Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)

“Marinetti stated a desire ‘to redouble the expressive force of words’ and spoke of ‘the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page’. As if the printed page was a battlefield. In fact, in a number of pioneering Futurist works, including Marinetti’s books, Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) and les Mots en liberté (Words-in-Freedom) and Carlo Carrà’s Guerrapittura (War-painting), were inspired by the mechanized warfare unleashed by World War II”. Andel 110; Ex-Libris n° 684.

“We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed... Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” (Marinetti, 1909)

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—poet, playwright, journalist, and novelist—was the founder and guiding spirit of the Italian Futurist movement. Beginning in 1909, he introduced ideas based on the visualization of speed and innovation in modern technology. His ideas had a profound impact not only on the visual arts, but also on literature and theater. Marinetti developed the concept of parole in libertà (free text), which carried the idea of free verse one step farther. It eliminated any rules regarding spelling, syntax, or typography.

Like many artists at that time, Marinetti developed a fascination with the concept of speed, sparked in part by advances in transportation and building construction. He was not interested in the social advances that technology would bring, but with the intoxicating and frightening experience of the power of machines. Using typography alone, Marinetti explodes the norms for book presentation, expressing modernity through a controlled chaos of words, shapes, and images.
Bibliography:
cf. Johnson, Robert Flynn, Artists' Books in the Modern Era 1870--2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books, San Francisco, 2001, no. 31… (mehr)

Not for nothing was Marinetti known as the “Caffeine of Europe”. His aim was to snap the intelligenstsia, the politicians, the populace, anyone who would listen to him, out of the past, out of sentimentality, into the future, into electrification, and to do it as fast and as stylishly, as unreflectingly and mercilessly as he inhumanly could do. He acted the role of the prophet, intoxicated with possibility, a vision of society moving at the speed of an electron, splintering the clunkiness of wood and tradition in a wake of soundwaves by wheels and engines and wings. He wanted man to become machine, and to wage and glory in war on his fellow machine, and to exalt in art, poetry, and dance at the same time.

It is a dizzy mixture that makes up his selection of his writings here, from art manifestos, allegorical fiction, memoir, invective, to poetry, politics, and proselytizing. We hear a lot about his “invention” of “Words in Freedom”. Here the form fits the content - a sort of high speed multi-sensory thinking out loud on the page that lacks punctuation and blurs ideas together in communicative association (a bit like Finnegan’s Wake, but with a purpose, and ten years earlier). Even when he is not deliberately writing like this, there are hints of it in the fluidity of thought and association of ideas. But this is a book of real contrasts. Sometimes his inspired use of metaphor unwillingly carries the reader along with his death driven dreaming, other times it jars like Nietzsche’s painfully vain autobiography, and he unmasks himself. The tightrope act between the dreaming poet, and the self-important impresario of the future is not one that he quite has the delicacy of balance to maintain in all his writings here, and yet he does it in some of his better ones.


I have read nothing like this collection here before. Marinetti has left a huge cultural impact over the years, in the spheres of art and literature high and low (especially anything modernist), film, technology, and in society at large. And this volume is worth reading for that reason, and because it can still provoke thought, while giving us a view onto the intellectual climate of cultural, technological, and societal change in the early 20th Century. However, it is not without its caveats, and there is a lot of questionable value here too in some of what he says (let’s not forget he was a bit of a Fascist).… (mehr)