16-mm film strips from Hans Richter’s unfin- Specialized Research AI at MIT

16-mm film strips from Hans Richter’s unfin-
ished film based on Kazimir Malevich’s 1927
scenario. c. 1970. © Hans Richter Estate.

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Malevich and Richter:
An Indeterminate Encounter

TIMOTHY O. BENSON AND ALEKSANDRA SHATSKIKH

A meeting between Kazimir Malevich and Hans Richter in Berlin in 1927
has led to much speculation about a “close” relationship and artistic collabora-
tion between two titans of abstraction to create a film whose realization was
tragically prevented by historical circumstances.1 The primary artifact of this
encounter is a scenario by Malevich, now part of the lore of our genesis narra-
tive of avant-garde film. Yet nearly everything about this encounter is far more
indeterminate, including the historical moment of Malevich’s conception of the
film, the date of his execution of the scenario, the degree of communication
between the two, and the relationship of the incomplete film that was actually
made some forty-four years later to Malevich’s and Richter’s ideas about abstract
film. Surviving in 16-mm strips in Richter’s estate and in rushes and work prints
at the Getty Research Institute, the film remained incomplete largely because its
makers, Richter and his cameraman, Arnold Eagle, could no longer discern for
themselves whether the creator was Richter or Malevich (they hoped for the lat-
ter). Is this perhaps an indication of a true collaboration after all, albeit one
largely deconstructed by considerable expanses of time and intellectual dis-
tance? If so, what does the film embody, Malevich’s filmic space or Richter’s
notion of “film as movement”?

Surviving documents afford a framework for investigation. They begin in the
context of Malevich’s 1927 visit to Berlin, the purpose of which was primarily to
show some seventy artworks at a special installation in the Novembergruppe’s
Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung.2 He had made a stop en route in Warsaw (March

For example, Werner Haftmann in his introduction to Kasimir Malewitsch: Suprematismus—Die
1.
Gegenstandlose Welt, trans. Hans van Riesen (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1962), p. 24. Margarita
Tupitsyn describes a “close” relationship that inspired Malevich to write the scenario, Margarita
Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Fundação Centro
Cultural de Belém, 2002), pp. 57–58. A similar account is offered in R. Bruce Elder, Harmony and
Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 2008), p. 168, n. 7.
2.
The exhibition took place May 7–September 30, with the Malevich section opening May 14,
organized by the Kartell der vereinigten Verbände bildende Künstler Berlin. Troels Andersen, Malevich:
Catalogue raisonné of the Berlin exhibition 1927 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970), pp. 57–58.

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OCTOBER

8–27), where his works were exhibited at the Polonia Hotel and where he also lec-
tured and was feted with a banquet that included many of the luminaries of the
Constructivist-inflected Polish avant-garde. He traveled on to Berlin in the company
of Polish poet Tadeusz Peiper, arriving on March 28 and staying until June 4. While
some accounts have Malevich creating the scenario in Berlin as a specific response to
Richter,3 it is as likely that the scenario that he would eventually hope to share with
Richter—appearing in manuscript on three pages with explanatory color drawings—
was created by Malevich in the USSR on the eve of his departure to Europe, which
took place on March 1, 1927. The scenario was intended for a scientific-popular ani-
mated film, for which Malevich invented his term “Artistic-Scientific Film.” The
scenario used devices that had by then been well developed by the Russian avant-
garde, including moving geometric forms, which had previously been explored
typographically in El Lissitzky’s Tale of Two Squares (1922) and on stage in Nina
Kogan’s presentation in Vitebsk of a Suprematist ballet involving geometric figures
that enclosed and concealed performers.4

In a letter sent in the days before his departure from Moscow, Malevich
informed his wife, Natalya Andreevna Malevich (née Manchenko, 1900–1990), on
February 23, 1927: “I’m on my way to the film studio. They want to make a
Suprematist film. It seems that Suetin will have to do it, the animators will come to
him.”5 In another letter around this time, he informs his assistants in Leningrad—
the painters Boris Vladimirovich Ender (1893–1960) and Nikolai Mikhailovich
Suetin (1897–1954) of negotiations with official powers regarding the making of
the film and about the supposed arrival of a group of animator-cinematographers
for its realization:

Evidently the Suprematist film will be realized and animators and also
filmmakers will come to you. You, Nikolai Mikhailovich, need to be
ready, that is, to show how Suprematist elements can be organized in
space and how architectonics can be made from them. . . . It’s necessary
to show the entire development of spatial Suprematism via aerovision,
dynamism, statics, and the gothic style.

