Hey there, I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater,
and today futurism’s so bright… the manifestoes continue!
So does the grudge match between realism and newer forms which argue that,
if you really want to show how weird and visceral and terrifying contemporary life is,
a bourgeois family arguing in a living room just. doesn’t. cut it.
This time, the argument gets dangerous.
We’ll look at futurism, a multiple-manifesto-having
Italian, and later a Russian, movement
that got going in the early decades of the 20th century.
And then we’ll stay in Russia to hang with the constructivist director Vsevolod Meyerhold,
who was Stanislavski’s opponent and ultimate inheritor.
Lights up!
[INTRO MUSIC]
Futurism is an Italian movement that got going in…France.
In 1909, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti published a manifesto
on the front page of the newspaper, Le Figaro.
Nice placement!
The manifesto called for a form of art that would be as fast,
exciting, mechanical, and macho as a race car.
Marinetti later named this idea "automobilism."
Art, he wrote, “can be nothing but violence, cruelty, injustice.”
He called for a form that would
“sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.”
And, okay, that sounds kind of fun,
but Marinetti also called for an art that glorifies
“war—the world’s only hygiene— militarism, patriotism,
the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,
beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”
He wrote, “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,
will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.”
Basically, as the name implies - futurism - wanted a total break from the past.
But… it's probably also important to note that Marinetti
also co-wrote the original Italian Fascist Manifesto,
and founded the “Futurist Political Party,”
which would later be subsumed into Mussolini’s political party.
So...Yeah.
That “total break with the past” has really different theoretical
underpinnings in comparison to, say, dada.
Which was kind of about, ya know, pulling pieces of paper out of a hat.
Futurism was the rare art movement that seemed to embrace war,
and a lot of Futurist artists got excited about Mussolini when he showed up.
Futurism even became the house style of Italian fascism.
Now maybe you’re thinking...uncool!
WELL - Marinetti doesn’t care!
He writes, “You have objections?—Enough! Enough!
We know them… We’ve understood!
But who cares? We don’t want to understand!
Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!”
Marinetti woulda’ fit right in on Twitter...
SO! What was Futurist theater like?
It definitely wasn’t realistic.
Marinetti vented his disgust with both “historical reconstruction (pastiche
or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction of our daily life.”
Futurists said goodbye to all that.
The first Futurist play was “Poupees Electriques” or “Electric Dolls,”
a play about a bourgeois couple and their lookalike robots.
Marinetti recited his manifesto in the middle of it.
The audience hated it. Really hated it.
During the second act, the play included a bunch of gross digestion noises,
they pretty much rioted.
Futurists liked the music hall and the variety theater, too.
Marinetti wrote that “the authors, actors,
and technicians of the Variety Theatre [had] only one reason for existing and triumphing:
incessantly to invent new elements of astonishment.”
They produced variety evenings called serates, kind of like dada, but less playful.
These evenings had music and poetry and--
surprise, surprise! -- the reading of more manifestoes.
In Futurism, the manifesto was also a form of art.
There were plays, too, called sintesi.
The important thing to know about sintesi is that they were short and they were fast.
There’s one called “Detonation,” and its main character is… a bullet.
Like, an actual bullet fired from an actual gun.
No guy in a bullet costume! Just a guy, with a firearm, with a bullet in it.
Marinetti’s idea was to take conventional plays,
like “Othello” and shrink them down to playlets that were one minute long.
Envy!
Handkerchief!
Adultery?
Strangling!
Wow, efficient!
Marinetti was definitely against psychological
realism and instead promoted what he called “fiscofollia,” a crazy kind of body movement.
The other important thing about Futurist theater was that the audience was supposed to get
in on the action, but not voluntarily or happily.
To get spectators going, Marinetti had some ideas:
“Spread a powerful glue on some of the seats,” he wrote,
“so that the male or female spectator will stay glued down and make everyone laugh…
sell the same ticket to ten people: traffic jam, bickering, and wrangling…
offer free tickets to gentlemen or ladies who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric
and likely to provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women, or other freakishness.
Sprinkle the seats with dust to make people itch and sneeze, etc.”
Marinetti was a bad person.
Futurism also took off in Russia, though it had a much different feel there—more
literary, more philosophical.
Still, Russian Futurism also wanted a complete break with the past, and embrace of modernity.
No fascism to speak of here, though -- Russian futurism drew much more from
communism, and the Soviet state.
Cue: horseshoe theory comments here.
In “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,”
a 1912 manifesto written in part by the playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky,
the Russian futurists said that we should “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc.,
etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.”
Mayakovsky was also against the slaughter of World War I, though, so … that’s a nice change of pace!
The Russian Futurists wanted new words and new forms,
and they didn’t mind if the audience booed them for it.
The most fervent years of Russian futurism were before the Russian Revolution,
but its most famous theater performance happened after,
when avant-garde theater and avant-garde politics had a brief honeymoon.
Help us out, Thought Bubble:
In 1917, during the October Revolution, which actually happened in November,
a group of Bolsheviks took over the Winter Palace where the provisional government was meeting.
Originally, the palace was defended by three thousand soldiers,
but most of the soldiers skedaddled when the Bolsheviks arrived,
so it wasn’t exactly a pitched battle.
Three years later, in 1920, the director Nikolai Evreinov created a play about it:
“The Storming of the Winter Palace,”
which was an all-night show staged onsite in front of a hundred thousand spectators.
