When F.T. Marinetti publishes his first manifesto in Le Figaro (19 February 1909), cinematographic technology has reached a stage at which films with a running time of up to 40 minutes can be produced. The first movie theatres are being built, seating up to 1000 people. Consequently, film is present in the early manifestos as a sign of technological modernity: the screen should compete with the stage, for instance, since film is able to show scenes that cannot be properly depicted on stage, e.g. war battle scenes or car races (Marinetti 1913 a, b). Marinetti also contrasts the short duration of film with the merely long duration of the old medium, the book (Marinetti et al. 1916). In 1913, he even claims to have been working with film for a long time in a large survey conducted by the Nuovo Giornale di Firenze on the topics of literature and film (Marinetti 1913c: 3). When Umberto Boccioni in 1911 and Marinetti in 1912 in Maison d’étudiants claim that the day would come when a simple picture would no longer be sufficient to depict the ever increasing movement of life (Baumgarth 1974: 71), both appear as visionaries, as seen from today's perspective.The Futurists do develop, as this article shows, an aesthetics appropriate to the new medium, but films as such play only a peripheral role in their artistic work.