Anna Baumgart, Andrzej Turowski
Film Script: Anna Baumgart, Florian Nowicki, Marcin Kowalewski, and Wiktor Rusin “Conquerors of the Sun” is a film project by Anna Baumgart that was realized in collaboration with art historian, avant-garde historian, and professor Andrzej Turowski. The occasion for this joint project arose from a chance encounter at the Warsaw café “Nowy Wspaniały Świat.” Andrzej Turowski wrote the study “The Locomotive of History.” It is a hybrid genre combining elements of a scholarly dissertation and artistic literature. The film “Conquerors of the Sun,” on the other hand, is neither a historical documentary nor a fictional film, but rather a blend of both genres. Together, they recreate the journey of an agitprop train that departed from Moscow to Berlin via Warsaw in 1921, named the “Red Wedge” in honor of El Lissitzky’s famous poster. It was an ordinary freight train loaded not only with military equipment and agitational-propagandistic materials intended to support revolutionary activities in the West but also with Suprematist artworks. Most of these were selected by Kazimir Malevich and Władysław Strzemiński, who met in Moscow and were members of various committees responsible for planning museums of contemporary art throughout Russia. Their shared dream was to create a new type of museum that would teach the proletariat to see and appreciate modern art. Malevich and Strzemiński wanted works to be included in the train that would form the basis for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in the future. One of the premises of the train’s mission was to establish a network of close contacts between avant-garde artists from Eastern and Western Europe. The phantom train never reached Berlin, and its exact location remained unknown for a long time. Eventually, it was discovered that it was sealed in Koluśki, near Łódź. It was as if Walter Benjamin’s hand pulled the emergency brake. Meanwhile, Strzemiński and his wife Katarzyna Kobro changed their life plans and moved to Koluśki, and later to Łódź, where they decided to establish the first Museum of Modern Art in Europe. Strzemiński had practically accepted that the locomotive had disappeared, so he was surprised to find out that it was in Koluśki. However, all attempts to gain access to it were unsuccessful, and finally, according to the most likely version, in 1931, the train and its entire cargo were destroyed in an explosion. As Turowski writes at the end of his book, the train has turned into a “political, dead ghost among yellowed documents. The train is the ‘lost truth of future history that once drifted between the imaginary islands of modern utopias.'”
In other words, the point is not to assert that the train – unlike the Art Museum in Łódź, co-founded by Strzemiński – actually existed in the sense of “physical truth,” but rather that it embodies the ambitions of the universalist avant-garde and its failure. Dreams of a better society, assimilated by party upbringing, and then repressed and frozen in the ice of death camps somewhere in the Far East.
“Revolutions are the locomotives of history” – a phrase by Karl Marx from the work “Class Struggles in France 1848-1850.” The intertwining of avant-garde art and political history. International revolution, a historiosophic vision, a triumphant future, political utopia – all that “burned” on the railroad approach in Koluśki. Kazimir Malevich is one of the main characters in Turowski’s book. In relation to the revolution, Malevich inscribed his book “God Does Not Cast Down” with the phrase “Go and Stop Culture” (I. Chashnik), “Go and Stop Progress” – D. Kharms. “The good on earth can only be achieved under one condition – to stop thought, stop progress, stop culture. Only under these conditions will we block the path to the departing future every day from us, we will stop the appearance of leaders who are going to lead the people to promised lands through progress or by the promise of God and his instructions” (from the treatise “Art,” 1924). El Lissitzky wrote to Malevich from Germany, reproaching the latter for not putting enough effort into promoting new art in Europe: “I am alone, but the whole world is coming forward, and no matter how tightly you hold clenched hands, it will still seep through your fingers (perhaps even with your own blood).” And following this is a phrase from Lazar Lissitzky that could become an epigraph not only for this project but for the entire avant-garde project: “We do not live as we know we should, and I know we could. It turns out the other way around.” One remembers Lev Lipavsky, who saw a system of hieroglyphs in the poetry of A. Vvedensky. According to Lipavsky, the train is a hieroglyph of death. As is known, after his arrest, A. Vvedensky was allowed to pass in stages. He did not even reach the camp. On the way from Kharkov to Siberia, he contracted typhus and was simply thrown out of the train car. Without a grave. In Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” revolution functions as the emergency brake of history, not its locomotive. Unlike Marx, Benjamin does not consider the turning to the past as a mere aestheticism characteristic of bourgeois revolutions. If the working class wants to remain the bearer of historical knowledge, it must pay attention to the “image of oppressed ancestors” and not be satisfied with the illusion of liberating grandchildren (Thesis XII). It is necessary to free and save not the future (as social democrats thought), but, in accordance with a weak messianic force, the past generations. There is no document of culture that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism. It is not accidental that the film is titled “Conquerors of the Sun.” It refers to the futuristic opera “Victory over the Sun,” staged in 1913. The libretto was written by Aleksei Kruchyonykh with elements of zaum co-authored by Velimir Khlebnikov, music by Mikhail Matyushin, and Kazimir Malevich took on the scenography and costumes. In “Victory over the Sun,” Kazimir Malevich’s black square was first revealed as a decorative element.
If we talk about the history of the agit-train as a tool of dynamic propaganda, it’s necessary to remember that in 1918, the first “Mobile Military Front Literary Train named after Lenin” was organized, traveling along the Moscow-Kazan railway. It consisted of passenger and freight cars equipped with book storages, small shops, a small office, and a kitchen. An important component of the agit-train was the political department; its staff included agitators and lecturers who were responsible for political work with the local population. However, undoubtedly more popular was the complaints bureau, where anyone could submit complaints about local authorities. Additionally, each train had an information department. Courts were staged in the style of public theater, where the kulak and bourgeois class were condemned. Filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Alexander Medvedkin, highly regarded by Chris Marker, as participants of agit-trains created uniquely fast films, shot in a matter of days and immediately edited. A new film in two to three days. In fact, it was a mobile television in the field that did not exist at that time.
“Conquerors of the Sun,” as Anna Baumgart put it, is “well aware of its form, a fake document.” According to her, she was looking for “someone who would introduce me to the methods used by science.” Interestingly, this project is another example of art mimicking quasi-scientific research. See the projects of the ASI group. Andzej Turowski deliberately interweaves elements of fiction into his historical construction. In the late 1990s in Moscow, A. Turowski obtained access to a folder of secret documents from the early 1920s in exchange for a bottle of Ballantine whiskey. The folder contained names of representatives of the Bolshevik authorities and influential avant-garde artists who joined the Bolsheviks to create a serious art-propagandist project. Turowski provides documents from secret archives given to him by the mysterious Yuri. He publishes previously unknown photographs and letters. The narration is simply full of facts and photographs confirming them. At first glance, they all look equally plausible. However, the author allows the reader to understand which information is true and which remains imaginary. Turowski and Baumgart provoke a rethinking of historical truth by fabricating it. This is a story about a historical defeat that can lead to victory in the future (see the Solon Effect). Historical truth is an event that is still ahead. In other words, only retrospectively can we recreate a specific version of historical reality that is considered true. There is only one difficulty: the elusive future locomotive, which with its tortoise-like movement does not allow reality to freeze in its entirety with all the documents of barbarism in hand.