RADIA A Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto by Pino Masnata

in The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, 2012

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' .

This essay summarizes the main features of Futurist books, by accounting for their complex originality. Since the early stages of their careers, Futurists employed books as a privileged means of experimentation both in terms of graphics and contents. Authors like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Francesco Cangiullo, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero and Ardengo Soffici explored the visual, graphic and onomatopoeic possibilities of written words in parolibere. These authors put into practice a typographic revolution, which aimed to subvert the usual order within a page, through the use of different characters and colours. In particular, Marinetti announced the birth of this peculiar expressive form in his manifests and set the grounds for a renewal of written expression.

2014

In January 1924 the latest incarnation of Futurist music theatre, Il nuovo teatro futurista, began a twenty-eight city tour of the peninsula. The Venice stopover, at the Teatro Goldoni on January 25, prompted a flurry of media activity. Press reports, manifestos and one-off periodicals advertised and then discussed the performance. Central to this Futurist-controlled discourse was the notion of la musica dell’avvenire, one that built on recent technological developments to provide a way out of a perceived crisis of musical language. The Futurists positioned themselves as inhabiting a moment of transition: soothsayers of a musical future that no one else could imagine. In this article I argue that these three aspects—Futurism as a media enterprise, la musica dell’avvenire and cultural crisis—share a common impulse, as offshoots of contemporary concerns with media and technology, culture and posterity, and language and crisis, all of which had a pervasive import in postwar Italian culture. I suggest that the Futurists sought to control media outlets, so as to take charge amid a culture of crisis. Yet in the process, their rhetoric of extremes saw a disavowal of all they were most reliant on—something that in the end proved their undoing. In particular, their futurology was contradicted by a reliance on older media, genres and sounds, which revealed them to be an embodiment of the crisis from which they were trying to detach themselves. I seek to excavate the aesthetic and historical stakes that contributed to this deep-seated contradiction, and to illustrate the predicament at the heart of postwar 1920s Italian culture: of forging a path to the future amid the ever-present ruins of the past.

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

The topic of this article is the role of the Polish press in disseminating knowledge about Italian Futurism in the years 1909-1939. It is the press, both daily and more or less specialized periodicals on culture, that is the most important and unrivalled source of information on the Italian avant-garde in Poland. The collected bibliography, on which the present text is based, contains one hundred sixty-fi ve references. The published materials can be divided into several groups: critical sketches, articles and all kinds of informative notes by Polish authors on Futurism, translations of Futurist theoretical texts, poetry and theatre, as well as reproductions of works of art, photographs and drawings portraying Futurists. From the beginning, the press commentators devoted most of their attention to the fi gure and activities of Marinetti. In the '30s, the interest in Futurism was eff ectively fuelled by his visit to Poland in relation to the staging of his drama Prisoners in the theatre in Lviv. Painting and theatrical experiments (mainly by Prampolini) also compose a large bibliography. Besides, Futurist literary manifestos infl uenced the new Polish poetry, creating hot press polemics, and the language of media itself. In addition to aesthetic issues, attention was drawn to Futurist proposals to rebuild social relations and to the link between Futurism and Fascism. Among the most important promoters of the Italian movement we list two poets, Peiper and Kurek, as well as writers and translators Kołtoński and Boyé, while the most well-deserved press titles are "Wiadomości Literackie" (Literary News) and "Zwrotnica" (Switches).

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.

Cinema&Cie, 2016

The article discusses the concept of 'radio-film', a term which repetitively entered the vocabulary of practitioners and theoreticians during the transition to sound, and raises several well acknowledged historical notions by adopting a slightly different question: has an idea of cinema as an entirely aural art — i.e. sound cinema as 'cinema made of sound' — ever come up in media history? Starting by considering the European scenario and by focusing more specifically on the case of the early Italian radio-play between 1925 and 1935, this article explores this path as a concrete historical possibility: in this context, the surfacing of two hybrid terms such as fonoquadro [phonoscene/phonoframe] and suonomontaggio [sound-montage] will represent the case studies for a discussion on 'intermediality' both as an epistemological framework to apply and 'a state of historical transition' to investigate. By questioning the role of cinema as an always present term of comparison in the debate on the medium specificity of radio and the ways in which a cinematic imagination has affected the development of entertainment genres in radio production, the essay aims at demonstrating how a hypothesis of aural cinema as a radio art can be grounded in several concrete aesthetic and technological intermedial exchanges.

“International Yearbook of Futurism Studies”, 2018

In his writings and interviews, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) always acknowledged his affinity with Futurism. This essay examines how this connection was articulated in Fontana's statements and creative works after the Second World War, considering his relationships with artists and artistic groups who rediscovered Futurism in the postwar period and appropriated some of its aims and methods. This analysis will reveal the influence of Marinetti's artistic movement on Fontana ever since the very beginnings of Spatialism, starting with the Manifiesto blanco (White Manifesto, 1946) launched in Buenos Aires and leading on to the programmatic texts Fontana wrote in Milan within the Spatialist movement. These observations will enable us to understand how themes previously explored by Futurism, such as scientific progress, plastic dynamism and the adoption of new media, re-emerged in Fontana's aesthetic and works, which responded to the most pressing issues of his day: from his 'holes' to his 'cuts', from his Spatial Environments to the cycle dedicated to New York. The essay will also explore in more detail specific phases in Fontana's oeuvre that demonstrate a particular wealth of connections with Futurism, like the fruitful meetings with Enrico Baj, Farfa and the Nuclear Art movement, all interpreters in their own way of Marinetti's and his associates' legacy. The same is true for Gruppo T, whose kinetic art and multi-sensory environments showed an engagement with Fontana's approach and engendered notable exchanges with the Futurist heritage.

Historical Materialism, 2023