Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film (edited collection) (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Interdisciplinarity: Futurist cinema as metamedium
In Adamowicz, E. y Storchi, S. (eds.): Back to the Futurists. The Avant-Garde And Its Legacy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719090530, 2013
One of the most innovative artistic expressions at the beginning of the twentieth century came from the Futurist desire of provocation and rupture with traditions. In the centenary of the foundation of Italian Futurism (2009) it would be interesting to reflect on their contribution in terms of interdisciplinarity. The faith in progress spurred these artists on to incorporate new media to achieve a total artwork. In this paper, I am going to explore cinema’s contribution as metamedium to understand the interconnections between old and new art forms, in order to create a common language suitable to the new times. From a “cinemacentrist” perspective, this research will focus on the relationships established between art, literature and theatre with the new medium to achieve a total spectacle. It would be useful to review the main Futurist manifestos, articles and manuscripts with advanced postulates by theoreticians such as Mario Verdone, Michael Kirby or Giovanni Lista, among others. It could also be a good chance to suggest a discussion on how the futurist proposal contributed to blur the multidisciplinary borders in Europe at the beginning of the past century.
Futurismo: Linking Past and Present through an Artistic Aesthetic
Theatre Topics
Ah Futurismo" shouts the recorded voice of F. T. Marinetti as the performers' stark, uplifted gestures arrest the descending light at the conclusion of Futurismo, a dance theatre production at Santa Clara University collaboratively created in 2013 by theatre artist Jeffrey Bracco and choreographer David Popalisky. This collaboration grew out of a mutual interest in the ideas, strategies, and values articulated in the pre-World War I foundational Futurist manifestos by F. T. Marinetti and how he and his collaborators implemented them through performance. Recognizing that the early Italian Futurists' embrace of speed through glorification of machines resonates with our present reliance upon technological innovation, we chose to use performance to critically investigate our relationship with speed and technology in the twenty-first century. This essay considers the implications for undergraduate students and ourselves as teaching artists of the creative choices employed in Futurismo. Our process, with its strengths and challenges, may prove useful for other artist-educators working in academic settings. What follows is a rationale for why the early avant-garde period of Futurism prior to World War I was most relevant to Futurismo's creation and thematic development. Next, we discuss how early Italian Futurist strategies and specific historical artifacts influenced the conceptualization of
The Italian Futurist movement has come back into vogue with its centenary in 2009 and the landmark exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that ran through 2014. The cultural influence of this movement on the modern era is undisputed, whether we look at paintings, literature, poetry, sculpture, architecture, music, or advertising. It is also undisputed that this avant-garde movement was deeply involved in the politics of both liberal and Fascist Italy. Futurist politics were characterized by a pronounced nationalism and imperialism, and were known for the mantra that war was the 'world's only hygiene' .
Futurist Conditions: Imagining Time in Italian Futurism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
ISBN 9781501343124, 2020
Mather's scholarship demonstrates it was the camera--not the engine--that was the key invention against which many futurist ideas and practices were measured. Overturning some misconceptions about Italian futurism's interest in the disruptive and destructive effects of technology, _Futurist Conditions_ argues that the formal and conceptual approaches by futurist visual artists reoriented the possibly dehumanizing effects of mechanized imagery toward more humanizing and spiritual aims. Through its sustained analysis of the artworks and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and the Bragaglia brothers, dating to the first decade after the movement's founding in 1909, Mather's account of their obsession with motion pivots around a 1913 debate on the role of photography among more traditional artistic mediums, a debate culminating in the expulsion of the Bragaglias, but one that also prompted productive responses by other futurist artists to world-changing social, political, and economic conditions.
The Effects of Futurism on Science Fiction Cinema
irbdirekt.de
In this study, the history and the definition of futurism is mentioned and as the concepts that the futurism is mostly concerned with, outer-history, machine, speed and dynamism is defined to explain the effects of Futurism on science-fiction cinema. Futurist ...
