Futurist ideas yielded innovative insights into the meaning of technology in relation to art, foreshadowing new possible forms and visual strategies for the art of film-making. The Futurists were among the first avant-garde artists to recognize a regime of the spectacle and of the image in modernity, though theirs was definitely an anti-naturalistic approach. Futurist imagery involved the discovery of new ways of watching and looking. Indeed, Futurism’s obsession with speed and movement made the moving image of film seem like the ideal Futurist medium. The Futurist myth of the machine, which allows speed, fast movement, and visual reproduction, is, to be sure, highly relevant to cinema, as is the Futurist idea of the machine as a device that helps to enlarge human experience, both in terms of expression and in terms of perception. However, despite the strong affinity between Futurism and cinema, very few Futurist films were made; Thaïs (1916), by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, is remarkable in that it is the only fairly well-preserved full-length Futurist film. Reference for this essay is the conserved version of the film available at the La Cinémathèque française, which is a tinted copy that includes French intertitles.

Bragaglia, who is best known for his theory and practice of photodynamism, wrote the screenplay and filmed Thaïs in collaboration with Riccardo Cassano for the Novissima Film production company; the company was founded by Bragaglia and Emidio De Medio in September 1916.