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No 3 (2022): formes scripturales, pratiques éditoriales

Les Mots en liberté futuristes, un livre hors norme: « Révolution typographique » : entre créativité et frénésie

Submitted
May 2, 2022
Published
May 2, 2022

Abstract

Shortly after the first World War, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Les Mots en liberté futuristes [Futurist Words in Freedom] was published in Milan, in French. It comprised a collection of several manifestos, followed by a series of words in freedom plates. This book – a remarkable testimony to the daring of the Futurist book – affirms the drive to radically transform writing and typography, and take over the content as well as the form by defying the rules of syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, typography, composition, white spaces etc. Already before the war, Marinetti had proclaimed he was undertaking a “typographic revolution” introducing a “new conception of the typographically pictorial page”. His volume Les Mots en liberté futuristes comes across as an unrivaled quest for an original, ardent expressivity, formal liberation from convention, and sensorial intensity – all propelled by transgressing codes and constraints.