Marinecktie by Pia Santaklaus

13 December 2008

Hi Brett, I enjoyed today’s Cinematheque session and offer some thoughts:

The first film was the Italian documentary FUTURISM (1971) which presented an excellent array of Futurist artists, their art and history, in a concise and informative, fast-paced style. It set the tone for the rest of the session.

As I now understand it, Futurism developed and sprouted around the same period as Cubism, preceding and inspiring later movements such as Art Deco, Dada and Surrealism. It more or less began in 1909 when Marinetti published his ‘Futurist Manifesto’ in France. In it he blasted and rebelled against nature, the establishment and everything old, while exulting youth, modernity, technology, speed, innovation and power. Other mostly Italian males agreed with this philosophy and joined the movement. The Futurists also glorified violence describing it as “the world’s only hygiene” and scorned all womankind. In time, Marinetti and other Italian Futurists adopted Fascist leanings becoming supporters of Mussolini which may have something to do with the seeming suppression of the movement since.

In what feels like hypocrisy, I believe it transpired that Marinetti eventually moved to the old city of Rome, became less radical and less combative by marrying, taking an academic position, promoting religious art and even espousing and declaring Jesus as a Futurist. With the death of Marinetti in 1944, Futurism expired.

The second film, BOCCIONI’S BIKE (1981) was a very impressive animation. I imagine it a real labour of love for the maker who with such a simple story managed to convey so many elements of the Futurist ‘movement’. He’s gone the full cycle! (Ha!)

Now I’ll focus on the third film, MARINETTI (1968) which left me with a hazy impression. The director Albie Thoms was there today to introduce the movie he’d made 40 years ago. It must have felt quite surreal for him to watch his own work on the big screen after all this time. I imagine he spent a lot of money restoring his film so that a brand new print might exist. I think it was a worthy exercise so that now he can reach new audiences (like us) from younger generations.

The film title was named in honor of the Italian poet and founder of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944).

MARINETTI (1969, shot in 1968) has with the passing of time become an important document, being one of the few Australian full-length feature films of the late 1960s in the experimental, psychadelic, avante-garde genres. It is an audio-visual ‘trip’ that used now-dated camera techniques and angles, frequent nudity and a complex multi-layered soundtrack to build itself into an ultimately difficult, unreassuring but necessary piece.

Historically, this ‘time capsule’ is fascinating. We see images from a long-gone Sydney Australia. In one scene, on a breakfast table we see a packet of Kellogg’s cereal (Coco Pops) and on the streets outside we see the public transport (Sydney buses), just two of the many images that remind us just how much things have changed and yet stayed the same.

I read somewhere that Albie Thoms once said the film “had no message, no revelation for the world…”; perhaps this film was made for his own personal gratification or as an indulgent portrait. In many ways it looks like a glorified home movie. The title may lead some to imagine this is a tribute to the Italian Futurist Marinetti; it may be, or perhaps it’s merely a springboard for director Thoms to unravel his own agenda, the same way Fellini claimed to resurrect and pay tribute to E.A. POE with TOBY DAMMIT (1968) while all the while only very scant tribute is evident as Fellini’s personal vision indulges his own ends.

MARINETTI opens with an extended, uncomfortable stretch of blackness. Sporadic, instant glimpses and bursts of scratching, flashing light are generated as the eyes stare blankly at the screen for a long while. The ears awaken as we sit in mostly darkness listening to the sound of Albie Thoms’ voice in a recorded conversation about Marinetti.

The flashes of white light become more and more pronounced; green flashes are gradually introduced. Around 10 minutes into the film we see full colour… the world of this community begins in the living room of an inner-city Victorian terrace. At the time (around 1968), those old suburbs and that style of architecture were not as fashionable as they’ve become today, making them a good, cheap, chic choice of housing for artistic communities to inhabit.

At one point in the film we hear mention of T.S. Eliot’s disjointed and prophetic poem ‘The Waste Land’ (1922). Perhaps the unkempt, crude, gritty, dissonant, unelegant persons and real inner city wasteland backdrops parallel and conjure Eliot’s impressions. In another scene you might catch a glimpse of TS Eliot amongst the super-fast edits (micro-seconds) of what appear to be the director’s inspirations which included amongst many others The Beatles and Ezra Pound. (Ezra Pound helped Eliot with ‘The Waste Land’ and in 1925 Eliot dedicated ‘The Waste Land’ to Ezra Pound).

It has been noted Eliot chose the title ‘The Waste land’ as an adjunct to Jessie L. Weston’s book ‘From Ritual to Romance’ (1920) which alludes to the sterile land of the Fisher King in the grail legend. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ includes a section ‘The Burial of the Dead’ which alludes to the Anglican ‘The Book of Common Prayer’. Here the narrator (as ‘Son of man’) includes lines of Old Testament allusions and finds himself in a desert. We recall the Old Testament God telling the prophet Ezekiel Israel will become desolate, broken and cities will lay in waste, while in Ecclesiastes, God warns the Jews to remember their youth, for in old age "fears shall be in the way" and "then shall the dust return to the earth as it was". In both Ezekiel 6:4 and Ecclesiastes 12:5-7, human failure seems pre-destined.

