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Review: Seeing Malevich, CinematicallyAuthor(s): Kent Mitchell MinturnSource: Art Journal, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 141-144Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134512

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Seeing Malevich,CinematicallyKent Mitchell Minturn

Oksana Bulgakowa, ed. KazimirMalevich:The White Rectangle; Writingson Film. Berlin and San Francisco: PotemkinPress, 2002. 252 pp., 20 b/w ills. $25 paper.

Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film.New Haven:Yale University Press, 2002. 192

pp., 20 color ills., 8o b/w. $55.

Critical response to these two publicationswill likely be divided. On the one hand,there will be those skeptical of any attemptto relate Kazimir Malevich's oeuvre tofilm. After all, Malevich was the father of

Suprematism, a movement dedicated toimmutable painterly aws and the ideal ofmedia purity and, unlike most of his avant-

garde contemporaries, he stubbornly heldout against photography, photomontage,and film-he never made the transition,to borrow Benjamin Buchloh's pithyphrase, "from faktura o factography." Onthe other hand, many scholars will revelin the knowledge that these two publica-tions could potentially jar Malevich studiesout of its current impasse. The cinematicMalevich, in other words, promises to

challenge and complicate received notionsabout Malevich the nihilistic "divine idiot"

(as T J. Clark recently described him),Malevich the unwavering formalist, orMalevich the iconoclast/iconophile. Theraisonsd'htre f both books, which appearedsimultaneously yet ostensibly unaware ofeach other, are seven essays Malevich wroteon film between 1925 and 1929. And while

these two studies do not represent the first

attempts at treating Malevich and film,Bulgakowa's and Tupitsyn's are certainlythe most ambitious to date.'

Bulgakowa's bilingual anthology, KazimirMalevich:heWhiteRectangle;WritingsnFilm,pre-sents new translations of Malevich's seventexts in chronological order-"On Exposers.

Posters" (1925), "And Visages Are Victoriouson the Screen" (1925), "The Artist and the

Cinema" (1926), "Art and the Problems

of Architecture. The Emergence of a New

Plastic System of Architecture. Script for anArtistic-Scientific Film. To Hans Richter"

(1927), "Letter to Ldszl6 Moholy-Nagy on

Painting and Photography" 1927), "Cinema,Gramophone, Radio, and Artistic Culture"(1928), and "Pictorial Laws n CinematicProblems" (1929)-along with an eruditeintroduction, "Malevich n the Movies:

Rubbery Kisses and Dynamic Sensations."2To her credit, Bulgakowa steers clearof the current vogue for "intermedial"

approaches to cinema and painting, and

chooses instead to bring to light importantbiographical information about Malevichas she traces the publication histories ofhis texts. The two, she posits, are not easilyseparated.

Malevich's decision to write about filmin 1925 coincided with his initial encounterwith Sergei Eisenstein n Nemchinovka, asmall town outside Moscow. Malevich's

longtime acquaintance Kirill Shutko, a revo-

lutionary student of Vsevolod Meyerholdand prote6g of Eisenstein, facilitated theirintroduction. The artist and filmmaker pur-portedly formed a strong bond, in spite ofthe fact that their views on art and politicswere diametrically opposed. Years ater,when the great director penned his mem-oirs, he was to recall Malevich's physical

strengthand mental

resolve,rather than his

ideas on film and painting. Bulgakowa also

suggests Malevich's writings on film were

inspired by geographic relocation. After os-

ing his important position as director of theInstitute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK) n

Leningrad (the state closed the institute

because its aesthetic philosophy was considered too abstract and unrelated to the goalsof the Revolution), Malevich asked for per-mission to travel abroad. In the spring of1927 he headed off to Germany along withcrates of paintings, pedagogic materials, andnumerous unpublished manuscripts. In earlApril of that year Malevich met with WalterGropius at the Bauhaus n Dessau. AlthoughGropius was not forthcoming with a joboffer, as Malevich had hoped, the trip wasnonetheless a productive one. While there,Malevich met Moholy-Nagy, who, one yearlater, published a German translation of hisTheNon-Objectiveorld. n Berlin Malevich

sought out Hans Richter, a former memberof the Blaue Reiter Group and a Dadaist,who by then was already known as Europe'smost important and pioneering abstractfilmmaker. Malevich had the opportunityto view Richter's short film Rhythmus 5, inwhich the filmmaker uses stop-action ani-

mation to bring to life cut-out nonobjectiveforms of varying sizes. Projected on thescreen, these forms seem to push forwardand recede in an ambiguous, diegetic space.In certain instances, this results in a pulsat-ing, stroboscopic effect not unlike TonyConrad's andmark TheFlicker 1966), com-pleted some forty years later. Given his con-stant search for new "models of perception"and keen awareness of what Bulgakowa call"the historicity of vision" (20), this psychophysiological side effect of Richter's ilmmust have appealed to Malevich as well.

Seeing Richter as the only artist worthyand capable of translating his ideas aboutSuprematism to the screen, Malevich wrotea three-page scenario entitled "Art and theProblems of Architecture. The Emergenceof a New Plastic System of Architecture.

