"Nuts and Bolts: Machine Made Man in Films from the Collection" Film Program
The Museum of Modern Art
This event has ended.
In his essay "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," published February 20, 1909, in the French newspaper "Le Figaro," Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) called for a mass cultural movement that would reject the sober and genteel conventions of the bourgeois world and embrace the speed, technology, and dynamism of the early twentieth century. Thus was born the cultural, political, and ideological movement known as Futurism. The Futurists—a loose collection of painters, writers, musicians and filmmakers—promoted an unsentimental aesthetic perception inspired by technology and the machine age. In his manifesto, Marinetti breathlessly announced the coming Futurist revolution, in which the heretofore dark night is “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 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.
[Image: Marcel L’Herbier "L'Inhumaine" (1924)]
Media
Schedule
from November 01, 2009 to January 02, 2010