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Twentieth century artists have continued the effort to heighten the viewer's experience of art by integrating traditionally separate disciplines into single works. Modern experience, many of these artists believed, could only be evoked through an art that contained within itself the complete range of perception. "Old-fashioned" forms limited to words on a page, paint on a canvas, or music from an instrument, were considered inadequate for capturing the speed, energy and contradictions of contemporary life.

In their 1916 manifesto "The Futurist Cinema," F.T. Marinetti and his revolutionary cohorts declared film to be the supreme art because it embraced all other art forms through the use of (then) new media technology. Only cinema, they claimed, had a "totalizing" effect on human consciousness.