Hello to everyone, I’m leaving Monday. Awaiting more of your letters
in Warsaw.6

The extra-filmic influences on Malevich’s scenario are discussed in Aleksandra Shatskikh,

3.
Hans von Riesen, “Malewitsch in Berlin,” in Avantgarde Osteuropa 1910–1930 (Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst [Kunstverein Berlin], 1967), p. 25; Oksana Bulgakowa, “Malevich in
the Movies: Rubbery Kisses and Dynamic Sensations,” in Kazimir Malevich, The White Rectangle: Writings
on Film (Berlin and San Francisco: Potemkin Press, 2002), p. 13.
4.
“Malevich and Film,” Burlington Magazine, vol. 138, no. 1084 ( July 1993), p. 478.
5.
Malevich o Sebe; Sovremenniki o Maleviche: Pis’ma, Dokumenty, Vospominaniia, Kritika [Malevich
about himself; Contemporaries about Malevich: letters, documents, memoirs, criticism], vol. 1: ed. I.
A. Vakar and T. N. Mikhienko (RA Moscow, 2004), doc. no. 3, p. 255. Translations from Russian
throughout this article are by Oleg Ivanov.
6.

Ibid., doc. no. 150, p. 184.

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Kazimir Malevich. Scenario for Art and the
Problems of Architecture: The Emergence of
a New Plastic System of Architecture. 1927.

OCTOBER

This group was supposed to be headed by the painter and director Zinovy
Petrovich Komissarenko (1891–1978), who had briefly studied in Malevich’s studio
in the Moscow State Free Art Studios, which gives credence to the suggestion that
Malevich’s scenario, in the polished and final form in which it currently exists, was
created by the author before his departure to the West, as bureaucratic conditions
mandated that the scenario be presented to a commission for approval before its
realization would be permitted. Instructing his assistants and helpers concerning
what had to be presented to the group of cinematographers and how, and making
Suetin responsible for following these instructions, Malevich took his scenario
along with his entire archive to Europe. But this plan for the making of the film
was not carried out.

Upon arriving in Berlin, Malevich took up residence with the von Riesen
family, German nationals who had lived in Moscow prior to 1915. One of the sons,
Alexander von Riesen (1892–1964), assumed the role of Malevich’s interpreter.
With the help of architect Hugo von Häring, Malevich made a crucial visit to the
Dessau Bauhaus with Pieper,7 which in turn allowed him to meet with Walter
Gropius and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, who engaged him to contribute a volume to the
Bauhausbücher series entitled Die gegenstandlose Welt.8 Part II of this volume, enti-
tled “Suprematismus,” bears a very close relationship to Malevich’s film scenario,
as it articulates in greater depth what the film scenario outlines. But if the book
delves more deeply into the meaning of non-objective art (as an expression of
pure feeling and seeking no pract ical values) and uses reproduct ions of
Malevich’s drawings where the scenario employs diagrams, they both reinforce
the idea that the film was conceived with the didactic purpose of illustrating how
Malevich’s Suprematism might be seen to progress from the Black Square (1913)
through circles of various colors and on to relationships among forms that evolve
eventually into spatial structures, culminating in a new Suprematist architecture.
The gist of this text—and hence the basis of the film scenario—was largely con-
ceived by 1925.9

Clearly aware of Richter’s films,10 Malevich sought out the director, commu-

7.
The visit is recounted in Tadeusz Pieper, “W Bauhausie,” in Zwrotnica no. 12 (Kraków: 1927),
translated as “At the Bauhaus” in Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács, ed., Between Worlds: A Sourcebook
of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 628–32, and in von Riesen, “Malewitsch in Berlin,” in Avantgarde
Osteuropa, pp. 22–25.
8.
Kazimir Malevich, Die gegenstandlose Welt, Bauhausbücher no. 11, trans. Alexander von Riesen
(Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1927); a reprint edition with the Russian text as a supplement and an
excellent introduction by Stephan von Wiese is Die gegenstandlose Welt (Mainz; Berlin: Kupferberg,
1980); an English translation was based on the German (the original Russian text was lost at the time):
Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: Paul Theobald & Co., 1959).
9.
Objectivity: Unpublished Writings 1922–1925, vol. 3 (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), pp. 363–68.
10.
Informat ion about Richter’s films had been included in Ludwig Hilber sheimer,
“Dinamicheskaia zhivopis,” in Kino-Fot 1 (1922), p. 7, the first issue of Aleksei Gan’s Constructivist
periodical.

