#emilio settimelli

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Our films will be:

Cinematic analogies that use reality directly as one of the two elements of the analogy. Example: If we should want to express the anguished state of one of our protagonists, instead of describing it in its various phases of suffering, we would give an equivalent impression with the sight of a jagged and cavernous mountain. The mountains, seas, woods, cities, crowds, armies, squadrons, aeroplanes will often be our formidable expressive words: the universe will be our vocabulary. Example: We want to give a sensation of strange cheerfulness: we show a chair cover flying comically around an enormous coat stand until they decide to join. We want to give the sensation of anger: we fracture the angry man into a whirlwind of little yellow balls. We want to give the anguish of a hero who has lost his faith and lapsed into a dead neutral skepticism: we show the hero in the act of making an inspired speech to a great crowd; suddenly we bring on Giovanni Giolitti who treasonably stuffs a thick forkful of macaroni into the hero’s mouth, drowning his winged words in tomato sauce.

We shall add color to the dialogue by swiftly, simultaneously showing every image that passes through the actors’ brains. Example: representing a man who will say to his woman: “You’re as lovely as a gazelle,” we shall show the gazelle. Example: if a character says, “I contemplate your fresh and luminous smile as a traveler after a long rough trip contemplates the sea from high on a mountain,” we shall show traveler, sea, mountain.

This is how we shall make our characters as understandable as if they talked.

Cinematic poems, speeches, and poetry. We shall make all of their component images pass across the screen. Example: “Canto dell’amore” [Song of Love] by Giosuè Carducci:

In their German strongholds perched Like falcons meditating the hunt We shall show the strongholds, the falcons in ambush.

From the churches that raise long marble arms to heaven, in prayer to God Prom the convents between villages and towns crouching darkly to the sound of bells like cuckoos among far-spaced trees singing boredoms and unexpected joys... We shall show churches that little by little are changed into imploring women, God beaming down from on high, the convents, the cuckoos, and so on.

Example: “Sogno d’Estate” [Summer’s Dream] by Giosuè Carducci:

Among your ever-sounding strains of battle, Homer, I am conquered by the warm hour: I bow my head in sleep on Scamander’s bank, but my heart flees to the Tyrrhenian Sea. We shall show Carducci wandering amid the tumult of the Achaians, deftly avoiding the galloping horses, paying his respects to Homer, going for a drink with Ajax to the inn, The Red Scamander, and at the third glass of wine his heart, whose palpitations we ought to see, Pops out of his jacket like a huge red balloon and flies over the Gulf Of Rapallo. This is how we make films out of the most secret movements of genius.

Thus we shall ridicule the works of the passéist poets, transforming to the great benefit of the public the most nostalgically monotonous weepy poetry into violent, exciting, and highly exhilarating spectacles.

[Photo from the Futurist movie Thais] Cinematic simultaneity and interpenetration of different times and places. We shall project two or three different visual episodes at the same time, one next to the other. Cinematic musical researches (dissonances, harmonies, symphonies of gestures, events, colors, lines, etc.). Dramatized states of mind on film. Daily exercises in freeing ourselves from mere photographed logic. Filmed dramas of objects. (Objects animated, humanized, baffled, dressed up, impassioned, civilized, dancing—objects removed from their normal surroundings and put into an abnormal state that, by contrast, throws into relief their amazing construction and nonhuman life.) Show windows of filmed ideas, events, types, objects, etc. Congresses, flirts, fights and marriages of funny faces, mimicry, etc. Example: a big nose that silences a thousand congressional fingers by ringing an ear, while two policemen’s moustaches arrest a tooth. Filmed unreal reconstructions of the human body. Filmed dramas of disproportion (a thirsty man who pulls out a tiny drinking straw that lengthens umbilically as far as a lake and dries it up instantly.) Potential dramas and strategic plans of filmed feelings. Linear, plastic, chromatic equivalences, etc., of men, women, events, thoughts, music, feelings, weights, smells, noises (with white lines on black we shall show the inner, physical rhythm of a husband who discovers his wife in adultery and chases the lover - rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs). Filmed words-in-freedom in movement (synoptic tables of Iyric values—dramas of humanized or animated letters—orthographic dramas—typographical dramas—geometric dramas—numeric sensibility, etc.). Painting + sculpture + plastic dynamism + words-in-freedom + composed noises [intonarumori] + architecture + synthetic theatre = Futurist cinema.