Velocità/Vitesse. Filmed Dramas of Objects and ‘avant-garde integrale’

The film 'Velocità' – also known as 'Vitesse' among the Parisian avant- garde circles – is an experimental film realized in 1930 by Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero, and Guido Martina, held in Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. It is an avant-garde film that, starting with the cliché of the love-triangle, goes on to dismantle the bourgeois drama model, elaborating Marinettian-like dramas of object and offering several tributes to avant-garde art and cinema. The link between the avant-garde compositional originality and the intertextual reference clearly recalls the dialogue started with other works, the programmatic will to collocate the film in a network of relationships, and inspiration that attests the participation of its authors to the cultural atmosphere of those years. This essay aims to process an analytic interpretation of the film starting from a reflection on the intertextual and inter-semiotic references to Futurist painting and to avant-garde French cinema, between iconology and visual culture.