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The Museum of Modern Art Film Series Marks Centenary of Futurism with Films |
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| Written by RoseLee Goldberg |
| Tuesday, 03 November 2009 02:08 |
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 Throughout
cinematic history mechanical creatures—robots, androids, cyborgs—have reflected
both the discord and the connection between man and machine. In his essay “The
Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” published February 20, 1909, in the French
newspaper Le Figaro, Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) called
for a mass cultural movement that would reject the sober and genteel conventions
of the bourgeois world and embrace the speed, technology, and dynamism of the
early twentieth century. Marinetti breathlessly announced the coming Futurist
revolution, in which the heretofore-dark night would be “illuminated by the
internal glow of electric hearts.” His veneration of a machine age continued in
“War, the World’s Only Hygiene” (1911–15), wherein he averred that the
automobiles, trains, and vast machines driving the technology of his day
possessed “personalities, souls, or wills,” and presaged the “nonhuman and
mechanical being.”
Technology was to be the new, exciting medium by which patriotic Italians would slough off their obsession with the past and become true members of an energised humanity, filled with ‘courage, audacity and revolt’ prepared for the impending and inevitable identification of man with machine’. It was an aggressive, masculine movement whose watchwords were ‘Youth, Speed, Violence!’ and which glorified ‘war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers … and contempt for woman’. [2] From the start the aeroplane was celebrated as part of this new, brave, speedy technocratic world. ‘The Futurist hero was the man of iron, the aviator and the engineer’. The ultimate expression of these ideas was in Marinetti’s book, Mafarka Futurista (Mafarka the Futurist, 1910), which was the subject of a notorious obscenity trial, thanks to the eponymous hero’s possession of an 11 metre long penis which he curled around himself while he slept. His son, Gazurmah, is a giant invisible mechanical bird with wings that embrace the stars. At the end of the book, Mafarka orders his slaves to build him a sailplane, on which he departs for even greater adventures. The identification of aviation with an aggressive, belligerent masculine sexuality is explicit. For Jung, the UFO could also be a masculine symbol, ‘in accordance of reports of … cigar shaped UFOs’ Nuts and Bolts: Machine Made Man in Films from the Collection is organized in collaboration with Performa 09, and was created after Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg approached MoMA about presenting a series of Futurist-related films from the Museum’s collection. Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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