Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9089647528, English, 266 pages, 2018, The Netherlands

The inner force and speed of Futurism has produced waves propagating over the decades and through history. Cinema, especially, invented in its modern form at the end of the 19th Century and booming in the latter decades, is coeval to the Futurist movement’s early disruptive actions. Being a complex medium to handle, but also very apt to render the rapidly changing dynamics, it easily attracted the avant-garde. Its early adoption as a ‘total’ medium is thoroughly elaborated in the ‘Futurist Cinema manifesto’, reverberating in this heterogeneous collection of papers. Futurist Cinema draws materials from different disciplines, reflecting the “poly-expressiveness“ of the movement, through the lense of media theory, sensorial perception, national culture, movie narrative, dance performance, and various other fields. It is a multi-dimensional scanning of the few films produced or only scripted and what they represent. The text is divided into three sections: the theoretical “Joyful Deformation of the Universe”, the analytical ”Daily Filmed Exercises Designed to Free Us from Logic“, and, finally, the ontological “Shop Windows of Filmed Ideas, Events, Types, Object, etc.”. We should acknowledge how these elements continue to resonate a century on, through, for example, online violence, accelerationism and emerging technologies like tactile screens.