ABSTRACT
In his 1925 essay “K. [Kunst] und Pangeometrie,” El Lissitzky wrote: “We are standing now at a period in which A. [art] is on the one hand degenerating into a pastiche embracing all the monuments in the museums, and on the other hand is fighting to create a new expression of space.” 2 Trained as an architect, Lissitzky worked out this concern with the expression of space across and between arts: painting, drawing, assemblage, photomontage, theater, typography, and exhibition design. However, despite his considerable work in photography and photomontage, he engaged little with one of the most popular new media forms of the interwar avant-gardes: cinema. While he praised Viking Eggeling’s abstract “absolute” films for using the medium “as a means of solving the problems of dynamic F. [form (Gestalt)] through actual movement,” he criticized film for ultimately being “only a dematerialized surface projection.” 3 Cinematic projection indeed reduced three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane; and Lissitzky had already resolutely moved in the reverse direction in his Proun constructions, made of paint, wood, sandpaper, metal foil, and other materials, which he called the “interway station from painting to architecture.” 4 His 1923 Prounenraum further extended the Prouns into architectural space, to cover three walls, corners, and the ceiling of a room at the 1923 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. 5 Given this trajectory, how, in 1925, could cinema figure into the Constructivist “new expression of space” advanced by Lissitzky?
