1. The photographic paradox
W. Strauven , “Futurist Poetics and the Cinematic
Imagination: Marinetti’s Cinema without Films”, in Futurism and the
Technological Imagination 201-228.
“We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality,
and take the utmost care to avoid it. For us this is a harmful and negative
element, whereas for cinematography and chronophotography it is the very
essence.” (38), argues Anton Giulio Bragaglia in his Futurist Photodynamism manifesto, as another paradox shapes into
the artistic movement founded by Marinetti. Although in the middle of an age
where photography was a new, developing technique, the Futurists that praised
the mechanical, were quite skeptic in regards to the rigor mortis of an image produced by the camera. Yet, as the
movement was growing, this technological novelty was ideal for “propagandistic”
means, especially since Futurism was associated with the Fascist ideology that
needed a strong visual component so as to reach a nation and even more. Gerardo
Regnani underlines: “Nonetheless, the use of photographic images as part of the
Futurist public relations machinery stood in marked contrast to the Futurists’
conflicting relationship with photography as an artistic medium” (179),
therefore pointing to the clear separation between photography as art and techne.
In fact, this debate was quite strong as the Futurists couldn’t
consider it an Art: apparently, it stood against all their principles of
glorifying speed, becoming one with the machine and create a dynamic reality.
Photography imprisoned reality, transforming it into an object of
representation, thus making it part of history and, even more, Death, the very
concepts that Futurists tried to erase: “but when I discover myself in the
product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total-Image, which
is to say, Death in person” (Barthes, 14). Another paradox insinuates itself
here, as after years of harsh debates inside the Futurist movement (the
Bragaglia-Boccioni conflict), still they accepted photography as an artistic
practice only regarding self-portraiture. “The Futurists hoped that the
photographic portrait would assume allegorical, narrative, imaginary,
psychological and heraldic dimensions” (Carey, 226), achieving therefore the
ultimate control over the lens and creating the dynamic, vital force associated
with the movement. It is intriguing how a practice that rendered the subject to
History, was now the same practice that could transform the self into the
undeniable, violent force.
Photography evolved in the Futurists’ perception from the static,
“passeist” practice, to the tool that transformed the artist into the “iconic
image” of the hero, the revolutionary. Still, for that to become possible, the
experiments of the Bragaglia brothers with “photodynamism”, trying to capture
“moving images”, represented the crucial starting point, as they were the first
“Futurists” to acknowledge the power of photography as “performance”.
Nonetheless, it was that same power which could get out of their reach,
distorting the artistic message. As Regnani further points: “Their typical
response was to control the risk by using ‘emblematic photography’. This solution
allowed them to promote their “authentic” vision of the Futurist movement in a
safe manner” (189). Therefore, this control took the shape of portrait and
photo-montage, displacing the body from a finite reality into the realm of
infinite representations, of “wireless imagination”, shaping an ideal form or
as Regnani calls it, “an ideal extension of
the mind and, therefore, a technological ‘prosthesis’ of the modern individual
in his or her interaction with the natural, social and technological world”
(186).
Ergo, photography, although despised at first as merely a tool, gained
its status as an aesthetic practice, reuniting once again man and machine
through the intervention of the lens. It was, once more, a spiritual question
of freedom, which the Futurists, paradoxically, had to control in order to
create their desired results in the photographic image.
2. The
cinematic eye
It is curious how, if the Futurists adopted photographic practices
only in the 30s, when it came to a new medium that appeared and seemed to
respond to all their programmatic ideals, they somehow failed to use it at its
fullest potential. “The Futurist cinema, which we are preparing, a joyful
deformation of the universe, an alogical, fleeting synthesis of life in the
world, will become the best school for boys: a school of joy, of speed, of
force, of courage, and heroism.”, postulated the manifesto The Futurist Cinema signed by Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio
Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla and Remo Chiti. It was a new
technology freed from any historical dimension and traditions that the
Futurists could shape according to their desires. In fact, cinematography which
dealt with moving images could recreate the “wireless imagination” and
“words-in-freedom” that the print limited in more ways. And this was,
apparently, easy to achieve by the technique of montage. “Marinetti proposed
selecting images from our mental warehouse, assembling them into ‘tight
networks’ in order to make them automatically follow on, one after another.”
(Strauven, 206), as the free analogies mimicking thoughts would now be
represented on screen.
Yet, the incongruence of desire versus reality in means of
technological possibilities is present once more. As Wanda Strauven presents
Marinetti’s vision of cinema as irrational, wireless montage of spontaneous
analogies, a striking paradox appears – cinematography has, in fact, its own
syntax and structure (considering that time when it resembled theatre) and at
that time, it was not as evolved as it is today in order to generate the visual
representations sought by the Futurists. Maybe, the clear example of
Bragaglia’s Thais, the single movie
remained from the Futurist legacy, underlines where the cinematography failed
as a technique for achieving the movement’s aesthetic principles. Or is it so?
