 1889 m. – Entr’acte (1924), D.: René Clair, P.: Rolf de Maré, Paris, France, 600 m. – Ballet mécanique (1924), D.: Fernad Léger, Dudley Murphy, P.: Paris, France, 321 m. – Vormittagsspuk (1927), D.: Hans Richter, P.: Germany, 165 m. – Anémic Cinéma (1926), D.: Marchel Duchamp, P.: France, 190 m. – Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), D.: Walter Ruttmann, P.: Deutsche Vereins-Film, Germany, 1466 m. – Ménilmontant (1926), D.: Dimitri Kirsanoff, P.: Paris, France, 1050 m.

254 

Marcello Seregni

– Ascension d’un Ballon (1897), D.: Georges Méliès, P.: Star Film, France, 20 m. – Gare aereonautiche (1906), D.: Giovanni Vitrotti, P.: Italy, 60 m. – Gare di palloni all’Arena di Milano (1906), P.: Luca Comerio (attribuito), Milan, Italy, 60 m. – Inaugurazione del parco aeronautico di Milano (1906), P.: Italy, 60 m. – Le rétour à la raison (1924), D.: Man Ray, P.: Paris, France, 82 m. From Science to the Marvellous: the Illusion of Movement, Between Chronophotography and Contemporary Cinema by Francesca Veneziano – – – – –

Volto sorpreso al buio (1995), D.: Paolo Gioli, P.: Italy, 169 m. Piccolo film decomposto (1986), D.: Paolo Gioli, P.: Italy, 380 m. Farfallio (1993), D.: Paolo Gioli, P.: Italy, 272 m. Il volto inciso (1984), D.: Paolo Gioli, P.: Italy, 700 m. L’uomo senza macchina da presa, film stenopeico (1973-1981-1989), D.: Paolo Gioli, P.: Italy, 380 m.

About the author Marcello Seregni is an archivist of Archivio Storico del Film at the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana in Milan. He is completing his PhD in Film History. As a researcher and conservator of film material with a specialization in small sizes, he has worked at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin and collaborated with Cineteca Italiana in Milan, Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia in Bologna, and laboratory La Camera Ottica in Gorizia. He has participated as a speaker in several conferences and meetings (Spring School in Gorizia, Early Cinema in Girona, Short Form in Turin).

Index Index of Names Alberini, Filoteo 202n, 225 Almirante-Manzini, Italia 173n Altomare, Libero 104 Antheil, George 24 Apollinaire, Guillaume 168n, 229 Artaud, Antonin 235, 237 Bacchini, Romolo 173n, 252 Bakhtin, Mikhail 153 Balbo, Italo 202, 237 Balilla Pratella, Francesco 42, 185, 226 Balla, Giacomo 13, 23, 26, 58n, 64, 91-92, 115, 120, 122-123, 142, 148n, 153, 156-158, 166, 169, 182, 197, 199, 201, 213n, 226-231, 236 Baudrillard, Jean 75 Belloli, Carlo 159 Benelli, Sem 226 Benjamin, Walter 80, 220, 238 Berghaus, Gunter 10, 98, 202 Bergson, Henri 20, 59-60, 113, 213n, 225 Bernardini, Aldo 134, 137n-138n, 140n, 142n, 251n Bertini, Francesca 166, 170n, 173n Boccioni, Umberto 10, 12, 20, 23-25, 28-29, 39, 43, 47n, 57-61, 65, 97, 103-106, 108-114, 157-158n, 166, 176, 182, 184-186, 199, 213, 215, 226-231 Bonnard, Mario 173n, 232, 245, 252 Borelli, Lyda 166, 173n, 230 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio 13-14, 26, 47-48, 60, 92-95, 98, 149, 151, 163-176, 184, 186, 189, 199, 209, 212-216, 228, 231-233, 242, 244, 250, 252 Bragdon, Claude 50 Braun, Marta 164n, 169, 214 Breton, André 29, 234, 236 Brik, Lilya 37n Brunetta, Gian Piero 133n-134, 165, 197 Buñuel, Luis 236 Burlyuk, David 37, 228, 244, 249 Buzzi, Paolo 104, 141, 204, 226, 230 Calvesi, Maurizio 47 Cangiullo, Francesco 129, 231-233 Canosa, Michele 133n-134n Cappa, Benedetta 187, 197, 234 Carli, Mario 148, 230 Carrà, Carlo Dalmazio 20, 58n, 104, 213n, 226-228 Casavola, Franco 234 Castiglioni, Achille 200 Cavacchioli, Enrico 104, 231 Cavalcanti, Alberto 21, 40, 246, 248

