Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (December 22, 1876 – December 2, 1944) was an Italian ideologue, poet, editor, and founder of the Futurist movement. Marinetti is widely known as the author of the Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote in 1908. It was published on the front page of the most prestigious French daily, Le Figaro, on February 20, 1909.
In The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti declared that “Art [&hellip] can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.” Since that text proclaims the unity of life and art, Marinetti understood violence not only as a means of producing an aesthetic effect, but also as being inherent to life itself. George Sorel, whose influence spanned the entire political spectrum from anarchism to Fascism, also argued for the importance of violence. Futurism had both anarchist and Fascist elements; Marinetti later became an active supporter of Benito Mussolini.
The Futurist Manifesto was read and debated all across Europe, but Marinetti’s first ‘Futurist’ works were not as successful. In April, the opening night of Le Roi Bombance (The Feasting King), written in 1905 was interrupted by loud, derisive whistling on the part of the audience&hellip and by Marinetti himself, who thus introduced another essential element of Futurism, “the desire to be heckled.” Marinetti did, however, fight a duel with a critic he considered too harsh. Even his drama La Donna è Mobile (Poupées Électriques), presented in Turin was not successful. Today, the play is remembered chiefly through a later version, titled Elettricità Sessuale (Sexual Electricity), and chiefly for the appearance onstage of humanoid automatons, ten years before the Czech novelist Josef Čapek would invent the term ‘robot.’
In 1910, his first novel Mafarka Il Futurista was cleared of all charges in an obscenity trial. That year, Marinetti discovered some allies in three young painters, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, who joined the Futurist movement. Together with them, and with poets such as Aldo Palazzeschi, Marinetti launched a series of Futurist Evenings, theatrical spectacles in which the Futurists declaimed their manifestos in front of a crowd that, often as not, attended the performances in order to throw various vegetables at the Futurists.
The most successful ‘happening’ of that period was the launch of the Manifesto Against Past-Loving Venice from the belltower of Saint Mark’s Basilica. In the flier, Marinetti calls for “fill(ing) the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing and leprous palaces” to “prepare for the birth of an industrial and militarized Venice, capable of dominating the great Adriatic, a great Italian lake.”
In 1911, the Italo-Turkish War broke out and Marinetti did not shrink from the war-effort: he departed immediately for Libya as war correspondent for a French newspaper. His articles were eventually collected and published in The Battle Of Tripoli. He also made a number of visits to London, which he considered “the Futurist city par excellence”, and where a number of exhibitions, lectures and demonstrations of Futurist music were staged. However, although a number of artists, including Wyndham Lewis, were interested in the new movement, only one British convert was made, the young artist C.R.W. Nevinson. Nevertheless, Futurism was an important influence upon Lewis’s Vorticist movement, which must be seen as its indirect offspring.
Around the same time he worked on a violently anti-Catholic and anti-Austrian verse-novel, Le Monoplan Du Pape (The Pope’s Aeroplane, 1912) and edited an anthology of futurist poets but his attempts to renew the language of poetry did not satisfy him. He was so dissatisfied that in his foreword to the anthology, he launched a new revolution: it was time to be done with traditional syntax and to move towards “words in freedom” (parole in libertà). His sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb exemplifies words in freedom. Recordings can be heard here of Marinetti reading some of his sound poems:
Battaglia, Peso + Odore (1912)
Dune, Parole In Libertà (1914)
La Battaglia di Adrianopoli (1926, recorded 1935)