CLASS PRESENTATION: FUTURISM

LE FUTURISM

PART1: SLIDE SHOW
AND
EXCERPT FROM THE MANIFESTO OF THE FUTURIST PAINTER

(Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini)

TO THE YOUNG ARTISTS OF ITALY!
1. Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.
2. Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation.
3. Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.
4. Bear bravely and proudly the smear of “madness” with which they try to gag all innovators.
5. Regard art critics as useless and dangerous.
6. Rebel against the tyranny of words: “Harmony” and “good taste” and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin...
7. Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.
8. Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.

PART2: VIDEO (FUTURISM)

PART3: FUTURIST PERFORMANCE:
REMO CHITI and EMILIO SETTIMELLI
VAGRANT MADMEN/ PAZZI GIROVAGHI

PART4: WEBSITE: THE FUTURISTIC THEATRE
* THE ORIGINS OF FUTURISM
* THE FUTURISTIC SYNTHETIC THEATRE
* FUTURIST SCENOGRAPHY
* THE FUTURIST ACTOR
* RUSSOLO AND THE ART OF NOISE
* Conclusion: Great Launch...

the origins of futurism

Futurism was launched in Italy when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) on Feb 20, 1909 published his Futurist Manifesto in an article Marinetti was able to secure on front-page of Le Figaro - then Europe’s largest daily circulating newspaper, based in Paris. The manifesto announced a new generation of artists who would abolish the conventions established in all major art and media, and would incorporate as much new modern multimedia as was available at the time. In a way, this caused Futurism to be the first mass media pop-culture movement supported by expensive but effective multimedia marketing through close affiliations with major media controllers, random demonstrations and performances, whistle-stop tours, a constant stream of propaganda for the members and abuse for the detractors - the very means used by today’s presidential election campaigns. The medium was the message - where whatever you have to say, how you say it is as important as what you say, and it worked! The manifesto declaring innovations by a mysterious “WE” that Marinetti used to describe his movement instantly attracted an allegiance of followers - ready formed from his full-page advertisement. His followers used many of the same techniques to continute to build the movement’s momentum
Futurism as Marinetti saw it was grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science.. The futurists turned their backs on the sheltered life of the cultureed intellectual. They ridiculed both the men of fossilized learning and the rejection of society created by complete bohemian withdrawl.
Instead, like the Dadaists and Russian Constructivists later, they opted for the public arena and demanded INSTANT RECTION. whether this reaction was favourable or not was secondary, but, essentially, the public must be involved in the performance and not just passive and submissive sitting in the audience. “We place the spectator at the centre of the picture” - declared the futurist painters. And the expectation was that the spectator would not just sit there, but hit back.
The publicity machines that existed were accented with new techniques of informational saturation - manifestos were published ceaselessly, and sent all over the world - Marinetti was an expert manipulator ofthe media: the coverate internationally that he secured for Futurism, largely with his own con-like skills, connections, and plentiful funds.
Painters, Musicians, Poets, craftsmen and atrists alike published a rash of manifestos in their respective fields of work, all bearing the signs of editing by Marinetti himself.

THE FUTURISTIC SYNTHETIC THEATRE:

Regarding books and reviews as unnecessary, FilippoTommaso Marinetti thought of theatre as 'the only way to inspire Italy with a warlike spirit.' The theatre he had in mind was suppose to move beyond the dogmatic, traditional theatre with its conventional structure and logic into a 'Futuristic Theatre' that would cut into the superficial cultural conventions like a machine of war . This Futuristic theatre would present itself in a form that was synthetic (very brief), atechnical (disregarding the formal principles of the Greek theatre), dynamic and stimultaneous (improvisational and spontaneous), and autonomous, alogical and unreal. The theatre would disregard rational structure and forms of theatrical realism, taking elements of reality and reassembling them according to whim and impulse.

The Futurist theatre was meant to generate an excitement in its audience that would bring it out of the torpor and monotony of its everyday life. Through the original and the unexpected the audience would be drawn through an elusive and unpredictable sequence of sensations and experiences.

PAINTING
+ SCULPTURE
+ PLASTIC DYNAMISM
+ WORDS-IN-FREEDOM
+ COMPOSED NOISE [INTONARUMORI]
+ ARCHITECTURE .
SYNTHETIC THEATRE (Dixon)

FUTURIST SCENOGRAPHY

Addressing their fellow scenographers as "idiots" the futurists argued that realist conventions in stage design only served to reinforce the dull palor of everyday life. The emotional intensity of the theatrical experience was blunted by the painted stage and reality could only be released through the abstract forms in which its reality was carried.
The Futurist innovation was to abolish the painted backdrop, the illuminated stage and realist props and replace them with a electro-mechanistic architecture and an "illuminating stage," lit from within with coloured light that expressed the psychic content of each scene, refracted through an arrray reflectors and coloured glass.

