Jennifer Scappettone
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231164320
- eISBN:
- 9780231537742
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231164320.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter demonstrates how Venice's artistic and architectonic heritage makes it extremely oppositional to Fascist urbanization, as well as to F. T. Marinetti's—founder of the Futurist ...
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This chapter demonstrates how Venice's artistic and architectonic heritage makes it extremely oppositional to Fascist urbanization, as well as to F. T. Marinetti's—founder of the Futurist movement—call for an industrial city. Without having a direct Roman heritage, Venice is devoid of any purist classicism, an aspect of the cityscape that enhanced its appeal to many artists during the nineteenth century. Venice was built almost exclusively during the so-called “centuries of decadence,” upon a collection of small islands unfitting to the modern state. Two large bridges were built across the Grand Canal to facilitate movement through the city; and canals were filled in around the city to create undisrupted stretches of pedestrian flow. But Venice's resistance to the traffic of the new century would hardly be mitigated by these; the speed and noise beloved by Futurists were held at bay by the confines of the Venetian lagoon.Less
This chapter demonstrates how Venice's artistic and architectonic heritage makes it extremely oppositional to Fascist urbanization, as well as to F. T. Marinetti's—founder of the Futurist movement—call for an industrial city. Without having a direct Roman heritage, Venice is devoid of any purist classicism, an aspect of the cityscape that enhanced its appeal to many artists during the nineteenth century. Venice was built almost exclusively during the so-called “centuries of decadence,” upon a collection of small islands unfitting to the modern state. Two large bridges were built across the Grand Canal to facilitate movement through the city; and canals were filled in around the city to create undisrupted stretches of pedestrian flow. But Venice's resistance to the traffic of the new century would hardly be mitigated by these; the speed and noise beloved by Futurists were held at bay by the confines of the Venetian lagoon.
Dafydd W. Jones
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380208
- eISBN:
- 9781781381526
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380208.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter reads the audio and visual innovations that stemmed from Italian Futurist poetry and late German Expressionist performance, which burst upon the first audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire ...
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This chapter reads the audio and visual innovations that stemmed from Italian Futurist poetry and late German Expressionist performance, which burst upon the first audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire (the rowdy neighbour to Lenin’s lodging room in Zurich, before he returned to Russia in early 1917) and Dada soirées, in logical continuation of currents of poetic intervention that found their apogee in Hugo Ball’s sound poetry and poems without words of 1916. The historical context of the politicised fermentation of artistic activity in Germany specifically in the years leading up to 1916, and is presented here in rigorous detail as ground for the Dada activities that are discussed in the chapters that follow.Less
This chapter reads the audio and visual innovations that stemmed from Italian Futurist poetry and late German Expressionist performance, which burst upon the first audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire (the rowdy neighbour to Lenin’s lodging room in Zurich, before he returned to Russia in early 1917) and Dada soirées, in logical continuation of currents of poetic intervention that found their apogee in Hugo Ball’s sound poetry and poems without words of 1916. The historical context of the politicised fermentation of artistic activity in Germany specifically in the years leading up to 1916, and is presented here in rigorous detail as ground for the Dada activities that are discussed in the chapters that follow.
Sascha Bru
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639250
- eISBN:
- 9780748651931
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639250.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises ...
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This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. The book brings together a wide range of European experimental writers and provides detailed analyses of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. It locates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, found itself caught up in a series of ‘states of exception’. In such states, legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside, and ‘literature’ as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicisation, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy. Against assertions that anti-art avant-garde gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, the book shows that European avant-gardists may well have been some of the staunchest defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.Less
This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. The book brings together a wide range of European experimental writers and provides detailed analyses of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. It locates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, found itself caught up in a series of ‘states of exception’. In such states, legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside, and ‘literature’ as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicisation, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy. Against assertions that anti-art avant-garde gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, the book shows that European avant-gardists may well have been some of the staunchest defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.
Louise Hornby
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190661229
- eISBN:
- 9780190661250
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190661229.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are ...
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This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are blurred and impressionistic—ocean waves, clouds of dust, puffs of steam and smoke—which render motion itself a kind of obscurity and reveal how film is itself an ephemeral medium of dust and smoke. The precursor to film’s absent materiality is found in photography’s own representation of motion as blur in Etienne-Jules Marey’s strange late nineteenth-century photographs of smoke fillets and the movements of air. These images, lesser known than his other motion studies, reveal how film casts back to its still antecedent to imagine motion in blurred terms of smoke and dust, even as it resists photographic arrest.Less
This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are blurred and impressionistic—ocean waves, clouds of dust, puffs of steam and smoke—which render motion itself a kind of obscurity and reveal how film is itself an ephemeral medium of dust and smoke. The precursor to film’s absent materiality is found in photography’s own representation of motion as blur in Etienne-Jules Marey’s strange late nineteenth-century photographs of smoke fillets and the movements of air. These images, lesser known than his other motion studies, reveal how film casts back to its still antecedent to imagine motion in blurred terms of smoke and dust, even as it resists photographic arrest.
Christine Froula
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780989082679
- eISBN:
- 9781781382196
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780989082679.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on the play by Cambridge historian and Apostle Goldsworthy (Goldie) Lowes Dickinson entitled “War and Peace: A Dramatic Fantasia” (staged 1917). Serving as Goldie's riposte to ...
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This chapter focuses on the play by Cambridge historian and Apostle Goldsworthy (Goldie) Lowes Dickinson entitled “War and Peace: A Dramatic Fantasia” (staged 1917). Serving as Goldie's riposte to war-extolling Italian Futurist and protofascist F. T. Marinetti, the play co-opts the Futurist to stage in the public art of theater the international contest between war and peace that preceded the Great War and roiled on through the interwar period to the Second World War and beyond. The play presages not only Dickinson's indefatigable labors on behalf of international peace after 1914 but a pervasive sense, in and beyond Bloomsbury, that the Great War marked less a “break” than “an intensification of many old struggles,” as Virginia Woolf later described it: interlocking conflicts at home and abroad that the Great War could not and did not resolve. Goldie's panoply of John Bull's clashes at home and abroad not only foregrounds world-shattering technologies from the aeroplane to nuclear energy and the atomic bomb but also stages intra-national, nationalist, international, and transnational rivalries for global resources and power that burst the conventional historiographic bounds both of the 1914–1918 war and, no less, of concerted work toward peace.Less
This chapter focuses on the play by Cambridge historian and Apostle Goldsworthy (Goldie) Lowes Dickinson entitled “War and Peace: A Dramatic Fantasia” (staged 1917). Serving as Goldie's riposte to war-extolling Italian Futurist and protofascist F. T. Marinetti, the play co-opts the Futurist to stage in the public art of theater the international contest between war and peace that preceded the Great War and roiled on through the interwar period to the Second World War and beyond. The play presages not only Dickinson's indefatigable labors on behalf of international peace after 1914 but a pervasive sense, in and beyond Bloomsbury, that the Great War marked less a “break” than “an intensification of many old struggles,” as Virginia Woolf later described it: interlocking conflicts at home and abroad that the Great War could not and did not resolve. Goldie's panoply of John Bull's clashes at home and abroad not only foregrounds world-shattering technologies from the aeroplane to nuclear energy and the atomic bomb but also stages intra-national, nationalist, international, and transnational rivalries for global resources and power that burst the conventional historiographic bounds both of the 1914–1918 war and, no less, of concerted work toward peace.
