ABSTRACT

This chapter reasserts the previous chapters’ linkage of technological invention and creative innovation in its discussion of Futurist filmmaking and abstract art. The chapter’s central position is that the various forms of newness defining avant-garde film and cinematography, especially in the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Ginanni-Corradini brothers, and the Russian painter Léopold Survage, were influenced by innovation in the nineteenth century. From the Futurists’ appropriation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s work on color music and the color organ, to their adoption of philosophical theories developed by Nietzsche and Lessing, new inventions and ideas from the 1800s continued to serve as a source of interest and point of connection for pioneers in art and cinema working in the early 1900s.