The most important movie produced by Italian Futurists was certainly the performance film Vita futurista (Futurist Life). All known copies have been officially declared lost. Different studies about the testimonials of the film’s late audience, the division of the sequences, the further inte- grations to the original plot, the public screenings, the written sources, and the popular imagery have allowed us to become familiar with and to understand one of the first avant-garde experiences in cinema. All these studies have been made without ever having seen the film: the only sources are archival materials, documents, papers, and critical testimony from the past.
This essay aims to reconstruct the history of this pivotal lost film by quoting diversified sources; through such sources (which include the so-called ‘non-filmic’ elements, such as public indexes, personal letters, press reviews, memorials, posters, etc.), Vita futurista can be studied philologically.
