Metaphysical Dimensions of Arabesque by Germaine Dulac in the Context of Black Square by Kazimir Malevich

In this chapter of my PhD thesis I follow the visual similarities between abstract images in Arabesque by Dulac and Suprematist paintings by Malevich. In doing so, I try to find out if the meaning of the first ones can go beyond psychological and social meanings usually attributed to them and enter the sphere of metaphysical issues. To answer this question, I examine the role of light and Dulac’s method of using it in abstract images. In ‘Background, Inspirations, Early Work’ I briefly present her life, art circles she was involved with, and influences which inspired her work. I define the main sources of her creative impulses and crucial points of interests, stressing the specific use of light, whose power of expression she discovered in Symbolist theatre and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. This is illustrated with the examples of films in which she uses light to render emotions, reveal the inner world of the protagonists and create the ambient of her works. In ‘Motif of Light’ I start with her earliest works, where one can already notice a tendency to use light for abstracting the image. Her ultimate turn towards pure cinema in 1929 brings the change of optics from figurative to abstract. I argue that it is not rhythm, as usually suggested, but a specific use of light which plays a crucial role in this shift. In ‘Arabesque, Black Square and Table’, a piece of poetic text helps me to look at the three different images: Black Square (1915) by Malevich, Arabesque (1929) by Dulac and my own film Table (2015), dwelling on subtle relations between these artworks and setting up a common ground for reflection. What comes to the fore in these pieces is the role of light in changing an object into a “figure”. Dulac’s method of abstracting objects understood as means of “translating certain ideas” (Williams, 2007a, p. 94) is contrasted then with the idea of freeing an object from the indexical bonds, which happens in Malevich’s Black Square (Bulgakova, 2002). This strategy lets me examine if abstract images in Arabesque transcendent the previous indexical attachments. The section ‘Light and Matter’ concentrates on the analytical character of Dulac’s works. To understand this issue, abstract images from her film are placed against a broader intellectual background of the epoch. I analyse the idea of the identity of image and movement (Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1896), and Einstein’s equation between light and matter developed around that time and later adopted to the reflection on cinema (Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 1922; Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1983). The idea of the ontological unity of these elements, when applied to the Dulac’s images, stresses their metaphysical character.