A pair of scissors is not enough. A literary (and movie related) peculiarity, an essay by Martino Oberto

Art conservator with a philosophical background, but also artist, editor and essayist, OM — Martino Oberto’s pseudonym — played a pivotal role in Italian verbo-visual research during the second half of the XX century. Combining his interest for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus with Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings and James Joyce’s works, he developed his own personal view about language and writing expression. “Ana Eccetera”, the revue he founded in 1958 along with Anna Oberto — his wife — and Gabriele Stocchi, was indeed the perfect way to elaborate and share his artistic, yet linguistic and philosophical research. In 1960, in “Ana Eccetera” 3, OM published A literary (and movie related) peculiarity — Uno specifico letterario (e filmico) —, an interesting, short essay about montage “written in a chaos caused by the mechanic operation of gluing”. The work is indeed the result of an actual work of collage, based on the idea of speech as the artificial product of single, unbound concepts juxtaposed all together. It is absolutely no news for those who know Martino Oberto’s work to deal with this kind of topic, which was often addressed and developed through the different issues of the revue, as well as through his paintings: his aim was indeed to understand the visualization of conceptual thought through written words, in order to abolish any distinction between signifier and signified. Starting from this peculiar method of writing and then proceeding with its weighty content, the contribution intends to analyze Martino Oberto’s work so as to highlight the important impact it had in Italian neo-avant-garde field. In doing so, it will be crucial to emphasize the important role of his artistic models — such as the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the film director Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn — as well as the philosophical and literary ones.