The various versions of the book are discussed in Kazimir Malevich, The World as Non-

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Malevich. Scenario for Art and the Problems
of Architecture: The Emergence of a New
Plastic System of Architecture. 1927.

OCTOBER

nicating with him through von Riesen as interpreter.11 Meeting with Richter and
seeing his films confirmed the Russian artist in his belief that the German director
could realize his scenario. That Malevich was not able to conduct any negotiations
on this matter was likely owing to the language barrier separating them as well as
his extremely tight schedule in Berlin.12

When his request for the extension of his visa was denied by Soviet authori-
ties at the end of May, Malevich, planning to return to Europe the following
year, left all the materials he had brought with him to Berlin. He attached a note
to the completed scenario: “For Hans Richter” (this note was written on a sepa-
rate page). Apparently, he thought that Alexander von Riesen would give the
manuscript to Richter, but this did not happen. Hasty communications between
Malevich and Richter may have ensued when Richter; his brother-in-law, Udo
Rukser; Hanover Landesmuseum director and Construct ivist champion
Alexander Dorner; and the Russian-born wife of von Häring all signed an affi-
davit to t ake over Malevich’s paper s and paint ings, which were st ill on
exhibition.13 Thereafter, Malevich corresponded with von Riesen, inquiring the
following September about the possibility of exhibiting his works in Vienna,
Dresden, and Hamburg. He asked about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, von
Häring, and, most notably, about Richter and the fate of his own “nonobjective”
film, apparent ly assuming that von Riesen had passed his scenar io on to
Richter.14 But communication appears to have broken down. Malevich sent a
postcard to Richter dated May 5, 1928, asking for the address of von Riesen and
complaining that he had heard nothing from von Häring.15 Even this postcard
did not reach its destination, and Richter received it only decades later through
von Riesen’s brother, Hans.16 In 1932, while in Russia to work on his ill-fated film
Metall, Richter paid a visit to an ailing Malevich in Leningrad, but in the pres-
ence of handlers nothing of substance could be said about the film project or
the pictures Malevich had left behind in the West.17

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11.
Hans Richter, Begegnungen von Dada bis heute. Briefe, Dokumente, Erinnerungen (Cologne:
DuMont Schauberg, 1973), p. 41. Published in English as Encounters from Dada till Today, trans.
Christopher Middleton (New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2013), e-book.
12.
On the language barr ier bet ween the t wo, see ibid., pp. 41– 42, and Hans Richter,
“Begegnungen in Berlin,” in Avantgarde Osteuropa, p. 18. The lack of communication between the two
stands in contrast to Ludwig Hilbersheimer, who remembered long walks and conversations with Malevich
through an interpreter. Hilbersheimer, introduction to Malevich, The Non-Objective World, p. 9.
13.
14.
Himself, pp. 195–96.
Begegnungen, p. 51.
15.
Ibid., p. 50. Communication continued as Malevich wrote Richter on May 10, 1928, from
16.
Leningrad asking Richter to help movie actress Zoya Barantsyevich get a visa and permission from
the authorities to enter Berlin for the purpose of studying cinema. See Malevich about Himself, doc.
170, p. 200.
17.

Begegnungen, p. 50. The paintings entered the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in 1957.
Letter from Malevich to von Riesen dated September 6, 1927, Leningrad, in Malevich about

Begegnungen, p. 50.