It included 2,500 performers, including the entire class of the Imperial Ballet,
as well as a bunch of tanks and armored cars.
This wasn’t really a reenactment.
Or it was a reenactment in a Bolshevik kind of way:
It ignored most of the details of the real event,
like the fact that it had actually happened during the day and that there was almost no opposition.
Actors playing the workers gathered on a red stage to the left,
and actors playing the provisional
government assembled in a white stage on the right.
Then the actors playing the workers swarmed the white stage chanting, “Lenin, Lenin!”
There was a car chase, and shadow plays in the windows of the palace.
The performance ended with a cannonball being fired from a ship and then a bunch of fireworks.
Lenin for all!
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
What’s neat about this performance is that it’s one of the first we’ve talked about
that was captured on film.
Obviously, this is longer than most futurist performances,
but it’s reminiscent of futurism’s total break with past,
embrace of modern technology, modern weaponry, and revolutionary politics,
use of multimedia and multiple focus, and interest in spectacle and astonishment over psychology.
Futurism kept going for a couple more decades in Italy.
But it was the preferred aesthetic of the fascist regime, not a rebellious countercultural style.
Unsurprisingly, young artists were way less into it after World War I.
Meanwhile, Stalin pretty much shut down Futurism in Russia.
He preferred propaganda that glorified the present —and his regime—
to dreamy glimpses of future utopia.
But we can still feel futurism’s influence in theater today,
in multimedia performance, multifocal performance,
works that mix actors and audience together,
and works that veer away from psychology and logic.
Now, we’ve talked about manifesto-and-playwrights, but before we wrap up for today,
we should talk about a famous director, and producer from the period, Vsevolod Meyerhold,
who only took from futurism what he needed, and nothing more.
Meyerhold was born in 1874.
He was a law student and an accomplished violinist who fell in love with the theater,
eventually joining Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theater.
In the famous production of “The Seagull,” Meyerhold played Konstantin,
the young writer who keeps telling everyone, “We need new forms!”
And Meyerhold himself believed that, too!
He and Stanislavski clashed often, as Stanislavski’s wanted realism
and Meyerhold wanted a theater that was unashamedly theatrical and dreamlike.
Meyerhold left the company after four years.
Meyerhold went on to direct for the Imperial theaters,
and that’s where he started to pioneer new trends in staging,
like eliminating curtains and backdrops,
and leaving the house lights on throughout the show.
Like the futurists, he loved the fairground and the variety theater,
and he incorporated elements of circus and commedia dell’arte into his productions.
But he wasn’t a fan of the Italian futurists.
When Marinetti came to Russia, Meyerhold wrote that his visit
reinforced the anarchy that was “an unhappy tradition of the Italian theater.”
Meyerhold didn’t dig the wild, uncontrolled, deliberately-offending-the-audience style.
He believed that without self-restraint, there is no craftsmanship.
But restraint didn’t mean realism or naturalism.
In his essay on “The Fairground Booth,” he wrote,
“When man appeared on the stage, why did he submit blindly to the director
who wanted to transform the actor into a puppet of the naturalistic school?
The actor of today will not understand that the duty of the comedian and the mime
is to transport the spectator to a world of make-believe.”
He believed that the truth of life would not be found IN realistic surfaces, but beneath them.
Only theater at its most theatrical, fantastical,
and acrobatic could help an audience understand it.
He emphasized the primacy of the director rather than the play, writing,
“A play is simply the excuse for the revelation of its
theme on the level at which that revelation may appear vital today.”
Meyerhold is also famous for pioneering a
new method of actor training that he called biomechanics.
Biomechanics has been linked to ideas like Fordism and
Taylorism that were all about how to make the worker more efficient.
But in aesthetic terms, we can link it to constructivism, another modern-art “ism.”
In keeping with early Russian revolutionary goals,
constructivism glorified industrialization and mechanization—
no expressionist anxieties at all —transforming theater into a meaning-factory.
Constructivist stage designs, for example, looked kinda like theatrical assembly lines,
covered in treadmills and windmills.
Initially, Meyerhold collaborated with the Bolsheviks
and was briefly an official of the theater division
before the government pushed drama in a more conservative direction.
Meyerhold founded his own theater and continued to produce plays,
but socialist realism, the favored style of Soviet Russia,
was never really his thing.
He was accused of bourgeois formalism, and in 1938, the government liquidated his theater.
“The pitiful and wretched thing called socialist realism had nothing in common with art,”
Meyerhold is reported to have said.
“In hunting formalism you have eliminated art.”
That didn’t go over well.
He was arrested, tortured, and then secretly killed by firing squad.
In exploring theater and modernism, we’ve seen a lot of conflict and riots,
but this is one of the first examples in which aesthetic choices can actually get you killed.
No jokes about that.
Next time we’ll be heading to America for a look at some mid-century moderns:
Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein.
Until then, a curtain is a curtain is a curtain is a curtain.
Unless it’s not.
Crash Course Theater is filmed in Indianapolis, Indiana,
and is produced with the help of all of these very nice people.
Our animation team is Thought Cafe.
Crash Course exists thanks to the generous support of our patrons at Patreon.
Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows like Origin of Everything.
Origin of Everything, hosted by Danielle Bainbridge, Ph.D.,
explores the history behind stuff in our everyday life,
from the words we use, the pop culture we love,
the technology that gets us through the day, or the identities we give ourselves.