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13 - Velocità/Vitesse: Filmed Dramas of Objects and ‘avant-garde integrale’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2020

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Summary

Abstract

The film VELOCITÀ – also known as VITESSE among the Parisian avantgarde circles – is an experimental film realized in 1930 by Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero, and Guido Martina, held in Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. It is an avant-garde film that, starting with the cliché of the love-triangle, goes on to dismantle the bourgeois drama model, elaborating Marinettian-like dramas of object and offering several tributes to avant-garde art and cinema. The link between the avant-garde compositional originality and the intertextual reference clearly recalls the dialogue started with other works, the programmatic will to collocate the film in a network of relationships, and inspiration that attests the participation of its authors to the cultural atmosphere of those years.

This essay aims to process an analytic interpretation of the film starting from a reflection on the intertextual and inter-semiotic references to Futurist painting and to avant-garde French cinema, between iconology and visual culture.

Keywords: Vitesse, Oriani, 1930s Futurism, Avant-garde, Intermediality

Vitesse

In 1930, the married couple Guido Martina and Tina Cordero founded the society Futurista Film and became acquainted with the aero-painter Pippo Oriani, author of a screenplay also published in a critical edition by Cineteca Nazionale (Verdone 1996). However, in the film's opening titles, the screenplay is ascribed to Cordero and Martina, whereas Oriani is credited only as scenographer and co-director.

The manifesto of Futurista Film was published in the Parisian review Comœdia on 5 March 1931 with the title Avant-garde integrale: Marinetti et le film futuriste: here the precepts of Futurist cinema are declared, according to a line that continues from the manifesto La cinematografia futurista dated 1916. In their manifesto, Cordero and Martina explain the programmatic objective of not providing a screenplay for the film; this discredits the hypothesis of an out-and-out screenplay foregoing the film. The innovations in the film make it a rare example of ‘integral avant-garde’; to cite the definition given by its authors in Comœdia: the inventive experiments on the use of the device found a perspective of intermediality, until the first radical experiment of ‘cinematographic aero-painting’, the cinematographic implementation of the lively Futurist dynamism.

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Futurist Cinema
Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film
, pp. 195 - 208
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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