The White Rectangle: Writings on Film

by MALEVICH KAZIMIR SEVERINOVICH

• ISBN13: 9783980498975
• ISBN10: 3980498972
• Edition: Bilingual
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

What did Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935), the proponent of pure abstraction in painting, have to do with film, that mechanical repository of everything that is banal and worthless? It was only in 1924 that Malevich described film as a system that fixed reality beyond the cultural idea. Nonetheless between 1925 and 1929 he wrote several articles on film as well as a script. The texts by the man who created the 'black square' that are assembled in this volume, and are for the most part translated into German for the first time, lead us to the heart of the debate about movement and acceleration as central metaphors for modernity in the international avant-garde. His contradictory reflections on the new medium document the friction between the metaphysical programme of Suprematist abstraction and the mediatic attributes of film. Malevich arranges the melodramas of Mary Pickford, the comedies of Monty Banks, the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Walter Ruttmann and Yakov Protazanov within his historical model of the rise of Modernism from Cezanne through Cubi

Table of Contents

Malevich in the Movies: Rubbery Kisses and Dynamic Sensations	9	(31)
Oksana Bulgakowa
On Exposers. Posters	31	(6)
And Visages Are Victorious on the Screen. by way of a discussion	37	(8)
The Artist and the Cinema	45	(6)
Art and the Problems of Architecture. The emergence of a new plastic system of architecture. Script for an artistic-scientific film	51	(8)
Painting and Photography. A Letter to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy	59	(4)
Cinema, Gramophone, Radio, and Artistic Culture	63	(14)
Pictorial Laws in Cinematic Problems	77	(9)
Weaving Texts: A Note on Malevich's Uses of Language	86	(6)
Anna Muza
Abbreviations	92	(2)
Index of Names	94	(4)
Index of Films	98	(1)
Notes	99