Ceccagnoli, Patrizio 116, 118-119, 125, 200n Chaplin, Charlie 234, 237-238 Chomette, Henri 26, 246, 249 Chiarelli, Luigi 231 Chiti, Remo 93, 148, 150, 152, 157, 169, 231 Chopin, Frédéric 51 Clair, René 22, 26, 234, 245, 248, 253 Cordero, Tina 13, 21, 23, 26, 30-31, 184, 195-198, 201, 236, 242, 248, 253 Corra, Bruno 26, 28-29, 48-50, 63, 89, 148-149, 169, 182, 226, 229-231, 241-242, 250 Craig, Gordon 227 Crali, Tullio 124, 238 Crispolti, Enrico 120 D’Albisola, Tullio 198-199n D’Annunzio, Gabriele 13, 63n, 64, 108, 135n, 155n, 163, 165, 167-168, 173, 225-226, 229, 232 D’Errico, Corrado 21, 24, 26, 242, 248-249 Dalí, Salvador 172, 236 De Chirico, Giorgio 205, 226, 231 De Chomón, Segundo 137-138, 244, 251 de Graffigny, Henry 135 De Medio, Emidio 164 de Saint-Point, Valentine 90, 97-99, 169 Deed, André 155n, 226, 233, 245 Depero, Fortunato 13, 16, 22, 37, 52, 64, 115, 119, 120, 122, 126, 141-142, 153, 197, 205n, 230-232, 234-237 Deslaw, Eugène 196-197n, 246-248 Diaghilev, Sergei 94, 231 Disney, Walt 126-127, 250 Diulgheroff, Nikolay 235 Dottori, Gerardo 197, 203, 234-238 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 235 Duchamp, Marcel 74, 83-84, 227-228, 231, 233, 235, 246, 255 Dudreville, Leonardo 232 Duncan, Isadora 89-90, 95, 97, 99 Duse, Eleonora 170n, 231 Eakins, Thomas 217-218 Eggeling, Viking 233-234, 245 Eisenstein, Sergei 30, 33, 37- 40, 43, 234-236, 239, 249 Ernst, Max 200n, 233, 238 Fabre, Marcel 229, 243-244 Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Maurizio 149 Falena, Ugo 98, 250 Fillìa 121, 197, 203, 233-237 Folgore, Luciano 104, 200, 227, 229-230

