Classic English Futurism & Fiume

Futurism & Fiume · Unit 1 of 6

The manifesto is a performance

In 1909 an Italian poet put a poem on the front page of a newspaper and called it a . It was written to be shouted. In this unit you will read three manifestos, learn the grammar they use, write your own, and perform it on camera.

  • Reading
  • Grammar: want to · will · imperatives · comparatives
  • Writing
  • Pronunciation: stress
  • Oral presentation

01Paris, 20 February 1909

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was an Italian poet, born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1876. He wrote in both Italian and French. On 20 February 1909 the Paris newspaper Le Figaro printed his "Founding Manifesto of " on its front page. It had already appeared in a few small Italian newspapers, but the front page of Le Figaro made it famous across Europe.

A manifesto is not a story and not an essay. It does not try to prove anything. It . It tells the reader what a group loves, what it hates, and what it is going to do. Marinetti's manifesto has eleven numbered points. You will read all eleven.

Tap any to see its meaning in English, Chinese and Thai, and to hear it. The Words button at the top lists them all.

Front page of Le Figaro, Paris, 20 February 1909. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica). Public domain.

02Reading: the Founding Manifesto

Read the eleven points aloud, quietly, before you answer. Notice how each one begins, and notice what Marinetti loves and what he wants to destroy.

F. T. Marinetti · Founding Manifesto of Futurism, 1909 · all eleven points · translated for this lesson from the French text in Le Figaro

  1. We want to sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and .
  2. Courage, and will be the essential elements of our poetry.
  3. Until today, literature has praised thoughtful stillness, and sleep. We want to praise aggressive movement, , the running step, the , the slap and the punch.
  4. We declare that the of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, its decorated with great pipes like snakes with explosive breath, a roaring car that seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the .
  5. We want to sing of the man at the , whose ideal shaft passes through the Earth, which is itself hurled along the circuit of its orbit.
  6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, brilliance and generosity, to increase the enthusiastic of the elements.
  7. There is no more beauty except in struggle. No masterpiece without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent on unknown forces, to force them to lie down before man.
  8. We stand on the last of the centuries! Why look behind us, when we must break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have already created eternal, ever-present speed.
  9. We want to glorify war, the world's only ; ; ; the destructive gesture of the ; the beautiful Ideas that kill; and for woman.
  10. We want to museums and libraries, and to fight , and every opportunistic and useful .
  11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure or by ; of railway stations that greedily swallow smoking snakes; of factories hanging from the clouds by the twisting threads of their smoke; of bridges that leap over rivers like giant , flashing in the sun like knives; of adventurous steamships that sniff the horizon; of broad-chested that paw the rails like enormous steel horses; and of the gliding flight of aeroplanes, whose flap in the wind like flags and seem to applaud like an enthusiastic crowd.

Standing on the top of the world, we throw, once again, our to the stars!

The last line of the manifesto

Write at least 20 characters first.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, F. T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini outside the offices of Le Figaro, Paris, 1912. Public domain.

03Grammar: the manifesto voice

Look back at how each point begins. A manifesto uses four patterns again and again. Together they make the voice sound sure, loud and impossible to argue with.

Four patterns

PatternUse it toFrom the texts
We want to + verbsay what you desireWe want to praise aggressive movement.
will + verbmake a promise or a predictionWe will sing of great crowds.
verb first, no subject (imperative)give an orderThrow Pushkin overboard! · Why look behind us? → Do not look back!
more + adjective + than · adjective + -er thansay the new beats the oldA racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

Careful: want to is followed by the base verb (want to sing, not want to singing or want sing). Short adjectives take -er (fast → faster); long ones take more (beautiful → more beautiful). Never use both (more faster is wrong).

Practice: rewrite each sentence

04Reading: The Art of Noises

Luigi Russolo was a Futurist painter. On 11 March 1913 he published an open letter to the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella called The Art of Noises. In it he argued that the music of the modern age must be made from the noises of the modern city. Then he built machines to make those noises.

Luigi Russolo · The Art of Noises, 1913 · translated for this lesson

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today Noise is triumphant and rules over the feelings of people.

Let us cross a great modern city with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will enjoy telling apart the of water, air or gas in metal pipes, the of motors that breathe and pulse like animals, the beating of valves, the up and down of , the of saws, the jumping of the on its rails, the crack of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags.

Luigi Russolo and his assistant Ugo Piatti with their intonarumori ("noise-intoners") in their studio in Milan, 1913. Published in L'arte dei rumori, 1916. Public domain.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Write at least 20 characters first.

05The mirror: Moscow, December 1912

Futurism did not stay in Italy. In Russia, a group of young poets published their own manifesto in December 1912. It was signed by David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. Its title was A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.

The Russian Futurists later sided with the Revolution of 1917, on the far left. Marinetti moved to the far right. Yet the two manifestos sound almost the same. Read two lines:

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, 1912 · translated for this lesson

Only we are the face of our Time.

Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. from the Steamship of .

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), one of the four poets who signed A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Portrait, 1918.
Write at least 20 characters first.

06Ten years later: Fiume

In September 1919 another Italian poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio, took control of the port city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia). He arrived at the head of a column of soldiers who called themselves legionaries. For sixteen months he ran the city like a theatre and a barracks at the same time: speeches from the balcony every day, the crowd shouting its answers in chorus, oaths, marches and parades in uniform, concerts and festivals. He the whole population as his audience and his army. Point 9 of the manifesto, war, militarism and patriotism, became daily street life. Marinetti himself went to Fiume that September.

In Unit 2 you will see how the ideas in this unit, the loud voice, the uniform, the marching crowd, the , became a whole city's daily life. Keep your manifesto: you will need its voice.

D'Annunzio drops messages tied to Italian-flag ribbons over Trieste. Drawing by Achille Beltrame, La Domenica del Corriere, 29 August 1915. Before Fiume, newspapers were already turning D'Annunzio's stunts into pictures like this one. Public domain.
Write at least 20 characters first.

07Writing: your manifesto

Invent an art movement and write its manifesto in ten lines. One good way: write the manifesto for the opposite of Futurism. If Marinetti loved speed, noise and machines, your movement might love slowness, silence, rain, gardens or old books.

Ideas for a name: Slowism, the Rain Poets, the Lamplight Movement, Quietism. Or invent your own.

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Name of your movement one to three words

0 words

08Speaking: perform it

A manifesto is read aloud. In English, the important words in a sentence are : said louder, longer and a little higher. The small words (the, on, of, we, our, to) are said quickly and softly. This rhythm is what makes a speech sound strong.

Mark the stress

Tap the words you think are stressed in Marinetti's last line. The | marks show where to pause.

Before the camera

  1. Mark your text. Copy your manifesto onto paper. Underline the stressed words and draw | where you will pause.
  2. Slow down. Speeches feel fast to the speaker. Read at about half your normal speed and pause fully at each |.
  3. Fall at the end. Each declaration ends with the voice going down: We want to praise ↘silence. A falling end sounds certain. A rising end sounds like a question.
  4. Look up. Look into the camera at the start and end of each line, not at the paper.
  5. Record three times. Use your phone. Keep the best. In class you will perform it live, in 60 to 90 seconds.

09Vocabulary

The twelve words to learn from this unit. Tap 🔊 to hear each one.

10Send your work

Words