In conclusion to his manifesto The Futurist Cinema, Filippo Marinetti encourages the resort to cinema as a tool to ‘decompose and recompose the universe’ according to the ‘marvellous whims’ of the Futurist artist (Marinetti et al.: 233). Such an invitation (at the same time a programmatic declaration and a playful publicity manoeuvre) calls for a subversion of the criteria that regulates cinematographic production, inscribes itself in the wider Futurist project of destruction of the syntax of traditional art and its consequent revision and reinvention through an imagination without strings. We find here the principle of analogy, which Marinetti borrows from the literary field and restores to the entire range of experience, promising the renewed imaginative combination of distant (and possibly antithetic) universes, undoubtedly without a connecting thread. ‘Analogy is nothing other than the deep love that binds together things that are remote, seemingly diverse or inimical’ (Marinetti 1913: 120), it is asserted in the manifesto Destruction of Syntax. Analogy must not make do with the easy approach to which it is accustomed in traditional poetry. The Futurist artist shall use it, on the contrary, to create unprecedented bonds and fuse incompossible universes, in order to achieve the short circuit of meaning that art must ensure.

We believe that cinema – as an analogical tool of decomposition and reinvention of universal syntax – represents the ideal place to investigate the relationship between the scientific dimension of the Futurist research and the sensorial and perceptive one.