256  Fregoli, Leopoldo 25, 27, 46n, 238, 242-243 Frusta, Arrigo 22, 23, 243, 248 Fuller, Loïe 25, 46n, 89-92, 94, 96-97, 158, 242, 250 Funi, Achille 232 Galizky, Tais 92n-93, 98, 166, 175 Gallone, Carmine 173n, 253 Gance, Abel 235 Gaudreault, André 137, 154 Genina, Augusto 173n, 252 Gershwin, George 24 Ginanni, Maria 149 Ginna, Arnaldo 26, 28-29, 48-49, 53-54, 63-65, 89, 91, 147-152, 156-158, 168-169, 226, 231, 238, 242, 248-250, 252-253 Gioli, Paolo 14, 209-210, 216-221, 254 Goncharova, Natalia 37n, 228 Govoni, Corrado 104 Griffith, David Wark 171, 230-231 Grimonprez, Johan 79 Gropius, Walter 232, 235 Grosz, George 231 Gunning, Tom 154, 156 Hirschhorn, Thomas 70-73, 76, 78, 80, 84, 250 Hitchcock, Alfred 172, 252 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 172 Illuminati, Ivo 231, 244 Innamorati, Isabella 65, 148, 150-151 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 90, 97, 99 Jones Susan 91, 97 Jones, William 29 Kandinsky, Wassily 49, 226 Kasjanov, Vladimir 37n Keaton, Buster 235 Kirby, Michael 48n, 157 Kirsanoff, Dimitri 204, 253 Kopalin, Ilya 40, 246 Kozintsev, Grigori 38-39, 233, 245 Kryzhitsky, G.K. (Georgi) 38 Kuleshov, Lev 40, 244 L’Herbier, Marcel 24, 175, 189, 234, 245-246, 248, 253 Lang, Fritz 22, 138n, 175, 235, 248, 251, 253 Lega, Giuseppe 237 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 50 Lista, Giovanni 11, 19, 29, 46, 48, 54, 58n, 60n, 89-90, 92, 94, 96-97, 109, 111n, 113, 120, 123-125, 133n, 137, 150-152, 154, 158, 160, 164n, 166n, 169, 184, 187, 196-199n, 204, 212-213, 216, 241 Larionov, Mikhail 37n, 228 Leblanc, Georgette 24 Leonidoff, Ileana 92-96, 98-99, 171

FUTURIST CINEMA

Léger, Fernand 22, 24, 26, 110, 196n, 199, 234, 246, 248, 253 Magritte, René 73, 200n Malevich, Kazimir 230 Man Ray 199, 204, 233, 235, 254 Marey, Étienne-Jules 14, 25-26, 164n, 209-212, 214-218, 221 Mari, Enzo 200 Mari, Febo 170n, 231, 252 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 9, 12-14, 21, 24, 27-30, 33-42, 50, 52-54, 57-58, 60-65, 69-74, 76, 78-84, 90-92, 97-98, 103-109, 111-112, 115-116, 118-119, 121-126, 140-142, 147-149, 151, 152, 154-158, 165-171, 174-175, 181-190, 195-202, 205n, 209-211, 214-217, 220, 225-239 Marks, Laura 73n, 80, 156 Martina, Guido 13, 21, 23, 26, 30-31, 184, 195-198, 201, 236, 242, 248, 253 Masnata, Pino 182, 232, 237 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 37n, 232, 236, 244 Mazza, Armando 63 McLuhan, Marshall 12, 20, 61, 103, 105-110, 112, 182, 188 Méliès, Georges 13, 133, 137-141, 202n, 225, 242, 250-251, 254 Mendelssohn, Felix 50 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 232-233, 236, 238 Moholy-Nagy, László 40, 247 Molinari, Aldo 21, 60, 229, 248-249 Momus 140n Morasso, Mario 225 Mori, Marisa 237 Morselli, Ercole Luigi 98, 250 Montanaro, Carlo 133n, 137, 141, 242n Munari, Bruno 200, 236-237 Murphy, Dudley 24, 199, 234, 246, 248, 253 Muybridge, Eadweard 25, 217 Nannetti, Neri 148 Napierkowska, Stacia 93, 98-99 Nijinsky, Vaslav 90, 97, 227 Novelli, Enrico 13, 133-138n, 141n, 142, 143, 226, 243, 251 Novelli, Ermete 134n O’Neill, Rose 117, 120, 123 Oppo, Cipriano Efisio 151 Oriani, Pippo 13, 21, 23, 26, 30-31, 58n, 184, 195-198, 201, 204n, 236, 242, 248, 253 Oxilia, Nino 173n, 244, 253 Paladini, Vinicio 22, 233, 235 Palazzeschi, Aldo 21, 63, 103-104, 153, 226-228, 230, 239 Pannaggi, Ivo 22, 233, 235 Papini, Giovanni 109, 114, 225, 230 Pastrone, Giovanni 63n-64, 155n, 229, 249, 252 Pavolini, Corrado 53, 149