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An Indeterminate Encounter

It was through Hans von Riesen and a remarkably auspicious fluke of history
that Malevich’s film scenario came to light, along with the bulk of the papers he left
behind in Berlin. In 1934, von Riesen’s parents hid Malevich’s package in the family
cellar. In 1945, the house was bombed, but in 1953, the contents were unearthed vir-
tually unscathed, and Hans van Riesen began to organize the material with the help
of a team assembled by the DuMont Schauberg publishing house for a series edited
by Werner Haftmann.18 The scenario was discovered at the end of the 1950s by
Haftmann while organizing Malevich’s archive. Informed of the discovery, Richter
found that he could not remember any collaboration with Malevich,19 a lapse about
which he was later to write frankly in his memoirs. From the early 1960s, however, the
growing fame of the Russian avant-gardist led Western researchers to baselessly assert
that there had in fact been a fruitful collaboration between the two famous artists.
No one was bothered that during the realization of this project, Richter was meant to
have played less a creative role than an instrumental-technical one of realizing
Malevich’s scenario as a didactic, instructional film. One must consider the possibility
that Richter was unable to realize Malevich’s scenario because it was not his own con-
cept but rather intended to show in a vivid manner the theory of the origin and
evolution of Suprematism that Malevich had initiated and developed over the course
of many years. Suprematism was born in painting, but according to Malevich its
abstract geometrical system had the potential to become a new style equal to the
great styles of past epochs. Would Richter have been able to identify with such an all-
encompassing stylistic project, representing a new creation of form in all spheres of
artistic culture, from ornament to architecture?

It may be possible to answer in the affirmative, as there is evidence that
Richter indeed tried to play a purely instrumental role and by 1970 had the
experience to do so successfully. During the 1930s, Richter had created indus-
trial films for Philips, been head of film production at Central Film Studios in
Zurich, and had made films for various chemical firms including Ciba, Durand
& Huguenin, Geigy and Sandoz. While some of these films embody his avant-
garde principles (especially those for Philips), others, such as “Kleine Welt im
Dunkeln” (A small world in the dark),20 were quite didactic, thoroughly profes-
sional industrial films with scarcely a glimmer of the mirth and “magic” so
characteristic of Richter’s avant-garde films.21 He had also pioneered a theory of

Kasimir Malewitsch: Suprematismus—Die Gegenstandlose Welt, trans. Hans van Riesen (Cologne:

18.
DuMont Schauberg, 1962), p. 31.
19.
Begegnungen, p. 41, and Hans Richter, Köpfe und Hinterköpfe (Zurich: Verlag der Arche,
1967), p. 102. Richter mentions that he was surprised to see Malevich’s film scenario reproduced in
color (pp. 264–65) along with the caption “Film für Hans Richter.”
20.
Basel-Münchenstein, 1939. Commissioned by J. R. Geigy SA.
21.
These experiences are the subject of essays by Doris Berger, Edward Dimendberg, and
Y vonne Zimmermann in Timothy O. Benson, ed., Hans Richter: Encounters (exhibition catalogue, Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, published by
Prestel, New York, 2013).

“Kleine Welt im Dunkeln” (A small world in the dark). Produced by Tonfilm Frobenius SA,

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OCTOBER

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Richter. Storyboard,
Part I. c. 1970.

the documentary and, for fifteen years during the 1940s and ’50s,22 taught film
at the City College of New York. All told, his experience in filmmaking was
broad and deep and equipped him to play an instrumental role. Yet Malevich’s
scenario also took him back to his earliest experimental works, one of which—
Rhythm 25—had been lost . Thus, while the project took the form of film
restoration, he could scarcely avoid making aesthetic decisions.

This inherent conflict between Richter the filmmaker for hire and Richter
the creative artist can be seen in his collaboration with Arnold Eagle to finally
make the film, an endeavor that resulted in at least two rough-cut work prints

22.
Richter wrote several lectures and articles on the documentary beginning in the 1930s.
These are best conveyed in his book begun in 1934: Hans Richter, Der Kampf um den Film: Für einen
gesellschaftlich verantwortlichen Film, ed. Jürgen Römhild (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1976), translated as Hans
Richter, The Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema, ed. Jürgen Römhild, trans. Ben
Brewster (Aldershot: Wildwood House Ltd., 1986).