On a happier note, the film soundtrack/sound montage is compounded with a multi-tracked, multi-layered, psychedelic, jazz, avant-garde soundscape that works well with the images and the added voice-over narration. Sound quality was pristine and included in the mesh, snippets of at least 2 Beatles songs: Good Day Sunshine (1966) and With A Little Help From My Friends (1967). Nice touch.

Following the Futurists’ philosophy, Thoms used strong light and movement in this creation. Particularly as it progresses into the second half, the film revealed even greater intensity of light, colour and movement.

Hard to watch, now-dated, cheap n’ cheesy camera techniques and effects such as fisheye lenses, garish colour filters, fast in-out zooming, spinning camerawork, slide and film projections and more, imbue MARINETTI with a 1965-1967 Swinging London aura. (Australia was a little behind in those days). It reminded me of films on Pink Floyd’s 1967 experimental light-sound shows at London’s UFO club.

MARINETTI is unattractive, uncommercial and strewn with lascivious content, perhaps for perv value or an opportunity to shoot some ‘tits 'n’ ass’. Sex keeps selling and I would guestimate that female presence in the film outscreened male by 9:1. Unfortunately, in today’s less ‘radical’ climate, most of the femmes in the film seem to take on a loose, lost, lamentable lustre.

Many shaky images rest over the melancholy male voice-over that recites supposedly profound lyrical insights; this narrator provokes with words like “Come!” and “Enjoy!” as females writhe and pose in sensual scenarios.

Indulgent, pretentious, exploitative and dated, MARINETTI is nevertheless a brilliant document of a collective of relatively youthful men and women (mostly women) in a slightly claustrophobic circle in a time when very few real ‘gods’ (eg Lennon-McCartney) walked the earth, while millions of try-hard followers and wannabes polluted and corrupted their afterglow. With some effort, one might see MARINETTI as a film on the creative process, especially the role women might play as muses for men desperately seeking inspiration in the mostly naked flesh of the ‘goddess’. This Robert Gravesian (White Goddess) ‘play’ is magnified by the overabundance of female sexuality which culminates in the resulting child… a product of the union.

Unfortunately, some of these ‘goddesses’ seemed more like ladies of quashed vitality. Sad-eyed sisters of a suburban wasteland lost on a fast track to desolation row. If their role was some kind of muse for the glory of creativity, their limp parading and luxuriating wasn’t convincing enough. These potentially “beautiful people” are old enough to know better - just how ugly one can appear under the suppressive veil of drink and drugs… The true Goddess’s forte is unblemished perfection and strength.

We move on… MARINETTI shows increasing complexity as it goes along. By the 2nd half, the film revealed itself above the status of an ‘anybody can be a filmaker’ film. One could appreciate it for it’s technical skill. The editing became far more impressive and the use of animation overlay and sections of ‘extra’ footage such as the frantic jazzy nightlife cityscape (a highlight), synchronized motorbike routines, gymnastics displays and more, drew the viewer away from the ‘baccanalian boudoir’ and towards other life aspects.

I’ll go out on a limb and add my own personal interpretation of the film. (It may help others…or not). I imagine this movie as a condensed expression of the complete cycle of humanity’s existence. The film opens with blackness and closes with blackness; a full circle is run that we might return ‘home’. Before mankind, we imagine there was nothing but God! (in darkness). We read in the Bible that “in the beginning was the Word” and so we suddenly get ‘words’ in the blackness (we hear the sound of Albie Thom’s talking words). As “the Word was God” (see: Gospel Of John), we may imagine God as filmmaker- 'a creator'. Remembering Genesis and God saying “Let there be light”, a sudden shift from the blackness; the Word is joined by sudden bursts of white light. Subsequent green light in the film may be seen as the creation of nature. We then have the Garden of Eden (?) (a cosy terrace house) followed by humanity appearing one by one and before you know it we are caught in a cycle of birth…sex sex sex sex sex; flesh on flesh and the undeniable generation of new flesh (birth and the young child) continuing the human dilemma. As we near the end, we may seem to abandon sexuality to some degree to focus more on evolutionary skills, techniques and knowledge (seen in the difficult bike synchs, tricky gymnastics and Futurist scribblings and edits). Finally we ‘return’ to a new light (white screen) before we re-enter the void (black screen) where the Word has changed into music though it seems the prophecies wont be denied. Humanity is doomed to wander wasteland Earth forever.

OK, so this is my own philosophizing and hypothesizing and may have nothing at all to do with this film, but for me it’s enough to wax it worthy of another viewing. I recommend you watch this film and see if you can make your own sense of it.

