Juliet Clark, in: Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive: ART & FILM NOTES, November/December, 2002
Book Description
These texts, by the man who created the 'black square', which are assembled in this volume and translated into English 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 this new medium document the friction between the metaphysical program 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 Cubism and Futurism, to Suprematism. In this process, almost all of his essays deal with the ‘missed encounter’ between film and art, because Malevich perceives film as the perfected form, not of Naturalism but of the principles of the new painting - dynamism and abstraction.
