dramatic disproportionment
by Douglas Messerli
Günter Berghaus, editor F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, translated by Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)
Reading the new collection of F. T.
Marinetti’s critical writings, edited by Günter Berghaus and translated by Doug
Thompson, I was over the many months alternately elated and disgusted! How
could one not be roused by Marinetti’s excited poetical rants? One can almost
hear his voice—singing what I imagine as a somewhat high-pitched shrill
siren-song of poetical and often political activism—in the early statements and
manifestos of Futurism:
My friends and I had stayed
up all night, sitting beneath the lamps of
a mosque, whose
star-studded, filigreed brass domes resembled our souls,
all aglow with the
concentrated brilliance of an electric heart. For many
hours, we’d been trailing
our age-old indolence back and forth over
richly adorned, oriental
carpets, debating at the uttermost boundaries of
logic and filling up masses
of paper with our frenetic writings...
begins Marinetti’s “The Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism,” first published in February 1909. The preface and
Manifesto scream out with the indignations of youth against a culture he and
his friends saw as wallowing in the decadence of the past symbolized by the
frail (and, for Marinetti, “feminine”) light of the moon, a theme reiterated in
his “Second Futurist Proclamation” in its subtitle, “Let’s Kill Off the
Moonlight,” and in his 1911 renunciations of Symbolist masters, “the Last of
the Lovers of the Moonlight.” The principles of his Manifesto itself represent a
loony combination of daring and what seems an absurdly naïve vision of the
future, singing of the “love of danger,” “the use of energy and recklessness,” “courage,
boldness, rebellion,” while arguing for “aggressive action, a restive
wakefulness, life at the double, the slap and the punching fist.” Marinetti
idealizes speed, the racing car, and machine-gun fire. Like the Russian
Futurists, he calls for the destruction of museums, libraries, and “academies
of any sort.” Like numerous calls for change by the young, the Futurists see
themselves as singing the song of the “great multitudes,” reminding one at
moments even of Whitman’s “body electric”: “the pulsating, night ardor of
arsenals and shipyards, ablaze with their violent electric moons,” “railway stations,
voraciously devouring smoke-belching serpents,” “bridges which, like great
gymnasts, bestride the rivers, flashing in the sunlight like gleaming knives,”
the “lissome flight of the airplane.” Just as the British Futurists later saw
the vortex as putting an end to time and space, Marinetti and his friends
proclaimed “Time and Space died yesterday.”
This is all the heady stuff of youth (even though Marinetti was 33 at
the time, young, but no longer a “youth”), and along with his dozens of other
proclamations and his aggressive transformations—well represented in this
comprehensive selection of his writings—of Italian poetry, theater, dance,
music, cuisine, photography, and radio outlined in the earliest and latest of
the Futurist writings, these help one to realize just how remarkable was
Marinetti’s contribution to the 20th century arts. His intoxicating,
if slightly insane descriptions of a Theatre of Surprises and a “total
theatre,” complete with multiple revolving stages and an audience lit by varied
colored lights below their feet and separated from the stages by a moat of
water wherein battleships raged, reveal an outrageously fertile imagination.
Marinetti’s calls for a radio that would go beyond painting, beyond war and
revolution, beyond chemistry, even beyond the Earth “by imagining the means
necessary for journeying to the Moon” not only expresses an imaginary future
for Italy and the world, but in retrospect, appears nearly clairvoyant. So too
were his calls for an “abstract cinema,” his proposals for a photography that
engaged “the drama of moving and immobile objects,” “the drama of the shadows
of contrasting objects,” the drama of humanized objects, turned to stone,
crystallized or made plantlike by means of camouflage or special
lighting,” “the fusion of images taken
from below with those taken from above,” “moving or static views of objects or
human and animal bodies,” “transparent and semitransparent images of people and
concrete objects,” “organic composition of a person’s different states of
mind,” an “art of photographing camouflaged objects,” in short, a “dramatic
disproportionment,” resonate when one considers both film and photography from
the other side of the century. Having dined on a meal (at Luigi Ballerini’s
1993 UCLA conference on Futurism) designed by Marinetti, I can tell you that
his cuisine was, if nothing else, a lot more fun and sexy than any other
poet-inspired concoctions I have experienced.
Hooray, then, for F. T. Marinetti and for the publication of this new
gathering of his works!
But no matter how much one desires to celebrate the poet and theorist,
sadly, this collection also calls up his terrifyingly pernicious ideas: his
repeated calls for war, combined with a breast-beating insistence of Italian
nationalism that not only parallels but crosses paths with the Fascist dictator
Benito Mussolini. And no matter how one might attempt to mollify Marinetti’s
war-mongering and nationalistic attitudes—perceiving these issues as part and
parcel of his desire to embrace the violence of a forceful life as opposed to a
passive worshipping of the past—one cannot but recognize behind his statements
the utter stupidity of those who pushed Europe into World War I and the blind
hatred and murderous actions that led to World War II. Certainly, many of
Marinetti’s desires for an Italy that “is both strong and free, no longer in
servitude to its great Past…an Italy that is under no one’s control…sovereign,
united, and indivisible” seem reasonable. Most Americans also want those things
for their country. Marinetti even warns, in his 1919 essay “Futurist Democracy,”
that
Italian pride must
not be, and is not, an imperialism whose goal
is to impose
industries, to corner markets, to effect massive
increases in
agrarian production….We want to create a true
democracy,
conscious and bold….
Marinetti’s “democracy” would have
also kept women (the “feminine” principal being an absolute anathema to his thinking)
from active roles in society; diplomats, professors, philosophers, archeologists,
critics, etc. would be rooted out by War (“This Futurist Year”). Time and again Marinetti and his Futurist
friends are praised for acting out violence in public affairs, behaving much
like Mussolini’s thugs before the rise of his party. Indeed, had Mussolini
treated the Futurists better, and not basically ignored them, as he did, it
seems apparent to any careful reader of Marinetti’s work that he might have
remained in league with the devil. Fortunately, feeling he had failed in his
political activities, he turned in his later years more and more to new ideas
regarding the arts.
Writers, even great ones—and I believe that Marinetti clearly aspired to
greatness in his innovative methods—are not always good men, even sane men. The
product of a romantic culture, with an exotic youth lived in Alexandria, Egypt
(“On one side, my father’s house in Alexandria looked out onto a busy street,
and on the other onto a huge walled garden that was filled with palm trees,
fans gently waving against the foamy blue laughter of the African sea,” writes
Marinetti in “Self-Portrait,” the earliest work in this volume), Marinetti
rebelled against a past that also defined him. Like many others who embraced
various forms of fascism (Lawrence, Pound, Hamsun, Lewis and Céline), the
impatience for progress was often rooted in a simplified and idealized vision
of the past. And while that fact does not ameliorate Marinetti’s many repugnant
ideas for change, it does allow me to perceive them in the context of his
idealistic and desirable interpenetration of all the arts and daily life.
Los Angeles, December 22, 2007
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).
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