257

Index

Picabia, Francis 234 Picasso, Pablo 225, 231, 238 Pirandello, Luigi 167, 173, 225-226, 231, 233-235, 237-238 Piscator, Erwin 232, 236 Ponti, Giò 200 Pound, Ezra 230 Prampolini, Enrico 22, 94-96, 114, 121, 123, 164-166n, 170n-172, 174-175, 197, 230-237 Princip, Gavrilo 229 Protazanov, Yakov 175, 234, 246, 251, 253 Quaranta, Lydia 173n Raimondi, Fernando 237 Ricci, Corrado 120, 132 Richter, Hans 200n, 245-247, 253 Riegl, Alois 72, 80, 85 Roberti, Roberto 173n, 253 Robida, Albert 140n Rosso, Gustavo 118n Rosso, Mino 198-199n Roth, Evan 84-85 Rubino, Antonio 118n-120 Russolo, Luigi 41-42, 58n, 182, 185, 197n, 213n, 227-230, 232 Ruttmann, Walter 21, 40, 51, 204, 235, 237, 245-248, 253 Saint Denis, Ruth 95 Sant’Elia, Antonio 197, 229-231 Savinio, Alberto 205 Schoenberg, Arnold 233 Scriabin, Alexander 48-49 Settimelli, Emilio 28-29, 63, 148-150, 156-158, 169, 182, 229-231 Severini, Gino 20, 58n, 213n, 226-229, 243 Sheeler, Charles 21, 40, 245, 248 Shklovsky, Viktor 231 Sironi, Mario 230-232 Soffici, Ardengo 108-110, 187, 213n, 229-230

Somenzi, Mino 197, 236-237 Sprovieri, Giuseppe 49, 229 Steiner, Rudolf 90 Strand, Paul 21, 40, 245, 248 Strauven, Wanda 12, 51-52, 69, 74-75n, 83n, 147, 150, 152n, 157, 184, 185n Stravinsky, Igor 228, 231 Svevo, Italo 233 Tatlin, Vladimir 232 Tato 13, 115, 123-125, 197, 236 Thayaht 232 Tofano, Sergio 118 Trauberg, Leonid 38-39, 233 Trilluci 150 Tzara, Tristan 232 Ungari, Paolo 48, 58, 232 Uysal, Mehmet Ali 78-79 Van Doesburg, Theo 231 Vasari, Ruggero 234-235, 237-239 Velle, Gaston 137, 251 Venna, Lucio 148, 156 Verdone, Mario 34n, 49, 58n, 91-92, 141, 148n149, 151-152, 158, 164n, 167-169, 196-197n, 241 Verbeek, Caro 76-77, 83-84 Verne, Jules 13, 133, 135, 141, 251 Vertov, Dziga 21, 33, 37, 40-42, 234, 236, 245-247, 253 Viola, Leone Antonio 26, 249 Virilio, Paul 175, 202 Vitrotti, Giovanni 202n, 243, 254 Wiene, Robert 175, 232, 253 Yambo see Novelli, Enrico Yutkevich, Sergei 38 Zecca, Ferdinand 137, 251

Index of Concepts actor 37n, 54, 64, 94, 98, 123, 134n, 139n, 148, 151, 156, 190, 233, 237 actress 98, 164, 166-169, 171, 173, 230 aero-painting 196-197, 201, 204n, 236-237 architecture 9, 50, 109, 121, 186, 197, 213n, 229 attractions 30, 37, 39, 64, 154, 156 audience 10, 34, 64-65, 76, 82-83, 112, 137-139, 147, 151, 155, 158, 176, 187-190, 202n, 232 avant-garde 9-13, 20-21, 26, 30-31, 33-40, 42, 44, 48, 51, 73, 94, 96, 134, 137, 141, 143, 147, 150-153, 158, 160, 165-166, 168n, 170n-172, 175, 181, 195-201, 205, 210, 230

body 22, 24, 53, 62, 69-70, 71, 77, 80-81, 83, 84, 90-91, 96-97, 99, 118n, 122, 123-124, 165n-166, 171, 191, 197, 205, 212-213, 215, 217-220 booed 64 bourgeois 23, 62, 65, 155, 195, 200n, 201 café chantant 155n Cerebrism 28-29, 48, 89-90, 148 children 75, 87, 118, 120, 133, 142 chrono-photography 14, 26, 164n, 209-210, 212-215, 217 class 10, 119, 155