The Use of Audio-visual Media in Italian Futurist Theatre
Theater und Medien / Theatre and the Media, 2008
The nineteenth century was a period of great changes in the physical and mental landscapes of Europe. A large number of new technologies and inventions, such as electric light, wireless telegraphy, motorcars, cinema, telephones etc., made a profound impact on the everyday life of most citizens in the industrialized world. The revolutionized means of transportation and the new modes of communication shook up people's conception of a linear time-space continuum and altered their cognitive mapping of the world. By the 1880s, there was agreement amongst intellectuals and the common population that European society had undergone a profound transformation and that a truly modern civilization had come into existence. Artists and writers ushered in an extensive debate, on how this ›modern‹ world could be adequately reflected in their creations. Within a decade, Europe was rife with new schools and movements that rallied behind Rimbaud's call, »Il faut être absolument moderne« (»One has to be absolutely modern«) (Rimbaud: 116). One of them was Futurism, founded in 1909 by the Italian poet and literary manager Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. It made a major contribution to twentiethcentury avant-garde creativity through the ways in which it applied the most recent technological inventions to the fields of art and literature. Marinetti's articles, interviews and manifestos indicated that he took a great interest in the advances of science and technology, but also the underlying philosophical and aesthetic implications of the changing conceptions of energy, matter, time and space etc. »Futurism is based on the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries made by science. Anyone who today uses the telegraph, the telephone, and the gramophone, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the airship, the airplane, the film theatre, the great daily newspaper (which synthesizes the daily events of the whole world), fails to recognize that these different forms of communication, of transport and information, have a far-reaching effect on their psyche« (Marinetti 2006: 120).
2016
This article aims to reflect on the legacy of Italian Futurism in 20th-century art and culture, as well as to discuss over how aesthetics and futuristic ideology permeate the post-modern and globalized scenario of the present days. In seeking to demonstrate how the futuristic experience contributed to the development of a poetics of contemporary art, we intend to launch a look at Futurism as an aesthetic of time, a motion turned into a kind of archetype of future artistic experiences.
If Arte Povera was Pop: Artists' and Experimental Cinema in Italy 1960s-70s
Tate Modern, 23-25 October 2015. As I write, the colourful and exuberant Pop art Exhibition at Tate Modern in London, The EY Exhibition. The World Goes Pop, is thriving and embracing the eclectic artistic and cultural expressions of protest against the mass commodification of art that took place across the globe in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Within this buzzing landscape, Tate Modern also curated a wonderful program of Italian films which were screened from 23 to 25 October 2015. This brief season was entitled “If Arte Povera was Pop: Artists’ and Experimental Cinema in Italy 1960s-70s”, which I could not miss as Arte Povera and Italian experimental films form part of my ongoing research into artists’ cinema. More specifically, it was the “If” in the exhibition title that I found particularly intriguing, suggesting as it does the cross-fertilisation of two different artistic phenomena: Pop art, with its reliance on quotation, and Arte Povera, with its aesthetic of appropriation. One needed to think about both not as opposite binaries, but as two sides of the same coin: by “stretching” the boundaries of Pop art’s conflation of mass culture tropes on one side, one could meet Arte Povera’s historical materialism in consumer culture on the other.
Futurism and Propaganda: Manifestos, Theatres, and Magazines
My dissertation argues that Italian Futurism, in twentieth century Europe, was able to gain widespread recognition because it modelled its methods of diffusion after the parliamentary styled campaigns of social movements. Futurism not only introduced a new style of art but also transformed the way in which art was promoted, politicized, and used as a tool for propaganda. Through an analysis of the Futurist communicative strategies - in particular the use of the manifesto, theatrical space, and literary magazines - the dissertation shows how Marinetti and the Futurists were able to bring together different methods of collective action with symbolic acts of self-representation. These elements coalesced into the Futurist campaign, which allowed the movement to spread throughout the world.