L’Inhumaine and Rhapsody in Steel
| Nov ’09 |
| 2 |
| 4:00 pm |
Set in a highly stylized Art Deco world, an opera singer is the object of a scientist’s obsession in “L’Inhumaine,” which will be shown with “Rhapsody in Steel,” an Impressionistic account of machine activity in a Ford Motor factory. In his essay “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,”published February 20, 1909, in the French newspaper LeFigaro, Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) called for a mass cultural movement that would reject thesober and genteel conventions of the bourgeois world and embrace the speed, technology, and dynamism of the early twentieth century. Marinetti breathlessly announced the coming Futurist revolution, in which the heretofore-darknight would be “illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts.” His veneration of a machine age continued in “War,the World’s Only Hygiene” (1911–15), wherein he averred that the automobiles, trains, and vast machines driving the technology of his day possessed “personalities, souls, or wills,” and presaged the “nonhuman and mechanical being.” Throughout cinematic history mechanical creatures— robots, androids, cyborgs—have reflected both the discord and the connection between man and machine. Inspired by the centenary of the founding of Futurism, and in celebration of Performa 09’s November programming, Nuts and Bolts presents films from MoMA’s collection that reflect Marinetti’s vision of the mechanical being in the machine age: endlessly energetic, productive in the factory, free from sentimentality, immune to disease and death, and yet somehow reflective of the human condition.
Organized by Anne Morra. Part of Nuts and Bolts: Machine Made Man in Films From the Collection. With sincere thanks to Sony Pictures Entertainment, Toho Co. Ltd., Lana Wilson, and RoseLee Goldberg.
Tickets: $10 / $8 Seniors / $6 Students / Children and MoMA Members free at www.moma.org
