Vita Futurista. Italian Futurism 1909-44 - ACE170.6

Excerpt from Amor Pedestre / Love Afoot or Pedestrian Love, a 1914 film by Marcel Fabre, here accompanied with music by Silvio Mix (Silvio De Re). Actors’ feet and legs only tell the story. Maurizio Calvesi says that Marinetti’s ideas became an ideology "with questionable, even dangerous implications". Film of shelling and other battlefield scenes during First World War. Calvesi suggests that Marinetti’s ideas on war were not very far from revolution. Gino Severini’s Treno Blindato in Azione / Armoured Train in Action (1915). Many artists and intellectuals welcomed the war as a cleansing blood bath, a source of radical change. Battlefield footage. Detail from Armoured Train. Film of Italian mobilisation, 1915. Photographs of Milan Futurists in the Battalion of Cyclists and Automobilists. Trio Exvoco performing one of Marinetti’s wartime words, illustrating his theories of "Parole in Libertà" (Words in Freedom). Wartime footage and free typography documents. Calvesi suggests that the Futurists confused war and revolution, believing that violent intervetion necessarily lay at the base of each. Revolutionary scenes in Russia. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Peasants running to pick up poetry and propaganda thrown from a train. Designs by Mayakovsky. Anti-religious procession with float carrying puppets designed by him. Portret Vladimira Tatlina / Portrait of Vladimir Tatlin (1911), by Mihkail Larionov, an example of Cubo-Futurism. The model of Tatlin’s Constructivist Monument to the Third International or Tatlin’s Tower (1919). Examples of Aleksander Rodchenko’s Poster Art. Footage of Lenin addressing crowds; his funeral; Stalin.