THE FUTURIST ACTOR:

The actor as a personification or as a vehicle to express emotions was regarded by the Futurists as an "absurd compromise." The function of personification could be more effectively accomplished through the use of mechanical devices, sounds, lighting and movement. The human actor was to be abolished and the new actor of the future would "celebrate the machine" (Kozintosov) through his or her movements and costumes.

RUSSOLO AND THE ART OF NOISE

Inspired by Marinetti's description of the Orchestra of the great battle (Zang Tumb Tumb), Russolo wrote the Manifesto of the Art of Noise. He then went on and invented the 'Futuristic Orchestra': Rectangular wooden boxes with funnel-shaped amplifiers representing instruments that produced a variety of noises, set mechanically into motion.

Within the 'Futurist Orchestra' there are six families of 'Noise Sounds':
1: Roars, Thunders, Explosions, Bursts, Crashes, Booms
2: Whistles, Hisses, Puffs
3: Whispers, Murmurs, Grumbles, Buzzes, Bubblings
4: Screeches, Creaks, Rustles, Hums, Crackles, Rubs
5: Percussion noises using: metal, wood, skin, rock, terra-cotta, etc.
6: Voices of animals and humans: Shouts, Shrieks, Moans, Yells, Howls, Laughs, Groans, Sobs

Others a mere combinations or associations of these.

Russolo in the Manifesto of the Art of Noise celebrated the noise of the age of the machine. Ancient life might have been about silence but the modern age was about the intensity, the variability and the duration of noise. A walk in any modern city was the experience of a symphony of noise from motors, trains, factories, machines of all sorts, slamming doors, crowds, and the flapping of flags. The noise of modern war only brought the symphony of industrial civilization to a crescendo.

Conclusion: Great launch, but no Follow-Through

The trouble with many of these manifestos is that they promised fantastic things that were not necessarily actually true. The articles on the Art of Noises, for example details paintings that are able to emit sounds as they perform the existence of being a painting. Likewise, their propositions were extreme in their recommendations to drama and literature. The full meaning of Hamlet can not be conveyed in two pages of text, a painting, and some mechanical sounds, any more than a propagandist, loudmouthed manifesto in a newspaper column can give true purpose to a generation of artists. In all, the movement set off many others in its innovative use of the media, but in itself was not really successful - due to its impracticality.
The Futurist movement was politically tied to Benitio Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Party, as Marinetti was sympathetic to the new fascist system of goverment proposed, and because the movement in intself glorified the machine of war and technology as the new saviour, was reciprocated with sympathy by Mussolini, and was the official cultural aspect of the Fascist party from when it began to form and was first defeated in 1918, to when it finally took hold in the 1930s. Almost immediatley after the Party came to power however, the creators and proponents realized what their sponsors intended to do with their power, began to rebel, and it appears they wre silenced by Mussolini, and the movement was in effect, disassembled by the Party.
However, the movement launched successfully in that everyone in iItaly, and much of Europe had heard of Futurism by 1912-4. Marinetti realized that the theatre was Italy’s most popular form of entertainment and a far more effective way of reaching the masses than the bookshops and news kiosks. As a result, his most effective and characteristic manifestation of all was the inventuion of the Futurist Evening (serata futurista). This was a combination of theatre, concert, political assembly, discussion, and riot. The theatre s of cities up and down Italy were regular venues for these events. The polie werre always ont the alert for through ble for the hours before the Evening began, thd the theatre was usually heavily surrounded by reinforcements, creating the desired tone of tension. The theatre was always packed an houre before curtain, with insults and vegetables apparently already flying. The evening would begin with Marinetti and his friends, through the words of his poets, hurling insults at the audience of the host city and its political and illustrious figures. The evening would continue, showing Futurist paintings, the declamation of manifestos, the groaning and scraping of Noise Intoners, the gems of Futurist Variety Theatre invented by Luigi Rusollo, and more insults. Marinetti was a master of picking up signs of aggression and using them to his own advantage.
The Futurists felt disgust for contemporary theatre because “it oscillates stupidly between historical reconstruction and the pohographic reproduction of our dayo-to day life - slow, analytical, and diluted theatre, worthy of originating in the age of oil lamps”. Authors, actors and technicias were encourage to use all media available to achive the theatrical sense of wonder, partially through the use of every imaginable kind of modern mechanical marvel - While often nonsensical, to be concise and fast was the ultimate goal: “It’s stupid to write a hundred pages when one would be sufficient.


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