Author’s note: This essay was written for a symposium at the Pacific Film Archive, organized by Alla Efimova and Oksana Bulgakowa, to celebrate the publication of Kazimir Malevich: The White Rectangle, Writings on Film, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa, Potemkin Press, Berlin and San Francisco, 2002.
So I open the book with a grimace. There is always reluctance on my part to be drawn back into Malevich’s strange world, and I think there ought to be. No one in his right mind entirely wants to subject himself to the painter’s mad dogmatism again, and feel himself pulled slowly into the vortex of puns, slogans, anathemata, non sequiturs. The vortex is dizzying, and a lot of the time it is boring and absurd. But if you suspend disbelief for long enough there is usually a payoff. The payoff is the point where the dogmatism and mysticism and world-denying nihilism coalesce, to produce Malevich’s unforgettable brand of comedy. I will now forever be branded by the idea of “a screen without kisses.” Let me quote the whole paragraph in which the phrase occurs, because, apart from being a high point of Malevichian tomfoolery, it also points clearly to what Malevich wanted from cinema, and thought it was on the point of becoming. This is what I want to talk about: Malevich’s vision of film to come, and why the vision was mistaken.
Here are the sentences. They begin, as invariably they do in Malevich, with a ventriloquism of his opponent.
“What one needs [from the new cinema],” so we are told, “is the face of life, not facelessness.”
That is exactly the charmed circle of concreteness in which painters have been turning around and around for a thousand years; and in which cinema too has begun to spin, having thoroughly convinced itself that the concrete can only be manifested in rubbery, pneumatic cine-kisses. And should someone dare to show a screen without kisses, society would label him a crazy utopian, an abstract-minded degenerate offspring of a concrete-minded society. The way out of this circle of concrete kisses lies through new art as a whole. Cinema will only reach a new dynamic-kinetic structure of film through new art forms, through pure abstraction, similar to that already reached by the painter.
I’ll add to this just one other part of a sentence, from the following paragraph. “The film artist,” says Malevich, “[will be] the dynamicist who, having assimilated the entire art of the painter, is…waiting impatiently for a palette of colored rays, in order to weave with them painterly planes of textures in the likeness of Renoir, Degas, Millet, and the rest.”
Just a word of obvious caution is in order about the last phrase and listing of names. Of course Malevich is not anticipating a cinema that imitates Renoir or Millet. He takes them as instances of what the nineteenth century was capable of, at its strongest, as regards true painterliness, a true play of planes and textures. Renoir and Millet did it within the carapace of realism. That was necessary for them, acting as they did within the structures of bourgeois society and its attendant empiricism. What the film artist will do under the aegis of the proletariat will be very different. Renoir was good, as it happens, at rubbery kisses; but he was good-essentially good-at dynamics, planarity, the interference of painterly substance with intimations of space. That is what the Vertov or Eisenstein to come will borrow from him.
I find myself asking two sorts of question as I read these passages. First: why do I find this primitive, utopian moment of film theory so appealing? Second: why did it prove so wrong about the future? It is the latter question I’ll focus on. We know now that an abstract cinema, though it went on existing in the margins of the medium, and still has its devotees, singularly failed to establish itself as a rival to the figurative kind. I would say, though people may want to dispute this, that even regarded as a marginal, “high art,” avant-garde phenomenon—keeping the flame of formal possibility alight in the face of the overwhelming power of the industry, the institution “Film”–-abstract cinema has proved deeply disappointing, deeply repetitive and insubstantial. Anyway, value judgments aside, I take it we would agree that what is notable is that abstraction in film has failed to establish itself, as it did in painting and sculpture, as a strong contrary mode; one which has a history, one which renews and questions and reinflects its own past, in the way that continues to happen with Gerhard Richter, say, or Robert Ryman, or Bridget Riley.
Why is this? Was the failure necessary or contingent? This is a huge question—an historical question—and I’m not going to pretend to give a proper answer to it here. But reading Malevich, thinking about what an abstract cinema could possibly be like in his terms, and above all thinking of an abstract cinema in the light of what abstract painting was like—in practice, as it issued from Malevich’s own hands—does at least provoke the beginning of an answer.