Brett, Thanks for yet another interesting Cinemateque experience. You make great and interesting choices on a very regular basis. Look forward to the next.

Pia Santaklaus

Short Article on Marinetti by Adrian Clement

Albie Thoms’ 1968 experimental Australian film Marinetti, was screened at the Chauvel Cinema on two dates as part of the excellent Chauvel Cinematheque, curated by Brett Garten, and included two short films, including Futurism, a 1971 historical documentary on the Italian Futurists directed by Guido Guerassio, and Boccioni’s Bike, a 1981 animation directed by Skip Battaglia. Seeing how I suggested this program, I thought it is fitting that I write a short article outlining my thoughts on it, having now seen it.



For starters, I think that it’s important to state that Thoms sees his film Marinetti as a tribute or homage to the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), who’s 1908/9 “Futurist Manifesto” kick-started a revolutionary nationalist movement which spanned a wide range of mediums such as painting and sculpture and sound art (Luigi Russolo’s manifesto “The Art of Noises” [1913] and his highly unique and unusual instruments that captured industrial and mechanic sounds are usually what critics point to as the first instance of intentional “noise music”). As the film is a tribute or homage, we can deduce that the film has ties to the Futurist movement in some capacity, whether that be stylistically, structurally, aesthetically and so on.




In twenty minutes, Guerassio seemed to provide a very good overview of the Italian Futurist movement, outlining some of its major artists, historical developments and ideas (including those imbued in Marinetti’s manifesto). It also summed up quite well an idea developed in Futurism which Thoms adopted for Marinetti. In 2003, Thoms stated, in interview with Danni Zuvela for Senses of Cinema, that, in Marinetti, he “adopted the Futurist notion of minimalisation of plot and characterisation”. This gives way to an experience that is largely non-verbal and highly subjective which bypasses verbalised pigeonholing. This was the intention of filmmaker Stanely Kubrick for his brilliant 2001: A Space Odyssey (released in 1968, coincidentally the same year as Thoms’ Marinetti), who in an interview with Playboy Magazine from 1968 argued that verbalising a single message would shackle an audience “to a reality other than their own” and “erect an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation.”



On a stylistic and artistic level, Battaglia’s Boccioni’s Bike was as much a tribute or homage to the painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) as Albie Thoms’ film Marinetti was to Marinetti. In his adventurous nine minute animation, Battaglia depicts a cyclist in a style that alludes to the dynamism of form and style quintessential in Futurist painting and sculpture.The image of a bicycle is pivotal as it references an event which influenced Marinetti’s decision to write the “Futurist Manifesto”. In 1908, Marinetti was involved in a small car accident, after trying to avoid two cyclists on a road just outside Milan. Helping himself out of the ditch, Marinetti vowed to “destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy”. He wrote that the Futurists “will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”

Above everything thing else I appreciated and enjoyed about Thoms’ Marinetti was its brilliant score. Thoms employed “blank verse voice-over narration as part of a sound montage” which mangled together with experimental and/or psychedelic rock music and a large palette of non-musical sound sources. Contextually, Marinetti was released roughly the same era as “The Gift” by The Velvet Underground from White Light/White Heat (1968), which is considered an experimental track because it combined spoken word with rock music, and likewise the same era as Frank Zappa’s avant-rock compositions, which played with language in a similar way to Thoms (but perhaps not as extreme).

In conclusion, just as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) was a translation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) from a Belgian-Congo era context to a Vietnam War context, Marinetti is as if Thoms was looking at 1960s Australia quite literally through the lens of a Futurist. Today I spoke with Brett Garten about how the film was received on its second screening. Roughly forty years since the film was first screen it still received the same response, with half of the audience walking out according to Brett. This time around however, most of the people who left were still hanging about outside until it finished to discuss the film, conveying a much higher level of interest in the film that was perhaps non-existent 40 years prior from an Australian audience.

Futurist Films - this week at Cinematheque

SAT. 13/12 @ !@ NOON & MON. 15/12/08 @6:30PM

FUTURIST FILMS

Director Albie Thoms will introduce this program on Saturday the 13th only.

Futurism Italy/1971/Colour/20mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Guido Guerrasio.

The Italian Futurists were the first artists to celebrate modern technology. This film captures the restless experimental energy of futurism and portrays the work of its major artists: Marinetti, Balla, Boccione, Carra, Russolo, and Severini.

Boccioni’s Bike USA/1981/Colour/9mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Skip Battaglia.

Animated, hand-drawn, lyrical film in the graphic style of the Italian futurists, accompanied by the sounds of a futurist orchestra.

Marinetti Australia/1968/B&W & Colour/80mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Albie Thoms.

A tribute to the Italian futurist poet Marinetti, the film is also a record of the avant-garde art circles in Sydney in the late 1960's. The film's bold structure includes long stretches of black and coloured footage interpersed with extremely rapid flashes of photographed footage, culminating with a statement of the "Hand-Made Film Manifesto" of 1968.