FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI

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'Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti' (December 22, 1876 – December 2, 1944) was an Italian ideologue, poet, editor, and main founder of the futurist movement of the early 20th century.

Contents

Biography

Childhood and Adolescence

Birth Of Futurism

First Scandals and Successes

Marinetti And Fascism

External links

Biography

Childhood and Adolescence

Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (some documents give his name as "Filippo Achille Emilio") spent the first years of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father (Enrico M.) and his mother (Amalia Grolli) lived together more uxorio. His love for literature emerged during his school years. At seventeen he started his first school magazine, ''Papyrus''; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for bringing Emile Zola's scandalous novels to school. His family sent him to graduate in Paris, France where he obtained the baccalaureat in 1893. He enrolled in Pavia University's Law Faculty, together with his elder brother, Leone.
His brother Leone's death at the young age of twenty-one was the first real trauma in Marinetti's life. After having obtained his degree (1899), Marinetti decided to abandon law and follow his literary vocation. He experimented incessantly in every field of literature (poetry, narrative, theatre, ''words in liberty''), signing everything "Filippo Tommaso Marinetti". His mother died in 1920.

Birth Of Futurism

A great lover of velocity, Marinetti was dragged out of a ditch outside Milan in 1908 after a simple accident: in order to avoid two cyclists, he had been forced to drive his car off the road.
The accident was loosely described in the Manifesto of Futurism, composed in 1908 and published the following February on the front page of the most prestigious French daily, Le Figaro. It seems that an Egyptian friend of his father's was an important shareholder in the paper.
But the Marinetti that was helped out of the ditch was a new man, determined to free himself from the pretentiousness and decadence of the prevailing Liberty style. He communicates a new and strongly revolutionary programme to his friends: every bridge to the past must be closed, "destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy" and sing of "the great crowds, shaken by work, by pleasure or by rioting"; "glorify war - the only hygiene of the world- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of liberators, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and contempt for women"

First Scandals and Successes

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... 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 terribly 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 Karel Čapek would invent the term "robot".
In 1910, his first novel Mafarka il futurista was cleared of all charges in an obscenity trial. But that year, Marinetti would discover some unexpected allies when three young painters (Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo) decided to join the Futurist movement. Together with them (and with poets such as Aldo Palazzeschi), Marinetti launches 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, a convinced warmonger, 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 a small book named The Battle Of Tripoli. In the meantime, he worked on a violently anti-Catholic and anti-Austrian verse-novel, ''Le monoplan du Pape'' (The Pope's Aeroplane, 1912) and edits an anthology of futurist poets. But his attempts to renew the language of poetry did not satisfy him. So much so that in his foreword to the anthology, he launches a new revolution: it's time to be done with traditional syntax and it's time to pass to words in freedom.

Marinetti And Fascism

In early 1918 he founded the ''Partito Politico Futurista'' or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later was absorbed into Benito Mussolini's ''Fasci di combattimento'', making Marinetti one of the first supporters and members of the Italian Fascist Party. He opposed Fascism's later canonical exultion of existing institutions, calling them "reactionary." He however remained a notable force in developing the party thought throughout the regime's existence. For example, at the end of the ''Congress of Fascist Culture'' that was held in Bologna on March 30 1925, Giovanni Gentile addressed Sergio Panunzio on the need to define Fascism more purposefully by way of Marinetti's opinion, stating:
Thus Futurism continued to influence Fascist thinkers outside of the Futurist school of thought on the furthering of Fascism.
Marinetti is most noted for his authorship of the Futurist Manifesto, first published in the Paris newspaper ''Le Figaro'' on February 20, 1909, and the sound poem ''Zang Tumb Tumb''. In ''The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism'', Marinetti declared that "Art [...] 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 in life itself, a stance which brought Futurism close to Fascism.
In 1938, when Adolf Hitler included creations of Futurism in an exhibition deriding what Nazi propaganda called ''degenerate art'', Marinetti persuaded Mussolini not to allow the exhibition entrance into Italy.
Fellow notable Italian futurists include Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and Luigi Russolo.
Marinetti died at Bellagio, Italy.

External links

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★ MP3 of Marinetti performing one of his poems: 'Battaglia, Peso + Odore' (1912)

★ MP3 of Marinetti performing one of his poems: 'Dune, parole in libertà' (1914) Score to this poem

★ MP3 of Marinetti performing one of his poems: 'La Battaglia di Adrianopoli' (1926) recorded by Marinetti (1935)