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An Indeterminate Encounter

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Richter. Storyboard,
Part II. c. 1970.

and over 120 takes.23 In a contract drawn up between the two in 1968, Richter is
to provide storyboards (“charts”) and take control of editing while Eagle will
shoot the film in color and provide Richter with a key sheet corresponding with
the animations. Narration in English, French, German, and Russian is envi-
sioned based on van Riesen’s translation of Malevich’s scenario.24

Yet only in June 1971 does any real work begin, with Richter scribbling a list
of several crucial elements he is providing. These include color photographs of
Malevich’s original scenario, Richter’s own “first sketches to the film” (storyboards
Parts I and II), and a German translation of Malevich’s scenario.25 As Richter
notes in his reminiscences, one of the storyboards (Part I) was in fact a re-creation
of his own work, and in production “the pictures illustrating his manuscript

Arnold Eagle Papers and Films related to Hans Richter, 1927–1990, Getty Research Institute,

23.
Research Library, accession no. 970021.
24.
25.
Hans Richter Estate. The storyboards are in the Getty Research Institute (970021).

Contract between Hans Richter and Arnold Eagle, December 5, 1968, Hans Richter Estate.
Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film, p. 91. Richter’s note to Eagle dated July 17, 1971, is found in the

OCTOBER

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Numbered film script corresponding to Richter’s storyboards.

became merged with those of my (long lost) film Rhythmus 25, the style and color-
fulness of which had made Malevich want to work with me in the first place.”26 By
September 1971, the project had received a NEA grant, and an additional con-
tract was drawn up in which Richter as director and editor assumes responsibility

26.
Begegnungen, p. 49. Trans. Christopher Middleton, Encounters from Dada till Today, MS. Hans
Richter Estate, p. 43. Richter’s storyboard matches an image labeled as “Rhythm 25” in Hans Richter by
Hans Richter, ed. Cleve Gray (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 137. The only differ-
ences are that the Getty images are numbered and some of the darker colors are slightly different.

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An Indeterminate Encounter

for “the content and artistic considerations” of the project and Eagle has responsi-
bility for “photographic and production arrangements.”27

The interpretation of the scenario and storyboards is documented in a type-
script whose numbers correspond to those in the margins of each frame in
Richter’s storyboard. So, for example, number 4 corresponds to a red square, as
seen in a still from the actual film. Crucially, instructions are given for squares to
appear and disappear, then to spin until they turn into circles, which in turn spin
and become diamonds (typescript instructions 7–10). Malevich’s scenario does
indeed call for the “movement of the Suprematist square,” as is seen in an English
translation from the Richter estate. Further instructions (typescript, nos. 15–18)
attempt to follow Malevich’s discussion of
how the displacement of circles within a
square will change their color s (English
translation, no. 3). The various surviving
takes—numbered to correspond with the
typescript and storyboards—show Richter
and Eagle working t hrough Malev ich’s
instructions all the way to his conclusion,
which involves architectons. Later pages of
the typescript also show Richter beginning to
incorporate instructions related to his own
film, Rhythmus 25, and the additional corre-
sponding takes relate entirely to Richter’s
second storyboard (Part II). Interestingly, the
architecton sequence, although on the first storyboard, is numbered as the last
sequence of takes. If this is where Richter’s and Malevich’s images “became
merged,”28 the material pertaining to Malevich is essentially separated from that
related to Richter in the two surviving rough-cut sequences (which correspond to
the discrete sets of instructions embodied in Richter’s storyboards),29 and the pro-
ject might still be divided into two films. A more crucial issue at the center of the
enterprise is the nature of movement. Richter shed some light on how he assumed
responsibility for this role during a visit he paid to Eagle’s studio in 1971 to check
on the progress of the film, a visit filmed by Eagle’s student crew, apparently for a
documentary that was never completed. In a surviving film fragment Richter com-

Still from Richter’s unfinished
film based on Malevich’s
1927 scenario. c. 1970.

Contract between Hans Richter and Arnold Eagle, September 27, 1971, Hans Richter Estate.
27.
Begegnungen, p. 49.
28.
29.
In each rough-cut print, sequences of takes not yet in numerical order but related only to
storyboard Part I are followed by sequences of takes related only to storyboard Part II. The only excep-
tion, a segment pertaining to Malevich’s three-dimensional architectons, is appended at the end of
each film (whether by intention or because of technical reasons). This order is given in the finding aid
for the Arnold Eagle papers and films related to Hans Richter, 1927–1990, box 14, F31, and box 15,
F32, which can be accessed online at: archives2.getty.edu:8082/xtf/ view?docId=ead/970021/
970021.xml;chunk.id=ref262;brand=default (accessed December 24, 2012).