If I take into account Millicent Marcus’ view on how Thais is presented, then the whole
allegory of getting rid of the old and embrace the new and its violence makes
sense. “If we agree that the concluding four-minute sequence of Thais really is a cinematic
breakthrough, what are we to make of the film’s first twenty-two minutes?” he
asks, just as to create a whole symbolic interpretation of the first twenty-two
minutes as the representation of passeism which has to be destroyed, just as
Thay’s body has to be destroyed, so as to give birth to a new aesthetics, of
free analogies and pure reality. “When Thais
enters into her secret chamber in the concluding sequence, she leaves
behind the screenplay and moves into a space of cinema puro where image, editing and the scenoplastica say it all, and even Bragaglia’s intertitles become
superfluous” (69). Still, the fact that Marcus implies that hints of this
interpretation are scattered through the whole film, leaves me a bit reserved,
making me wonder if this was implicitly created by Bragaglia himself.
All in all, cinematography is another aspect of the Futurist foggy
legacy, as it doesn’t manage to fulfill the aesthetic ideal of the artist.
Still, once more the need to combine spiritual and mechanical as the ultimate
scope, see the ending of the cinematic manifesto: “Painting + sculpture +
plastic dynamism + words-in-freedom + composed noises [intonarumori] + architecture + synthetic theatre = Futurist
cinema”, remains yet a vision that goes beyond avangardist thoughts.
3. How
photodynamism and scenoplastica reconcile in the future
If Bragaglia’s attempts to recreate the vital force through
photographic practices or to announce the death of the “passeism” in aesthetics
through the “moving image” created controversies and didn’t achieve its final
purpose inside the Futurist movement, nowadays we can find examples of this
legacy inside cinema and, moreover, through the internet.
Aligning with the innovative Man
with the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, there is another recent work that,
even more, resembles the Futurist ideas of free analogies, wireless imagination
and infinity of thought. Made in 1992, the experimental documentary Baraka presents a series of photographed
scenes connected through music, as a dynamic reality and spiritual state of
mind. It is the very “cinematic simultaneity and interpretation of different
times and places” as the Futurists desired, although in only one work of art.
In other words, it is the “remediation” (in Bolter and Grusin terms meaning
that an old medium is reshaped inside a new medium) of photography inside
cinema.
But how do we further link Futurists and remediation? It is, yet,
another paradox that maybe Marinetti wouldn’t agree upon, but modern art, in fact,
is the ultimate remediated product, creating the need for a “wireless
imagination” just as to escape the limitation of reality. As Bolter and Grusin
argue, “High modern visual art was also self-justifying, as it offered the
viewer a visual experience that he was not expected to validate by referring to
the external world” (344), meaning that the ultimate experience was one inside
the work of art and for it. If Futurism represents the starting point of this
high modern visual art, it is interesting how their ideals of getting art and
life together still ended up in a museum. In fact, moving from the
cinematograph as the space for “moving images”, the modern visual art that
presents mixes of different media in free analogies (as Marinetti sought) can
be “consumed” inside what are now known as unconventional spaces for
creativity: modern art museums, galleries and so on. But maybe it is the very
different approach of these spaces of “performance” that fulfills the ideal of
Futurists to destroy museums as traditional institutions in order to achieve an
eternal present (the fact that modern visual “performances” are consumed in
real-time or function through repeated projections may be this same quest for
the ultimate freedom).
In conclusion, the realm of visual was yet limited as technology at
that point, but nowadays, at a more or less unconscious level, Art resembles
and fulfills some of the Futurism desires.
Works cited
A.G.
Bragaglia, “Futurist Photodynamism [1913]”, http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/futuristphotomanifesto/
F.T.
Marinetti, B. Corra, E. Settimelli, A. Ginna, G. Balla, R. Chiti, “The Futurist
Cinema [1916]”, http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/cinema.htm
Roland Barthes Camera Lucida. Reflections
on Photography. New York
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin,
“Remediation,” Configurations 4:3
(1996): 311-358
S. Carey, “From fotodinamismo
to fotomontaggio: The Legacy of Futurism's Photography”, Carte
italiane 2.6 (2010): 221-237
M. Marcus, “Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs; or, The Death
of the Diva + the Rise of the Scenoplastica = The Birth of Futurist Cinema”, South
Central Review 13.2-3 (1996): 63-81.
G. Regnani, “Futurism and Photography: Between Scientific Inquiry
and Aesthetic Imagination”, in Futurism and the Technological Imagination,
ed. Günter Berghaus ( Amsterdam / New
York