Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 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: Fernando Maramai
- Filmography
- Index
- Film Culture in Transition
1 - Introduction: The Poetics of Futurist Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- 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: Fernando Maramai
- Filmography
- Index
- Film Culture in Transition
Summary
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 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.
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- Futurist CinemaStudies on Italian Avant-garde Film, pp. 19 - 32Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017