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English translation of Malevich’s scenario
from Richter, Encounters from Dada till
Today. Pages 40–42 (details). 1974.

ments, “Of course, I followed the manuscript of Malevich exactly.” Then, moving
to the animation strand with his storyboards, he continues:

But there are of course no . . . indications for movement. So the articu-
lation of movement, that I had to do. And there my work comes in. I
have not invented any forms which are not with Malevich. But whether
this thing turns to the right or the left, whether this goes this way, or
goes this way as I have indicated on the drawing, or whether these,

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An Indeterminate Encounter

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these . . . movements . . . are photographed at the same time or devel-
oped one after the other as a kind of movement and countermove-
ment, or here, or there, or there. That of course had to be left to me.
And that’s exactly what Malevich wanted. Because he didn’t under-
stand anything about the filmmaking. He understood only about his
principles. And his principles I haven’t changed.30

Richter may well have been right in this, as Malevich clearly imagined an ani-
mation from the beginning and, unable to realize this in Russia, had sought out
Richter to implement the project.

30.

Richter interviewed by Arnold Eagle, audio track. Ibid., box 19A.

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Work progressed to the creation of two silent rough-cut work prints. Yet by this
phase of the work, Richter was beginning to have serious doubts about authorship.31
He and Eagle sought the expertise of the eminent film historian Annette Michelson
to determine whether he was rendering a historically accurate version of Malevich’s
intentions.32 Evidently, Michelson was initially dubious at seeing Malevich’s static
designs being placed into movement. However, according to Eagle, after hearing how
Richter had interpreted “Malevich’s interest in cinema and movement,” she declared

31.
These doubts were compounded by unrelated accusations that he had copied drawings by
Viking Eggeling for donation to various museums in Louise O’Konor, Viking Eggeling: Artist and
Filmmaker; His Life and Work, trans. Catherine G. Sundström and Anne Libby (Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1971). The accusations stem in part from Ré Soupault, whose divorce from Richter was not a
friendly one. Richter denied the allegations, which were eventually challenged in the scholarship. See
Marion von Hofacker in “Kunsthistoriker gegen Künstler,” in Hans Richter: Malerei und Film (Frankfurt
am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1989), pp. 155–67.
32.

Letter from Arnold Eagle to Hans Ruppel, May 12, 1981. Hans Richter Estate.

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An Indeterminate Encounter

that she found Richter’s attempts “acceptable” and was willing to pursue the investi-
gation under certain conditions to be specified and subject to evaluation.33 Before
anything definitive could come of this, Richter announced that he had decided to
abandon the project and return his grant to the NEA.

One can understand how in 1927 Richter’s work could have appealed to
Malevich. As an abstract painter and filmmaker, Richter had departed from mime-
sis, an essential prerequisite for the epochal change Malevich envisioned:

Until now there was realism of objects, but not of painted units of
colour. . . . Any painting surface is more alive than any face from which
a pair of eyes and a grin jut out. A face painted in a picture gives a piti-
ful parody of life. . . . But a surface lives, it has been born.34

In Malevich’s view, what film needed in the immediate historical moment
was a painter, one securely embedded in the formal progression outlined in his
Bauhaus book and film scenario:

Eisenstein and Vertov are truly first-class artists, with an inclination
towards the left, for the first relies on contrast and the second on
“showing the object,” as such, but both still have a long way to go to
Cézannism, Cubism, Futurism, and non-objective Suprematism.35

Moreover,

In the West, important artist-painters are little by little beginning to
work in the cinema, and, in beginning their work with a purely abstract
element, they are beginning with our future source of new forms. This
entry of the contemporary artist-painter into the cinema should bring
us, and him, to a new essence and significance for the screen, as a new
way of showing the masses the art of our new life.36