Script for an Artistic-Scientific Film. To HansRichter." Bulgakowa's anthology includes th

complete text along with black-and-whitefacsimiles of Malevich's preparatory ketchefor this project (the original drawings werein color-Malevich wisely foresaw theadvent of color film). Although a soundtrackwas eventually completed, the actual shoot-

ing of the Richter-Malevich film was post-poned indefinitely when Soviet authorities,

fearing Malevich's defection, withdrew

his visa and forced him to leave Germany.Wrongly assuming he would return to

Germany some day, Malevich left his film

scenario, paintings, and manuscripts behind.

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by-products of modern technologicalprogress are futile because the present tense

inevitably and all too quickly becomes thefuture anterior.'

Bulgakowa's and Tupitsyn's books willdoubtless inspire other scholars to writeabout Malevich and film. One can only hopethat the next study on this topic will addressone glaring inconsistency in the two studies

currently under review-both scholarsanachronistically relate Malevich's writingson film to his early Suprematist paintings.As such, they fail to consider the possibilitythat Malevich's antimimetic, antifilmic man-ifestos reflect the rise of state-sponsoredSoviet Socialist Realist painting, or that an

essay like "And Visages AreVictorious on theScreen" might foreshadow Malevich's deci-sion to paint faceless peasants a few yearslater. (Tupitsyn briefly deals with these

paintings on pages 71-86, but only to bol-ster her earlier comments on Suprematism.)

In heri999 essay

"The Mass Productionof the Senses: Classical Cinema as VernacularModernism," film historian Miriam Hansenmakes the provocative claim that "Russiancinema became Soviet cinema by goingthrough a process of Americanization."7

Following her lead, art historians should askto what extent Russian avant-garde paintingbecame Soviet Socialist Realist paintingthrough a similar process of Hollywood-ization. Paintings such as Sergei Gerasimov'sA Collective-Farmestival(i937), AlexanderDeineka's TheWide Expanse 1944), and

Alexander Laktinov's A Letter rom he Front

(1947) beg for this kind of comparison.These large paintings amount to wide-screen

spectacles, in which the canvas has beenreimbued with an undeniably filmic space.In the tradition of classic Hollywood cine-ma, a story is told from the point of viewof an omniscient narrator o the detached

spectator standing in front of the canvas.One question remains. When, in

"Pictorial Laws n Cinematic Problems,"Malevich writes that "We must not forgetthat the content of our epoch is not exhaust-ed by showing how pigs are fed on a state

farm, or how the 'golden crops' are harvest-ed" (82), is he criticizing the mimetic limi-

tations of cinema, or is he presciently antici-

pating the ultimate failure of Soviet Socialist

Realist painting-or both?

I. See, for example, ean-Claude Marcadr6, LaR6flexion de Mal6vitch sur le cin6ma," in Peinture

cin6ma einture, d. Germain Viatte Hazan,1989),and Aleksandra hatskikh, Malevich ndFilm," urlington agazine 35,no. 1084 July1993): 70-78. Lutz Becker,who made wo filmsfor Camilla Gray's andmark rt nRevolutionhowat the Hayward Gallery, ondon, 1971,also pub-lishedSuprematism Time:Malevich nd Film(London:Rereford alon, 1997),and "Suprema-tism and Film: n Unrealized roject," hich anbe found onlineat http://www.gmurzynska.com/symposium/cont_03.html.2. Allbut the final ssay,overlooked because of atypo that cited the author as W. Malevich, revi-ouslyappeared nMalevich: ollected Writings, d.TroelsAndersen Copenhagen: ergen, 1968-78).3. Anna Muse,"Weaving exts:A Note onMalevich's ses of Language,"nKazimir alevich:TheWhiteRectangle, 6-90; and Victor Tupitsyn,"Incitement ndThought: he Texts of Malevich,"inMalevich nd Film, 25-46.4. There seems to be some disagreement boutwhether he poster nquestion was painted byMalevich imself r one of hisdisciples. upytsinand Shatskikh gree hat t was done by Malevich,Bulgakowa emurs.

5. K.S. Malevich, FromCubism nd Futurism oSuprematism: he New Realism n Painting,"nEssays nArt, ol. I, ed. Troels Andersen, rans.XeniaGlowacki-Prus ndArnold McMillan(Copenhagen: ew Carlsberg oundation ndDanish tate Research Foundation, 968): 19.6. Cf. Fredric ameson, Progress ersusUtopia;or Can We Imagine he Future?" cience ictionStudies , no.2 (July 1982): 147-58.7. MiriamHansen, "The MassProduction fthe Senses: ClassicalCinema as VernacularModernism," odernism/Modernity, no. 2(1999): 59-77. See also DeniseJ.Youngblood,"Americanitis: heAmerikanshchinan SovietCinema," ournal f Popular ilm nd Television 9,no. 4 (Winter 1992): 148-57.

KentMitchellMinturn s a PhD candidate narthistory t Columbia University. n all2003 hewas AdjunctAssistant Professor n ColumbiaUniversity's ilm tudiesDepartment, where hetaught n interdisciplinary ourse itled "Cinemaand Painting."

144 WINTER 2004