The Use of Audio-visual Media in Italian Futurist Theatre (original) (raw)

2008, Theater und Medien / Theatre and the Media

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).