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
2 - Speed and Dynamism: Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avant-garde
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 essay analyses the influence of Italian Futurism on Soviet avantgarde cinema: a process often disavowed or overlooked due to historical misinformation or ideological reasons. For many progressive scholars, it was difficult to admit the decisive influence of Italian Futurism – which converges into Fascism – on revolutionary Soviet cinema. Instead, the research developed here – thanks to a comparative analysis of the Futurist manifestos and of the Soviet avant-garde theoretical writings, as well as of the directors’ compositional choices – makes clearly detectable the influence of Marinetti and his movement on the latters’ theories and poetics.
Some concepts of Italian Futurism's worldview and aesthetics play a fundamental role in the theory and experience of Soviet avant-garde cinema. For revolutionary artists, the two crucial ideas of Futurist poetics are speed and power: in a word, dynamism. These ideas and configurations activate in the cultural and artistic context a highly innovative and particularly aggressive symbolic trend against tradition.
Keywords: Avant-garde, Soviet Cinema, Marinetti, Eisenstein, Vertov,Feks
The influence of Italian Futurism on the cinematographic avant-gardes is decidedly stronger in Russia, and was, above all, stronger in the Soviet Union, than in Western Europe. The two fundamental pillars of the Futurist poetics, which impress young artists and new film-makers, are speed and power: in one word, dynamism. These ideas and configurations present themselves as a symbolic movement with strong innovative and mouldbreaking ambitions. Those film-makers who want to side against the old world (political, social, imaginary, and so on) choose the key notions of Italian Futurism, which summarize the will of change and the affirmation of modernity as absolute value.
Despite the ideological discrepancies, the Soviet revolutionary cinema absorbs all the crucial components of the Futurist poetics and of Marinetti, because it firstly accepts the symbolic form of Futurism, its break with the past and the assertion of what is new, therefore the revolutionary process. The plan of Italian Futurism as well as Soviet avant-garde is that of destroying the past to conjure modernity. Many of those determinations that characterize the Futurist change and innovation can be attributed to the Soviet avant-garde because they reflect a similar destructive movement, marked by aggressiveness and by the will to change everything. However, the objectives they pursue are deeply different.
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- Information
- Futurist CinemaStudies on Italian Avant-garde Film, pp. 33 - 44Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017