Futurist images for your ear: or, how to listen to visual poetry, painting, and silent cinema

Abstract

This paper discusses the crucial tension between expression and experience in the Futurist art-action programme, by focusing on its noisy dimension. In the 1910s, the Futurists shocked the bourgeois audience with clamorous happenings and educated their senses towards a new aesthetics of mixed sensations. Noise was a key ingredient in their avant-garde programme. The paper demonstrates how Futurist art even in its most visual expressions remains fundamentally an art for the ears. Three types of images – typographical, painterly, and cinematic – are analysed from an aural perspective, in order to highlight the synaesthetic mechanisms at work in the Futurist art experience. The main concern is to point out how the Futurists applied visual effects to actually enhance the auditory sensibility of people. This leads to the conclusion that Futurism does not need sound in order to be noisy, because even in its ‘silent’ forms it is noisy in its essence.

Keywords:

• synaesthesia
• Futurist art
• Futurist cinema
• Marinetti
• Russolo
• Ginanni-Corradini brothers
• chromophony
• polyexpressiveness

Acknowledgements

This text is a revised version of ‘Futuristische geluiden: vloekende kleuren+chromatische akkoorden+lawaaikunst+zang tumb tumb+gefilmde analogieën’, published in the Dutch media historical journal Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 6, no. 2 (December 2003): 10–33. I would like to thank my fellow editors for allowing me to re-use the material in a new context. I also would like to thank Tarja Laine for her critical feedback.