In his response to contemporary Russian cinema, Malevich was seeking to
pulverize the “object” and representation in film, so ardently embraced by his col-
league Eisenstein, to arrive at an equivalent of Suprematist painting. Yet Richter,
having already created an entirely non-mimetic medium, was just then proceeding
in the opposite direction, embracing Eisenstein’s montage technique in his first
film involving non-abstract referential imagery, Filmstudie (1928), and he would
collaborate with Eisenstein the following year on the film Everyday. Thus while the
intersecting trajectories of Richter and Malevich left each artist prone to misun-
derstandings in their exchange, there is the possibility of enough indeterminacy
in each artist’s practice at the time of their meeting that Richter might have been

Letter from Arnold Eagle to Hans Richter (date not provided), Arnold Eagle Papers, Getty

33.
Research Institute, accession number 070021, box 1, folder 9, quoted in Tupitsyn, p. 89.
34.
K. S. Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting”
(1916), in Essays on Art: 1915–1933, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin, ed. Troels
Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), vol. 1, p. 38.
35.
36.

K. S. Malevich, “And Images Triumph on the Screen” (1925), in Essays on Art, p. 230.
K. S. Malevich, “The Artist and the Cinema” (1926), ibid., p. 238.

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OCTOBER

able to realize Malevich’s vision. Despite the chance of misprision—if perhaps, as
Norbert Schmitz suggests, Richter was still involved in “identifying objective func-
tions of human perception, a peculiar mimesis of the functions of the sense
organs,” whereas “for Malevich, film represents a liberation from such psychologi-
cally concrete, experienced functions”37—both artists were deeply committed to
painting and seeking a progression in their art in film. In his entirely non-mimetic
films of pure light and its absence, of dissolution of figure and ground, of materi-
alization of the screen in actual space, Richter had already realized film as archi-
tecture,38 as was seen in his earliest film, Rhythmus 21 (1921), which included pas-
sages where the screen is bisected into black and white exactly as depicted in
Malevich’s drawings in his film scenario. Moreover, Richter had achieved this by
adding the transformative element of time, conceivably a move resonant with
Malevich’s Marxist-inflected “theory of the additional element,” the subject of the
lengthy first section of his Bauhaus book.39 According to this view of cultural evo-
lution, every significant artistic advance is the result of the dynamic force of a
“new additional element” that contravenes the “statics” of “our human existence
of rest” and contributes to our “struggle for existence” against unconscious
nature.40 Malevich’s scenario marked such successive moments “of disobjectivisa-
tion of the consciousness of old relationships of elements, and their new order in
the painterly perception.”41 At stake is Malevich’s distinction between static and
dynamic, and whether, as film and theater historian Oksana Bulgakowa has sug-
gested, he was both interested in a didactic popularization of his theory and want-
ed “to test the capabilities of film.”42 If Richter had already created, or was capable
of creating, a non-mimetic filmic space that “addresses itself to the eye, to sight,
rather than the body and its kinesis,”43 and if he could abandon his reliance on
rhythm—which, for Malevich, was unacceptable as “an ornamental form of move-
ment”44—then he might also have been capable of capturing Malevich’s filmic
space. The fact that Malevich’s didactic project was never executed would be far
less important if Richter’s fragments conveyed the only instance of Malevich’s
filmic space in existence—a tempting prospect for further investigation.

See Philippe-Alain Michaud, “Toward the Fourth Dimension: Rhythmus 21 and the Genesis

Norbert Schmitz in Oksana Bulgakowa, ed., Das weiße Rechteck: Schriften zum Film (Berlin:

37.
Potemkin Press, 1997), p. 124, cited and trans. in The White Rectangle, p. 24.
38.
of Filmic Abstraction,” in Hans Richter: Encounters.
See note 5 above and The World as Non-Objectivity, pp. 147–94.
39.
Ibid., pp. 150, 148, and 152.
40.
Ibid., p. 185.
41.
Bulgakowa, The White Rectangle, p. 23.
42.
Annette Michelson, “Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital,” October 3 (Spring 1977), p. 85.
43.
Kazimir Malevich, “The Cinema, Gramophone, Radio, and Artistic Culture,” in Kazimir
44.
Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, Unpublished Writings 1913–1933, vol. 4 (Copenhagen: Borgen,
1978), p. 168.