Futurism: The Revolutionary Art Movement and Its Impact on European Culture, Appunti di Storia Angloamericana

Scarica Futurism: The Revolutionary Art Movement and Its Impact on European Culture e più Appunti in PDF di Storia Angloamericana solo su Docsity! Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published in 1909 “The founding and the Manifesto of Futurism” on the front page of the Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro. In the following decades, Futurism became a paradigm for countless movements to come, some embodying the most vital currents among the 20 th century arts (Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism). Futurism became the focal point for a vast debate that stretched across Europe and the United States, spanned the spectrum of the arts, including literature, music, the visual arts, architecture, drama, photography, film, dance, even fashion. Futurism, in short, had irreversibly forged a fateful link between a theory of modernity and the project of the avant-garde. F.T. Marinetti was born in 1876 in Alexandria. After launching Futurism with his manifesto in 1909, Marinetti gave a series of lectures in which he further explained his ideas, including one delivered in London in December 1910. The same year he was approached by a group of young painters in Milan who wished to join the “movement”, which at this point consisted of himself alone. Marinetti decided to launch them on a colossal scale. They would have a show that would premiere in Paris, then tour the major capitals of Europe: first London, then Berlin, then other cities. When the exhibition opened in early 1912, it provoked furious debate. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 effectively put an end to Futurism’s influence in England. But its afterlife in Italy was quite another matter. From the moment that war broke out, Marinetti became a strident advocate of Italian intervention. In 1917 Marinetti also had his first meeting with a dissident Socialist who had earlier broken with the Socialist party over the question of Italy’s potential intervention in the war, Benito Mussolini. In 1918, accompanied by Marinetti, he held the inaugural meeting of the Fascist Party in Milan, the city where he had lived for many years as editor of the Socialist newspaper Avanti. Only four years later, Mussolini would be named prime minister in Italy, in October 1922. Marinetti, paradoxically, had left the party already in 1920, angered by its refusal to adopt a sufficiently anticlerical position as part of its platform. In the years that followed, from 1922 until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Marinetti and the Futurists would occupy a strange, uneasy place within Fascist culture. The Futurist style especially favored for projects in the visual arts and design, which involved new technologies, aviation, or other indices of modernity. At the same time, they were distrusted by many leaders within the Fascist regie, viewed as potential dissidents. When Italy formally allied itself with Nazi Germany in 1936, anti-Semitism was quickly adopted as a prominent feature of government policy. Though Marinetti and others protested in private, the Futurists did not take a concerted public stance against the new government policies and for the most part acquiesced in their implementation. Technical Manifest of Futurist Literature 1. it is imperative to destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random, just as they are born. 2. it is imperative to use verbs in the infinitive, so that the verb can be elastically adapted to the noun and not be subordinated to the I of the writer who observes or imagines. Only the infinitive can give a sense of the continuity of life and the elasticity of the intuition that perceives it. 3. adjectives must be abolished. 4. adverbs must be abolished. 5. every noun must have its double, which is to say, every noun must be immediately followed by another noun, with no conjunction between them, to which it is related by analogy. It is imperative to suppress words such as like, as, so, similar to. Better yet, to merge the object directly into the image which it evokes. 6. abolish all punctuation. With adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions having been suppressed, naturally punctuation is also annihilated within the variable continuity of a living style that creates itself, without the absurd pauses of commas and periods. To accentuate certain movements and indicate their directions, mathematical signs will be used, along with musical notations. 11. destroy the “I” in literature: that is, all psychology. Three elements which literature has hitherto overlooked must now become prominent in it: 1. noise (a manifestation of the dynamism of objects); 2. weight (the capacity for flight in objects); 3. smell (the capacity of objects to disperse themselves). Destruction of Syntax-Wireless Imagination-Words-in-Freedom Futurism is based on the complete renewal of human sensibility which has been brought about as an effect of science’s great discoveries. 1. acceleration of life, which today has a rapid rhythm. Physical, intellectual, and emotional equilibrium on the cord of velocity stretched between contradictory magnetisms. Multiple and simultaneous awarenesses within the same individual. 2. dread of whatever is old and already known. Love of the new, the unexpected. 3. dread of quiet living, love of danger and an attitude of daily heroism. 5. human desires and ambitious multiplying and going beyond all limits. 6. an exact knowledge of everything inaccessible and unrealizable in each person. 7. semi-equality of man and woman, and less inequality in their social rights. 8. contempt for love (sentimentalism or lechery) produced by greater freedom and erotic ease among women and by universal exaggeration of female luxury. Let me explain: today women love luxury more than love. 10. modification of the conception of war, which has become the sanguinary and necessary test of the strength of a people. 11. the passion, art, idealism of Business. New financial sensibility. 15. new sense of the world. Men have successively conquered a sense of the house, the neighbourhood in which they live, the city, the region, the continent. Today man possesses a sense of the world; he has only a modest 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. 16. disgust for the curving line, the spiral. Love for the straight line and the tunnel. Dread of slowness, Love of speed, abbreviation. Death of free verse Free verse once had countless regions for existing, but it is now destined to be replaced by words-in- freedom. The wireless imagination By wireless imagination, I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with disconnected words, and without the connecting syntactical wires and without punctuation. Death of the literary I To rid ourselves of this obsessive I, we must abandon the habit of humanizing nature, attributing human preoccupations and emotions to animals, plants, waters, stones and clouds. Instead we should express the infinite smallness that surrounds us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms. The verb in the infinitive I maintain, however, that the verb in the infinitive is indispensable to a violent and dynamic lyricism, for the infinitive is round like a wheel. With the verb in the infinitive is round and mobile as a wheel, the other moods and tenses of the verb are triangular, square, or oval.