What Is Futurism? Definition, Art Movement, Traits & Film Influence

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Published: June 10, 2019 | Last Updated: June 11, 2025

What is Futurism? Definition & Meaning

Futurism is an early 20th-century art movement that celebrated speed, technology, and modernity, rejecting traditional aesthetics in favor of movement, dynamism, and industrial progress.

Key Traits of Futurism

Futurism focused on motion, industry, and modernity. It rejected the past and emphasized:

Movement and speed
Urban energy and mechanical power
Fragmented forms and repetition
Strong diagonals and force lines
Modern technology as inspiration

Futurism in Art: Speed, Machines, and Modern Life

Marinetti with Futurist publications — *Marinetti at his desk surrounded by early Futurist journals. He saw publishing as a political weapon.*

Futurism began in Italy in 1909 when poet, playwright, and political activist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto in the French newspaper Le Figaro. The manifesto praised war, youth, and machines.

Declaration of Futurism text 1909 — *Marinetti’s original Futurist Manifesto (1909) outlined the movement’s violent rejection of the past.*

Marinetti wanted to destroy old forms of art and replace them with work that reflected the energy of the modern world. This included the speed of cars, the strength of machines, and the movement of crowds in a modern city.

The visual style of Futurism came into focus with painters like Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini.

Repetitive motion of a walking dachshund and woman's legs captured in Futurist style — *Balla turns a simple stroll into a study of speed. Legs, tail, and leash multiply in motion, like a film strip caught mid-frame. Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla (1912).*

They broke apart static forms and tried to show time and motion in a single frame. Their paintings often used strong diagonals, repeated contours, and fragmented shapes to create rhythm and movement.

Colorful abstract Futurist painting — *Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913) breaks the rider and bike into rhythmic waves of motion and force.*

Futurist sculpture also followed this focus on movement. Boccioni’s most famous work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), shows a figure striding forward, its contours stretched by motion and speed:

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space sculpture — *Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) captures speed as sculpture, blending body, motion, and force.*

The figure is neither fully human nor mechanical, shaped instead by the wind and force of its own steps.

Futurist Architecture and Graphic Design

The movement extended beyond painting and sculpture. Futurist architecture favored large geometric forms, industrial materials, and a rejection of classical symmetry. Though most early projects remained conceptual, architect Antonio Sant’Elia proposed radical city plans made of glass, steel, and electric networks. His drawings influenced later designs in modernist and brutalist architecture.

Drawing of a Futurist city by Sant’Elia — *Sant’Elia’s architectural sketches imagined vertical cities built from steel, glass, and speed.*

Futurism also shaped early 20th-century graphic design. Bold sans-serif typefaces, diagonal lines, and dense compositions echoed the group’s obsession with energy and disruption. These layouts foreshadowed the work of later designers in Constructivism and the Bauhaus.

Futurism in Literature

Futurism also shaped experimental writing. Marinetti’s poetry and manifestos broke grammar rules, used unusual typography, and mimicked the noise of battle or machinery.

Cover of Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb with dynamic typography — *Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) used fragmented typography and sound-based language to mimic the chaos of modern warfare.*

His book Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) used repetition, fragmentation, and visual spacing to turn text into a kind of visual performance.

These ideas later influenced concrete poetry and experimental typography in art books, Dada, and avant-garde publications.

Politics, War, and the Movement’s Decline

Futurism was closely tied to nationalism and, later, fascism. Marinetti supported Italy’s entry into World War I and remained politically active until his death. Many artists in the group shared this aggressive, pro-war ideology, which contributed to the movement’s decline after the war. Some artists were killed, others moved to different styles. By the 1920s, many had abandoned Futurism or moved into design, film, or architecture.

Influence on Film and Cinematic Style

Though Futurism itself was short-lived, its ideas shaped later movements and visual media. Futurist cinema existed briefly, with few surviving examples. The best-known is Thaïs (1917), an experimental film by Anton Giulio Bragaglia that used sets and lighting to reflect Futurist aesthetics.

Futurism’s strongest legacy in cinema appears indirectly. Its interest in speed, abstraction, and industrial imagery influenced German Expressionism, Soviet montage, and early science fiction.

Metropolis (1927, UFA) reflects Futurist ideas through its synchronized crowd movements, pulsing machinery, and repetitive editing patterns:

The workers march in mechanical unison, elevators rise and fall in loops, and the camera cuts between gears, levers, and bodies in rhythmic sequence. These visual repetitions echo the Futurist obsession with speed, labor, and the industrial city as a living mechanism.

Modern films also show clear visual and rhythmic parallels that echo futurist ideas.

A good example is Brazil (1985, 20th Century Fox), which uses dense industrial design, exposed pipes, and mechanical absurdity to create a bureaucratic world built from machines.

Industrial pipes and staircases inside bureaucratic building in Brazil — Tangled ducts and staircases create a dense industrial interior in Brazil (1985). The layered composition and mechanical absurdity reflect the film’s vision of bureaucratic chaos. **Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.**

This echoes Futurist architecture and its obsession with functional complexity.

Run Lola Run (1998, X-Filme Creative Pool) builds momentum through rapid editing, looping structure, and angled compositions. Its repetition, split screens, and graphic inserts recall the movement’s interest in fragmentation, motion, and speed.

In both films, image and rhythm take priority over plot. That shift reflects the visual logic of early Futurist experiments.

Futurism in Music

Russolo’s intonarumori noise machines — *Russolo and Piatti in their Milan workshop with the intonarumori, machines built to produce industrial sounds.*

Futurism also pushed boundaries in sound. In 1913, Luigi Russolo published The Art of Noises, a manifesto that called for a new kind of music built from the industrial sounds of the modern world. He argued that traditional instruments could no longer express the energy of a mechanized society.

Instead, he created mechanical devices called intonarumori (noise-intoners) to produce controlled bursts of hissing, roaring, buzzing, and grinding. You can listen to them here:

Russolo’s concerts in Paris and Milan used these instruments in live performance, laying the groundwork for noise music, experimental sound design, and early ideas in electronic composition.

Summing Up

Futurism began as a rejection of the old and a celebration of progress. Its artists tried to capture the rhythm of life in a mechanized world, using abstract forms to represent energy, noise, and change. Though short-lived, its techniques shaped later design, cinema, and architecture. You can still see its influence wherever motion and machine aesthetics dominate the frame.

Read Next: Curious how art movements shaped film?

Explore our full Visual Art Timeline to see how styles like Surrealism, Cubism, and Suprematism influenced cinema’s most experimental moments.

Or keep browsing our Film Movements & World Cinema section for more on the histories that shaped screen culture around the globe.