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In denying ‘any surfacing of even vague futurist traits’ in Joyce and claiming that ‘between Marinetti’s crazy ideas, the confused theorizing of the futurists and his brother’s there was the same difference that is found between a clown and a tragic actor’,1 Stanislaus Joyce was implicitly overlooking the meaning and relevance of the intertwining of clownish and tragic aspects in futurism. He did not adequately consider futurist concepts of ‘art-presence’ or ‘art-performance’ or ‘Carnival’, ‘Baldoria’, ‘upside down world’ and hence could not assess the possibility that Joyce’s idea of a synesthetic ‘total’ art and the ‘total’ art of the futurists illustrated in the ‘Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’2 might have had something in common, which could be represented precisely by the ‘antigraceful’, bizarre and often grotesque blend of the figures of ‘the clown and the tragic actor’. Prominent in music hall as well as in the slapstick comedy of early cinema, this special blend could also be interpreted as a sustained exercise in the simultaneous adoption of different strategies and in the handling of different instruments and techniques; as Joyce puts it, when commenting on the revision of three episodes of Ulysses: ‘I have to work on them [Circe, Eumaeus, Penelope] simultaneously, different as they are, so that I remind myself of the man who used to play several instruments with different parts of his body’ (LI, 179). The importance of the iconic figure of the quick-change artist, the acrobat, the multi-instrumentalist or ‘l’homme orchestre’, or the ‘oneman -band’, poised between improvisation and systematisation, is epitomised in early comic cinema, in Max Linder’s as well as in Méliès’ trick films – L’Homme Orchestre (1897), L’Homme de Têtes (1898), L’Homme Protée (1899), L’Homme aux Cent Trucs (1900) or L’Homme aux Mille Inventions (1909). This last figure could be seen as an apt description of most avant-garde artists and innovators in literature and in the arts, as well as 86 6. Futurist Music Hall and Cinema CARLA MARENGO VAGLIO of inventors and early cinema entrepreneurs, such as Filoteo Alberini, who was defined as ‘homme orchestre’ by Nino Frank in his fundamental Cinema dell’Arte.3 Present in early cinema’s technique of multiple impressions (Méliès’ L’Homme de Têtes, 1898), and closely connected to the art of the illusionist and the conjurer (such as Félicien Trewey in the Lumières’ 1895 Partie d’Écarté or Méliès’ Escamotage d’une Dame Chez Robert-Houdin, 1896), the figure of the ‘multi-instrumentalist’, the acrobat and the ‘quick-change’ artist was at the core both of the ‘protean sketches’ (such as ‘Lucinda’s Elopement’)4 commonly seen at the music hall (the only authentic ‘criticism of life’, according to Joyce) and, for Marinetti, of the entire ‘Variety Theatre’. Marinetti’s 1913 Variety Theatre manifesto called for theatre that was direct and immediate, ‘primitive and naïve’,5 a theatre of ‘quick actuality’, of dynamism and acrobatism, of ‘tightrope walking’. Theatre was to represent a fundamental experience of modernity. It was indeed in a prophetic anticipation of modernity that Marinetti could state that: Today the Variety Theatre is the crucible in which the elements of an emerging new sensibility are seething. [. . .] The Variety Theatre is thus the synthesis of everything that humanity has up to now refined in its nerves to divert itself. [. . .] it is also the bubbling fusion of all the laughter, all the smiles, all the mocking grins, all the contortions and grimaces of future humanity. The Variety Theatre offers the healthiest of all spectacles in its dynamism of form and colour (simultaneous movement of jugglers, ballerinas, gymnasts, colourful riding masters, spiral cyclones of dancers spinning on the point of their feet. [. . .] The Variety Theatre is a school of heroism in the difficulty of setting records and conquering resistances, and it creates on the stage the strong, sane atmosphere of danger (e.g., death-diving, ‘looping the loop’ on bicycles, in cars, and on horseback).6 The artistic works created by both Joyce and the futurists could be defined as arts depending on acts of ‘death diving’, of somersaulting, of ‘looping the loop’ (like the ‘Diavolo’ or the monkey ‘Diavolina’, in imitation of the man who originated the spectacular act)7 and of ‘quick change’, operating the sudden metamorphosis of an ‘act’ into an ‘instant’ (Marinetti: ‘di “atto” in “attimo”’), of gesture into light. Futurist art, as explained...

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