Cinema is the quintessence of motion: cinema is motion. Thanks to the incredible progress made in the study of optics during the  19^th century and the discovery of the principle of persistence of retinal vision by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, cinema becomes the first art form technically capable of depicting the flow of time, of rendering the dynamic and the inherent flux of our experience of the world and reality.

Parthenon frieze bas relief © Giannalberto Bendazzi – Animation: A World History

The first attempts to represent motion date back thousands of years. This image of a Parthenon Frieze bas-reliefGeorges Sifianos, 'The animated chisel of Phidias', in Giannalberto Bendazzi, Animazione. Una storia globale, UTET, Torino, 2017., analysed by film animation historian Georges Sifianos, is incredibly similar to the chronophotography experiments of Marey and Muybridge carried out 2,200 years later. Each animal represents what we today call a “keyframe” in animation.

More than two millennia later, capturing and depicting motion is the challenge that unites the fathers of photography and cinema and the painters and sculptors of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, in the deep conviction that all art has the duty to represent and reflect the complexity and velocity of a world undergoing rapid and continuous transformation. An unprecedented scenario in which man and machine move in unison. Art has a dream: to represent all of this in a single perceptual experience, where sound, colour and motion merge together and derive from one anotherSynaesthesiaclose 

Composition VI (1913) – Wassily Kandinsky © State Hermitage Museum

“It would seem truly strange to me that sound could not suggest colour, that colours cannot give the idea of a melody and that sound or colour may seem unsuitable for translating ideas. Everything is expressed in a universal analogy, from the day when God created the world as one complex and indivisible whole.”

Charles Baudelaire'Letter from Baudelaire to Wagner', in Charles Baudelaire, Saggi critici, edited by Cinzia Bigliosi, Edizioni Pendragon, Bologna, 2004, pp. 151-153.

In this context cinema, and in particular Italian silent cinema of the 1910s, is seen as a privileged means of interpreting modernity. The world of art views cinema with optimism and interest as an instrument with which to potentially and finally achieve the holy grail of a total and synaesthetic work of art. This interest towards cinema is shared throughout the art world: Edmondo De Amicis writes his Philosophy of Cinema, in which he defends the aesthetic and poetic values of cinema; painter Vasily Kandinsky, an advocate of the idea of an art that can combine multiple art forms, is interested in cinema; the composer Schönberg, who overturned the rules of tonal music, argues that cinema more than theatre is the ideal instrument for transferring his music into images; Gabriele D’Annunzio writes that cinema, being the art of transformation, is the only means capable of representing Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the debates taking place in the fledgling field of early 20^th century psychology, cinema appears as an “apparatus of symbolic communication” with the ability to unite the visual language of the other contemporary art forms (photography, painting, graphic art) within a synaesthetic perception capable of evoking universal emotions.

© libreriamo.it

Above all, cinema is much-appreciated by the avant-garde movement. The first to show an interest in it, and thus subsequently influence the other avant-gardists, are the Futurists, with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurist Cinema of 1909. Satanic Rhapsody is not a Futurist film, although the Futurists adore Lyda Borelli.

Satanic Rhapsody is a Liberty or Art Nouveau film, more impregnated with the decadent and crepuscular atmospheres of D’Annunzio than those of the avant-garde. However, Futurist interest in cinema is primarily linked to the ideas of continuity and vital dynamism, which are inherent to cinema and its ability to offer a synaesthetic (and synoptic) representation of modernity. This is especially true with regards Italian cinema of that decade, and in particular Nino Oxilia’s Satanic Rhapsody, a film that boasts numerous firsts, including having a musical score expressly composed for it by the great Pietro Mascagni and its unprecedented use of colour as an expressive means.

In those same years, Futurist painter Gino Severini allows himself to be seduced by early 20^th century Paris. In its cafés and clubs, he finds the dynamism that has by now become the new canon of beauty. In particular for Severini, the movements of the dancing girls come to represent the rhythm of this dynamic life.

The painting Blue Dancer (1912) illustrates the artist’s fascination with the essence of movement and the sensorial nature of dance. Oxilia’s film, shot in Italy only three years later, displays similar themes and ideas.