258  classical 83, 85, 92, 95, 109, 134n close-up 57, 166, 199-201 coffee 200-201 comic (strip) 118n, 141n comic(al) 137, 152-157, 165n, Constructivism 40, 233 cuteness 12-13, 115, 117-119, 126 Dada 20, 31, 42, 200n, 213n, 232 dance 12, 25, 27, 46n, 89-99, 104, 109, 125, 140, 153, 156, 158, 166, 168n, 170-171, 175, 199-200, 205, 229, 231-233 decadent 163, 165n-166n, 168n, 171-173 diva 166-170 dynamism 10-12, 25, 31, 33-36, 38-40, 47, 51, 63, 99, 103, 107-108, 111n-112, 141n, 152n, 170, 182, 186-187, 189, 196, 199, 204 electric 21, 41, 77, 90, 94, 97, 104-110, 188, 191, 227-228 Expressionism 20, 44 fascism 33, 179, 234 féerie 137 free-word 11, 28-29, 31, 90, 108, 118, 129, 197-198, 201, 231 geometric 24, 26, 41, 91-92, 94, 96-98, 123, 156, 158, 171, 174, 200-201, 229 gymnastic 97, 148 grotesque 38, 54, 64, 110, 118n, 136n, 153, 171, 200n, 231 haptic 72-73, 80, 85, 155 interactive 65, 73n-74 Kindchenschema 115, 117-120 machine 9, 12, 22, 24, 40-41, 46-47, 62, 73, 91, 106, 133, 141n, 155n, 163-164, 166n, 169, 205, 214, 217-219, 230, 233-234, 236, 238 mechanic 10, 14, 22, 24, 26, 38, 40-42, 46, 59-60, 91, 94, 105-106, 108-110, 112-113, 121-123, 152n, 167, 171, 173, 182, 187-188, 198-199, 201, 213, 217, 229, 233-234, 238 mise-en-scène 165, 170n movie theatre 57, 74, 80, 202 music 9, 24, 26, 38, 42, 48-51, 82, 90, 92-94, 105, 148, 157, 182, 185-187, 226-227, 231-235 pantomime 38, 93-94, 98, 235 parody 38, 64, 153-155, 157-158, 165, 167-168 passéism 34-35, 47, 53, 97, 106-108, 112, 151n, 165, 167n, 185, 190, 215

FUTURIST CINEMA

photodynamism 14, 48, 164n, 167, 172, 174, 186, 212-214, 228 photography 24-25, 47n, 60, 62, 105-106, 108-109, 11, 113, 115, 123-124, 169, 175, 210, 212-214, 217 physiology 72n poetry 19, 36, 41, 51, 64, 97, 104, 108, 165n, 185, 197, 202, 210, 225-225, 234, 236 poly-expressive(ness) 9, 11, 186 positivism 59, 164n poster 70n, 147, 150-151 propaganda 107, 170, 174 religion 35, 125, 168, 184, 231 renewal 89-90, 104, 107, 185-186, 210 rhythm 24-26, 30, 34-36, 39-41, 46, 51, 64, 76, 82, 90-92, 97, 182, 185, 214, 217 science-fiction 134-135, 137-138n, 140, 190 sensory 37, 69, 75, 77, 80, 83n, 84, 121, 155 shock 10, 34, 36-37, 40, 118 society 9-10, 62, 65, 70, 155, 195 spectatorship 13, 163, 166, 169-170, 176 stardom 151, 176 stop-motion 84n, 200 Surrealism 20, 31, 117, 123, 234, 236 symbolism 36, 94, 165n synaesthesia 148, 155 tattilismo 12, 69-70, 73-74, 233 technology 9-10, 13, 24, 57, 61, 73, 75, 78, 81, 82, 105-106, 110, 163, 171-173, 175, 182, 188, 190, 198, 201, 206, 213, 216, 218 telegraph 61, 103-106, 108, 141, 185, 191, 210 temporality 212, 214, 216 theatre 24, 28-29, 35, 37-38, 46, 48-49, 51-53, 63-65, 70n, 80, 82, 91, 111, 123, 134n, 136n-137, 147, 149n, 150-152n, 158, 165n, 169-170, 188, 190, 199, 202n, 225-237 Theosophy 90, 171-172 typographic 108, 141, 197, 230 universal 112, 122, 152, 157, 182, 210, 227 utopia 40, 124-125, 151, 153, 158 vaudeville 25, 29, 46n, 154-155n visual 11-13, 19, 21, 25-26, 28-30, 36, 39-43, 46, 48, 51, 72, 80, 84, 109, 117-118, 120, 138, 141n, 148, 153-155, 163-165, 173, 175, 176, 187-188, 198-199, 210, 217, 234 words-in-freedom 9, 28, 104, 107, 116, 142, 185-187 world war 10, 52, 152-153, 238