As I understand abstract painting, and Malevich’s is a strong case of a general condition, singularity and intensity within it depend on a tension between an implied depth and an asserted surface. Some kind of illusionistic opening onto space, sometimes crowded and proximate and impacted, sometimes ethereal and disorienting, is put at odds with material traces that have evidently gone to make the spatiality-make it here, with these odd instruments and unguents, punished and cosseted just this way, visibly, tangibly, not entirely to be seen through. I shall be Malevich-dogmatic at this point, and simply say that film’s ontology seems to me radically different. The very word “film” says it all. Film, as we perceive the projected image in the darkened room, in some strong sense does not have a surface. Surface in cinema is transparency. And it has to be. Cinema’s formal raw material is depth-depth without surface, depth inhabited by bodies catching a moving, puncturing play and fall of light which lures us always further forward and across, deeper into the illusion, never back to the plane of projection. It’s not just that there is no picture surface in cinema, it’s that powerful cinema depends on exorcizing even the ghost of surface, and conjuring away the picture plane as well.
My thesis is essentially this, then. Powerful abstraction in painting is possible because painting can put spatial illusionism under pressure. It can do without an immediately convincing, inviting, recognizable, enterable spatiality. It can thrive on the process of making its spaces come across, in actual viewing, as secondary or virtual—products of surface manipulation. I don’t think film can do this. Enterable space is its medium.
Here is where Malevich misrecognizes his own achievement. It has indeed proved possible for painting productively to pursue the idea of a dynamics “detached from corporeality”—that is, a dream of a truly abstract, nonhuman patterning of motions, tempos, steadyings, reaches into distance. I think painting was able to do so because it had a “corporeal” surface structure, a crude materiality, in which the normal associations of materiality with embodiment could be actively worked against—pulverized, reversed, evacuated. So that heaviness and weightlessness, or momentum and equilibrium, or uprightness and dispersal—all these corporeal dimensions could be made to be compatible for a moment, made to look like aspects (dialectical moments) of each other. Could cinema possibly do this—technically, ontologically? I don’t see how.
My guess is that some of you, reading the “rubbery kisses” paragraph, have already aligned Malevich’s prescriptions for cinema with those of other great modernist utopians of the same moment-with Vertov, obviously, or Kracauer, or Walter Benjamin. The question I’ve posed can be generalized to the group. Was it inevitable or contingent that these high-modernist hopes for the transformative power of the cinematic apparatus turned out to be mistaken? And that film “re-naturalized” itself so profoundly in the ensuing decades, inventing its own deep structure of seamlessness, continuity, familiarization?
I would say it was inevitable, for the reasons stated-because film lacks a surface, a materiality, a place where manufacture declares itself. This is not to say film lacks the means to destabilize and estrange the normal tempos and scales of everyday life. Of course it can—Vertov and Eisenstein show how. But they also in practice show how far, and with what specific formal means. Cinema’s formalism cannot be a formalism of manufacture, but must be one of space, of spatial dispositions and intervals-above all, of “lighting” as it reveals the movement and being-together of bodies. Therefore the cinema that best finds ways to draw the spectator wholly into the intervals and points of contact—to make that set of formal trajectories surround and include the eyes in the darkened cockpit—will carry all before it. Rubbery kisses rule. Shot/counter-shot narrativity is indispensable, or dispensable at too high a cost. Because the apparatus lacks the means to make itself physically present—as a felt materiality —in the experience of the projection. The great effects of cinematic formalism, the moments when the camera-eye warps and discloses a world we have never quite seen, are necessarily parasitic on strong likeness and irresistible narrative flow. The John Ford tracking shot, the Toland deep focus, the Godard jump cut, the wild repleteness within the frame of Blonde Venus or Shanghai Express—they all have their being as functions, inflections, of story, of the world with the girl and the gun.
I have to say, finally, that I don’t regret this. I am a partisan of modernism, but that doesn’t mean that I want or expect its kind of formalism to exterminate the rest. It is, as usual, touching and infuriating to find Malevich so confident it will.
T. J. Clark, who teaches art history at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism and other books.
