The Radio
F.T.Marinetti & Pino Masnata
Published September 22, 1933 in Gazzetta del Popolo as Manifesto futurista della radio and on October 1, 1933 as Manifesto della radio in Futurismo
Italian version
English translation may be found in Futurism. An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Whittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 292-295.
La radia must not be
- theater because radio has killed the theater already defeated by sound drama
- cinema because cinema is dying (a) from rancid sentimentalism of subject matter (b) from realism that involves even certain simultaneous syntheses (c) from infinite technical complications (d) from fatal banalizing collaborationism (e) from reflected brilliance inferior to the self-emitted brilliance of radio-television
- books because the book which is guilty of having made humanity myopic implies something heavy strangled stifled fossilized and frozen (only the great freeword tableaux shall live, the only poetry that needs to be seen)
La radia abolishes
- the space and stage necessary to theater including Futurist synthetic theater (action unfolding on a fixed and constant stage) and to cinema (actions unfolding on very rapid variable simultaneous and always realistic stages)
- time
- unity of action
- dramatic character
- the audience as self-appointed judging mass systematically hostile and servile always against the new always retrograde
La radia shall be
- Freedom from all point of contact with literary and artistic tradition. Any attempt to link la radia with tradition is grotesque
- A new art that begins where theater cinema and narrative end
- The immensification of space. No longer visible and framable the stage becomes universal and cosmic
- The reception amplification and transfiguration of vibrations emitted by living beings living or dead spirits dramas of wordless noise-states
- The reception amplification and transfigurahon of vibrations emitted by matter. Just as today we listen to the song of the forest and the sea so tomorrow shall we be seduced by the vibrations of a diamond or a flower
- A pure organism of radio sensations
- An art without time or space without yesterday or tomorrow. The possibility of receiving broadcast stations situated in various time zones and the lack of light will destroy the hours of the day and night. The reception and amplification of the light and the voices of the past with thermoionic valves will destroy time
- The synthesis of infinite simultaneous actions
- Human universal and cosmic art as voice with a true psychology-spirituality of the sounds of the voice and of silence
- The characteristic life of every noise and the infinite variety of concrete/abstract and real/dreamt through the agency of a people of noises
- Struggles of noises and of various distances that is spatial drama joined with temporal drama
- Words in freedom. The word has gradually developed into a collaborator of mime and gesture. The word must be recharged with all its power hence an essential and totalitarian word which in Futurist theory is called word-atmosphere. Words in freedom children of the aesthetics of machines contain an orchestra of noises and noise-chords (realistic and abstract) which alone can aid the colored and plastic word in the lightning-fast representation of what is not seen. If he does not wish to resort to words in freedom the radiast must express himself in that freeword style which is already widespread in avant-garde novels and newspapers that typically swift quick synthetic simultaneous freeword style
- Isolated word repetitions of verbs in the infinitive
- Essential art
- Gastronomic amorous gymnastic etc. music
- The utilization of noises sounds chords harmonies musical or noise simultaneities of silence all with their graduations of appaggiatura crescendo and decrescendo which will become strange brushes for painting delimiting and coloring the infinite darkness of la radia by giving squareness roundness spheric in short
- The utilization of interference between stations and of the birth and evanescence of the sounds
- The delimitation and geometric construction of silence
- The utilization of the various resonances of voice or sound in order to give a sense of the size of the place in which the voice is uttered. The characterization as the silent as semisilent atmosphere that surrounds and colors a given voice sound or noise
- The elimination of the concept or the illusion of an audience which has always had even for books a deforming and damaging influence.
The details of this article clearly indicate the affects of sounds and noises from stage theater and power of human ability to hear to give a sense of drama and changes of a dying cinema becomes a realistic factor for most futurist.