My friends and I stayed up all night. We were sitting under mosque lamps hanging
from filigreed brass domes, star-studded as our souls, all aglow with the concentrated brilliance of an electric heart.
For many hours, we’d been trailing our age-old indolence back and forth over
richly adorned, oriental carpets, debating at the uttermost boundaries of logic
and filling up masses of paper with our frenetic writings. Immense pride filled our
hearts, for we felt that at that hour we alone were vigilant and unbending, like
magnificent beacons or guards in forward positions, facing an enemy of hostile
stars, which watched us closely from their celestial encampments. Alone we were,
with the floundering drunks, with the uncertain beating of our wings, along the city
walls…
At long last all the myths and mystical ideas are behind us! See there, the Earth’s
very first dawn! Nothing can equal the splendour of the sun’s red sword slicing
through our millennial darkness for the very first time!
We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.
We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.
We intend to glorify aggressive action, life at the double, the slap and the
punching fist.
We wish to glorify war, and beautiful ideas worth dying for.
FTM 1909
We will elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent. The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp.
We rebel against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time.
We must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary life – the iron network
of speedy communications which envelops the Earth: the Earth which itself is hurtling at breakneck speed along the racetrack of its orbit.
How can we remain insensible to the frenetic life of our great cities and to the
exciting new psychology of nightlife?
UB | CC | LR | GB | GS 1910
We shall sing of the great multitudes who are roused up by work, pleasure or rebellion; of the pulsating, nightly ardour of arsenals and shipyards, ablaze with their
violent electric moons; of railway stations, voraciously devouring smoke-belching
serpents; of factories hanging from the clouds by their twisted threads of smoke;
and of the lissome flight of the aeroplane, whose propeller flutters like a flag in the
wind, seeming to applaud, like a crowd excited.
FTM 1909
We will destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients and academic formalism. We want our country free from the endless number of museums that everywhere cover
her like countless graveyards.
UB | CC | LR | GB | GS 1910
Do you really want to waste all your best energies in this unending, futile veneration for the
past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, diminished, trampled down?
FTM 1909
Shit to Florence, Montmartre and Munich. Shit to dictionaries. Good-taste-isms. Orientalism.
Academicism. Shit to Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe. Beshitted dilettantisms. Shit to
Montaigne, Wagner, Beethoven, Whitman and Baudelaire!
GA 1913
Look at us!
We’re not exhausted yet!
Our hearts feel no weariness, for they feed on fire, on hatred, and on speed!
Look around you! Standing tall on the roof of the world, yet again, we hurl
our defiance at the stars!
FTM 1909
Our eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis.
DV 1922
Let the reign of the divine Electric Light begin at last.
FTM 1909
Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!
UB | CC | LR | GB | GS 1910
_
QUOTED MANIFESTOS
FTM 1909 ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
UB|CC|LR|GB|GS 1910 ~ Umberto Boccioni / Carlo Carrà / Luigi Russolo / Giacomo Balla / Gino
Severini, Manifesto of the Futurist Painters
GA 1913 ~ Guillaume Apollinaire, The Futurist Antitradition
DV 1922 ~ Dziga Vertov, WE: Variant of a Manifesto
