Building Blocks

13th November- 23rd November

Zang Tumb Tumb - The word as an image

This section of research will specifically tackles Futurism and Italy. I have focused on Futurism previously in A Level graphic design and during this project, I thought that the revolutionary film Zang Tumb Tumb by Marinetti, would be a good reference point as to the importance of letters as a collective and as an independent focus.

The transition from the Avant-garde to Modern art were subject to a rather specific sensation, namely the arranging of words to enhance their collective meaning. This was championed by a French Poet, Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s 20 page poem, ‘Un coup de dés (A throw of the dice)’ shattered typographic conventions. It introduced radical type layout which by todays standards would be deemed as rather tame. However it was one of the first examples where the placement of type reflected the purpose and feeling of its content. Mallarmé underlines just how evocative this method is when describing the white space ‘like silence’. Movement is hugely important when considering type: ‘This distance, whereby groups of words or individual words are mentally separated, is that it seems now to accelerate, now to slow down the movement’.

The Futurist programme was lead by poet, editor and art theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti published the first and by far the most famous Futurist manifesto in Paris in 1909.

The title of Zang Tumb Tumb is meant to emanate the sounds of industrial war such as bombs, artillery shelling and telegraphic messages being transmitted. It was a form of poetry about the Balkan War started in 1912 and published two years later in Milan.

Marinetti was clearly very informed when creating Zang Tumb Tumb as he was a war correspondent for the Siege of Adrianople employed by the French newspaper L’Intransigneant. The poem featured what Marinetti called words in freedom (Parole in libertà) which was his various avant-garde typography and typefaces that were made to almost personify the war in its entirety: some letters marched, some lined up like soldiers and others suddenly grew from a small size to a huge size much like an explosion. This utterly changed artists views on war, people in power and industrialisation.

Essentially it glorified modernity: speed, motor cars, aeroplanes and war. A quote from the book Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century by Richard Hollis to be particularly insightful into Marinetti’s objective was when Hollis described the arrangements of the words as ‘Visual equivalents of sounds in the shapes and relative size of the words’. This idea that letters have individual characteristics, individual weight and shape and can take on their own form and emerge as images excites me tremendously. The main concept that I have taken from Zang Tumb Tumb is personification of seemingly inanimate forms.

This writing on the work won’t directly influence my work, but I think that it was important to keep the philosophy of the research at the back of my mind. Taking care to respect lettering and its many impactful details that are all too regularly dismissed.

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