We must liberate film as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and nimbler than all the existing arts. We are convinced that only thus can it attain the poly-expressiveness toward which all the most modern artistic researches are moving. Futurist cinema is creating, precisely today, the poly-expressive symphony that just a year ago we announced in our manifesto Weights, Measures, and Prices of Artistic Genius. The most varied elements will go into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of colour, from the conventional line of prose to wordsin- freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In short, it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colours, lines, and forms, a clash of objects and realities thrown together at random.
(Marinetti et al. 1916: 230-231)
The history of 20th-century art and culture has been molded by the concept of avant-garde. Avant-garde movements implied a strong spirit of modernization: among these movements, Italian Futurism pursued an astonishing renovation. Founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on 20 February 1909, when he published The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, Futurism gave birth to a new kind of intellectual collective group, and to radical cultural artifacts that shaped new boundaries among the arts, according to a theoretical paradigm highly focused on contemporary society. With their works, the Futurist artists emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence as emerging features of modern needs during the machine age.
Big changes affected Italy during the second industrial revolution: Futurism was influenced by some of these technological changes, by interpreting the first steps of industrialization in Italy as an opportunity to turn towards novelty and against an obsolete tradition.
According to Marinetti, Futurism is ‘the enthusiastic glorification of scientific discoveries and of the modern mechanism’ (Marinetti 1914: 150); therefore, ‘the triumphant progress of science’ (Boccioni et al. 1910: 62) had determined profound changes within humanity; so, through their enthusiasm for the opportunities of expression given by scientific innovations, the artists could become the spokespeople of freedom.