Abstract
The essay analyses the influence of Italian Futurism on Soviet avantgarde cinema: a process often disavowed or overlooked due to historical misinformation or ideological reasons. For many progressive scholars, it was difficult to admit the decisive influence of Italian Futurism – which converges into Fascism – on revolutionary Soviet cinema. Instead, the research developed here – thanks to a comparative analysis of the Futurist manifestos and of the Soviet avant-garde theoretical writings, as well as of the directors’ compositional choices – makes clearly detectable the influence of Marinetti and his movement on the latters’ theories and poetics.
Some concepts of Italian Futurism's worldview and aesthetics play a fundamental role in the theory and experience of Soviet avant-garde cinema. For revolutionary artists, the two crucial ideas of Futurist poetics are speed and power: in a word, dynamism. These ideas and configurations activate in the cultural and artistic context a highly innovative and particularly aggressive symbolic trend against tradition.
Keywords: Avant-garde, Soviet Cinema, Marinetti, Eisenstein, Vertov,Feks
The influence of Italian Futurism on the cinematographic avant-gardes is decidedly stronger in Russia, and was, above all, stronger in the Soviet Union, than in Western Europe. The two fundamental pillars of the Futurist poetics, which impress young artists and new film-makers, are speed and power: in one word, dynamism. These ideas and configurations present themselves as a symbolic movement with strong innovative and mouldbreaking ambitions. Those film-makers who want to side against the old world (political, social, imaginary, and so on) choose the key notions of Italian Futurism, which summarize the will of change and the affirmation of modernity as absolute value.
Despite the ideological discrepancies, the Soviet revolutionary cinema absorbs all the crucial components of the Futurist poetics and of Marinetti, because it firstly accepts the symbolic form of Futurism, its break with the past and the assertion of what is new, therefore the revolutionary process. The plan of Italian Futurism as well as Soviet avant-garde is that of destroying the past to conjure modernity. Many of those determinations that characterize the Futurist change and innovation can be attributed to the Soviet avant-garde because they reflect a similar destructive movement, marked by aggressiveness and by the will to change everything. However, the objectives they pursue are deeply different.