Film Culture in Transition

General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.) Double Trouble: Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 025 9 Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk (eds.) Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 054 9 Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.) Film and the First World War, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 064 8 Warren Buckland (ed.) The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, 1995 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 131 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 170 6 Egil Törnqvist Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 137 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 171 3 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 172 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 183 6 Thomas Elsaesser Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 059 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 184 3 Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, 1998 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 282 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 312 0 Siegfried Zielinski Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 313 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 303 8

Kees Bakker (ed.) Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 389 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 425 7 Egil Törnqvist Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 350 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 371 7 Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.) The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000, 2000 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 455 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 456 1 Patricia Pisters and Catherine M. Lord (eds.) Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, 2001 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 472 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 473 8 William van der Heide Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures, 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 519 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 580 3 Bernadette Kester Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919-1933), 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 597 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 598 8 Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.) Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 494 3 Ivo Blom Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 463 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 570 4 Alastair Phillips City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 634 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 633 6

Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.) The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 631 2; isbn hardcover 978 905356 493 6 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 635 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 636 7 Kristin Thompson Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 708 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 709 8 Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.) Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 768 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 769 2 Thomas Elsaesser European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 594 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 602 2 Michael Walker Hitchcock’s Motifs, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 772 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 773 9 Nanna Verhoeff The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 831 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 832 3 Anat Zanger Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 784 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 785 2 Wanda Strauven The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 944 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 945 0

Malte Hagener Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 960 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 961 0 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 984 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 980 1 Jan Simons Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 991 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 979 5 Marijke de Valck Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 192 8; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 216 1 Asbjørn Grønstad Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema, 2008 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 010 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 030 7 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 2009 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 013 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 012 3 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 083 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 084 0 Pasi Väliaho Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 140 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 141 0 Pietsie Feenstra New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies under Franco, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 304 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 303 2

Eivind Røssaak (ed.) Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 212 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 213 4 Tara Forrest Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 272 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 273 8 Belén Vidal Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 282 0 Bo Florin Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood 1923-1930, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 504 3 Erika Balsom Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 471 8 Gilles Mouëllic Improvising Cinema, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 4551 7 Christian Jungen Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 566 1 Michael Cowan Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film ‒ Advertising ‒ Modernity, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 585 2 Temenuga Trifonova Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 632 3

Christine N. Brinckmann Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 656 9 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 666 8 Volker Pantenburg Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 891 4 Paul Cuff A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoléon, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 734 4 Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (eds.) Melodrama After the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 673 6 Steve Choe Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 638 5 Melis Behlil Hollywood is Everywhere: Global Directors in the Blockbuster Era, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 739 9 Thomas Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, 2016 isbn 978 94 6298 057 0 Michael Walker Modern Ghost Melodramas: ‘What Lies Beneath’, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 016 7

Steffen Hven Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 077 8 Alexandra Seibel Visions of Vienna: Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 189 8 Rossella Catanese Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film, 2018 isbn 978 90 8964 752 8