The Two Times of the Word. Reading and Watching Dadaist Photomontages

The aim of the paper is to analyze how the alphabetic language, and the typographic rules of layout, have been radically transformed by the Paroliberismo of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The leader of Futurism indeed begins to think about how to act on the page for a more effective message and gives a new property to the written composition: he assigns optical qualities to intensify its expressive power, modifying some factors such as colour, size, contrast, and the relationship with the page that from being a passive container of the text becomes the place of its exhibition. With the first parolibere compositions, the word becomes a semantic hybrid summarizing the characters of the icon and symbol. The result is a typographic composition that quickly communicates its message through a network of associations of dual nature, visual and alphabetical. Cut, isolation and alteration of texts, typical of this progressive development of the linguistic iconicity, anticipate the new ability to manipulate words, images and photographs of the first Dadaist photomontages. Raoul Hausmann, the theorist of Lautgedicht and one of the inventors of photomontage, with Grosz and Heartfield, represents the connecting link of this parallel operation on the text and figuration specific of this first Avant-garde experiences.

This essay aims to analyze the influence of Futurist typographic experimentation on Dadaist photomontage that inherited two elements from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Words in Freedom: space-time simultaneity and the intuitive fruition of the composition. The leader of Futurism conveyed the anthropological transformations experienced by individuals in metropolises in typographic terms by giving new optical qualities to written composition to intensify its expressive power. He modified some factors, such as color, size, and the structure of text, to create a sort of assembled alphabetic composition that we might call typo-montage. Thus, the free-word page went from being a passive container of text to being the place of its exhibition, altering its grammar and absorbing the qualities of the new metropolitan system of communication: synchronic, fast, and intuitive. This happened in Futurist typography, but, in a certain sense, it also happened—and this is my argument—in the new Dadaist photographic composition: the photomontage.