FILM

CULTURE
IN TRANSITION

Futurist
Cinema
studies on italian avant- garde film
EDITED BY
rossella catanese
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
The Poetics of Futurist Cinema
Giovanni Lista

2. Speed and Dynamism 33

Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avant-garde
Paolo Bertetto

3. Futurism and Film Theories 45

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

4. Film Aesthetics Without Films 57

Sabine Schrader

5. Marinetti’s Tattilismo Revisited 69

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

6. Dance and Futurism in Italian Silent Cinema 89

Elisa Uffreduzzi

7. Futurism and cinema in the 1910s 103

A reinterpretation starting from McLuhan
Antonio Saccoccio

8. The Human in the Fetish of the Human 115

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

From La colonia lunare to Un matrimonio interplanetario
Denis Lotti

10. An Avant-Garde Heritage 147

Vita futurista
Rossella Catanese

11. Thaïs 163

A Different Challenge to the Stars
Lucia Re

12. Velocità, a Screenplay by F.T. Marinetti 181

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 209

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

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
8 FUTURIST CINEMA

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 Cinema1

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 words-
in-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 moderni-
zation: 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: Futur-
ism 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.

10  Rossell a Catanese

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 innova-
tions, 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, com-
bined 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 techno-
logical 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
Preface 11

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 ap-
proaches, 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, theo-
rizing 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
12  Rossell a Catanese

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 Jour-
neys, 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,
Preface 13

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 personi-
fication 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, of-
fers 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 ‘avant-
garde 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.
14  Rossell a Catanese

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 contem-
porary 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.
Preface 15

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.
16  Rossell a Catanese

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 Cinema1

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 expres-
sion 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, Futur-
ist 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.

20  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 percep-
tion. 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 cin-
ematographically 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.
Introduc tion 21

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 particu-
lar, 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
22  Giovanni Lista

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 mo-
dernity 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 im-
age 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.
Introduc tion 23

The destitution of the human figure is completed by the ‘drama of ob-

jects’, 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
24  Giovanni Lista

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 accep-
tation 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 c­ inematography 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 meto-
nymic 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,
Introduc tion 25

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 synes-
thetic expression of colour and shape, to Boccioni’s poetics of ‘moods’,
26  Giovanni Lista

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 Futur-
ism, 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
Introduc tion 27

dramas’, but also of ‘dramas of disproportion’ and of ‘unreal reconstruc-

tions’. 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 sig-
nifier, 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 experi-
ence. 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’
28  Giovanni Lista

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 rein-
terpreted 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 deform-
ing 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 visual-
ity 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
Introduc tion 29

itself to the heterogeneity of the urban scene, liberator of energy, the the-
atrical 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 experi-
ment 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 un-
determined 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 combina-
tion 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.
30  Giovanni Lista

Short montage and ‘cinematographic cinema’

Shortly after the realization of Vita futurista, Marinetti creates the sub-
ject 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 pro-
nounced 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 discus-
sion 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 micro-
forms, 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 ‘mechani-
cal effects’ (Lista 2009), is finally claimed by the film Velocità, realized in
1930 by Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, and Pippo Oriani, the most mature
Introduc tion 31

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 expres-
sion 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 fragmenta-
tion 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 autono-
mous 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 rar-
ing Futurist imaginary, which ranges from stream of consciousness to the
kaleidoscopic scenery of the metropolis in action.
32  Giovanni Lista

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.