tablyDog on a Leash(1912) andGirl Running on a
Balcony(1912), revealing a common inspiration in
the chronophotographic image.
Yet Anton Giulio actively and emphatically dis-
tinguished hisFotodinamismo from photography
per se.Their only affinity, he claimed, was in the
shared use of the camera. Despite his obvious and
far-reaching debts to Marey, Bragaglia disavowed
influence by the French photographer in an
attempt to disassociate his images from the techni-
cal, mechanical reputation of photography. In his
essay Fotodinamismo futurista (1911), first pub-
lished in the Florentine journalLacerba in July
1913, Bragaglia criticized Marey’s chronophoto-
graphy for coldly fragmenting movement rather
than ‘‘synthesizing’’ it. For Bragaglia, Marey’s pos-
itivist experimentations failed to transcend the
realm of science; only the rhythmic flux ofFotodi-
namismocould make photography over into an art
form.Fotodinamismo, Bragaglia argued, transfig-
ured the visual world by deforming it, refracting
it—thus creating a new, artistic image that captured
something beyond the physical, material world.
‘‘We despise the precise, mechanical, and glacial
reproduction of reality,’’ he wrote. ‘‘For us this is a
negative element, whereas for cinematography and
chronophotography it is the very essence.’’Fotodi-
namismo, he argued, proffered not a dissection of
physical and temporal units, but a synthetic flow of
sensation turned inside out: ‘‘A shout, a tragic
pause, a gesture of terror, the entire scene...can be
expressed in one single work,’’ declared an ebullient
Bragaglia. (Bragaglia 1970, 39).
Like much Futurist discourse, Bragaglia’s writ-
ings and images vacillate between, on the one hand,
adrivetorepresentmovementandaction,andonthe
other, a turning away from external appearances, to
‘‘seek the interior essence of things.’’ Mere photo-
graphy—whether cinematic or chronophotographic
or simply descriptive—failed to evince the lyrical
and emotive aspects of visual experience. In short,
they did not sufficiently ‘‘dynamize’’ (to use a Futur-
ist watchword) the subject.
In this regard, Bragaglia was profoundly influ-
enced, as were many of his contemporaries in Italy
and abroad, by the metaphysical theories of the
French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson’s con-
cepts lent to art a renewed purpose of penetrating
beyond the material world, beyond quantitative
measurements or descriptions. Bergson’s cham-
pioning of intuition over rationalized thought
clearly influenced Bragaglia’s approach to the pho-
tographic image.
’’We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of
movement, which has already been broken up and ana-
lyzed. We are involved only in the area of movement
which produces sensation, the memory of which still
palpitates in our awareness.’’
(Bragaglia 1970, 38)Fotodinamismo thus willfully incurred dissolu-
tion, dematerialization, and interpenetration. The
nimbus-like trails of light clinging to Bragaglia’s
subjects, as in the imageChange of Position(1911),
are meant as signifiers of memory still ‘‘palpitat-
ing.’’ By flooding their subjects with light and over-
exposing the photographic plate, the Bragaglia
brothers hoped to record not motion, but the psy-
chic and emotional energy underlying it. The spiri-
tual pretensions ofFotodinamismoalso derived in
part from other trends circulating in contemporary
art and literature, such as Theosophy and mysti-
cism, and the rarefied geometries of the ‘‘fourth
dimension.’’ Anton Giulio himself subscribed to
various occultist and mediumist theories, and be-
lieved that Fotodinamismo could reveal invisible
and spectral qualities that lurked within matter.
Notwithstanding Bragaglia’s invectives against
positivism and the ‘‘precise reproduction of reality,’’
his own images were, in turn, subjected to a very
similar criticism from within Futurist ranks. The
eminent Futurist artist and theoretician Umberto
Boccioni came to disparage Bragaglia’s work,
claiming that photography could not be an art
form, much less a Futurist one. Boccioni viewed
Bragaglia’s photodynamicsas prosaic, cinemato-
graphic inventories of movement, for all their pre-
tensions to a poetic rendering of dynamic synthesis.
Six Futurist artists published a statement disavow-
ing any affinities between Fotodinamismo and
Futurist ‘‘plastic dynamism.’’ Under pressure from
the importunate Boccioni, Marinetti withdrew his
support of the Bragaglia brothers towards the mid-
dle of 1913. Such polemics not only reveal the nuan-
cesofwhatisoftenperceivedasamonolithicFuturist
movement, but also mark a significant chapter in the
contentious history of photography as art.
In 1914, Anton Giulio temporarily abandoned
photography for experimental novels, but soon
collaborated again with Arturo, this time publish-
ing a (notably un-Futurist) study of Roman ruins
entitled Nuova archaeologia romana (1915). The
following year, Bragaglia created his own film com-
pany and shot three full-length films. His filmThaı ̈s
(1916), one of the few Futurist films ever produced
and the only Futurist film extant today, featuredBRAGAGLIA, ANTON GIULIO