"Garbage and Kissing": Kazimir Malevich and the Cinema
With his stark geometric compositions, the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), founder of Suprematism, strove "to free art from the ballast of the objective world." A new book edited by Stanford professor Oksana Bulgakowa, The White Rectangle: Kazimir Malevich on Film, allows English-speaking readers to discover the visionary artist and theorist's idiosyncratic take on one of the most objective of arts: the cinema. Malevih's views on film are rich in apparent contradictions: the artist painted iconic images of peasants but derided Soviet films' glorification of rural life; he found many avant-garde films unsatisfactory, yet was impressed by the painterly images in the Mary Pickford vehicle Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. As Bulgakowa points out in her introduction to The White Rectangle, "Malevich challenges the very qualities of film that made this 'mechanical art of movement' an epitome of modernity for the avant-garde artists, Futurists and Constructivists."
This series draws on Malevich's writings and PFA's remarkable collection of Soviet films to reexamine not only the celebrated experiments of Eisenstein and Vertov, but also the popular comedies that fascinated Soviet audiences and critics but have been largely overlooked in the West. In doing so we reenter the cinematic debates of the 1920s that often served as impetus for Malevich's commentaries.-Juliet Clark
"Cinema is a practical, convenient, cheap way of disseminating knowledge, wherein lies its usefulness and, perhaps, its purpose; but as far as it concerns the education of people in the field of artistic culture, film is a destructive phenomenon....Film now lags behind (all arts) because its artistic form is obscured by garbage and kissing. Compared to the works of visual arts, it is not even worthy of criticism. It is a deaf and mute Lovelace, always drifting from one boudoir to the next."-Malevich, 1926
"So long as the screen remains a site where philistines deposit their everyday junk, film will not become an independent art: it is but a new trash can, invented by the technical power of science, in which the philistine displays his tripe, or a camel burdened with the junk of a Kirghiz nomad."-Malevich, 1928
