It’s nice to attend a film festival in your home town. I know there’s people out there who have to pay thousands in our almost non-existing currency for sandwhiches and drinks in between films, hang around in lobbies and try to look not too idle, while idly waiting for the next film. You who hang in there, I salute you – some give up, call it a day after a film or two, and go to a pub, only to waste more money on something potentially even less satisfying than a bad film, let alone a good one.
Now, before I cooked my rice with soya this evening, I saw The Mill and the Cross, a U.S. production by Polish director Lech Majewski. The film is an exploration of a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose paintings you are somewhat familiar with, whether you realize or not: when you think the Tower of Babel, you think his Tower of Babel. If you ever think of 16th century communal life in Holland, chances are he has already visualized it for you. And at some point it is likely that you have come across the painting in question,The Procession to Calvary.
The filmmaker takes this rich image apart, and stages scenes from within it while adding to it glimpses behind the scene: background stories, the point of that pole on the far right, with the spoked wheel on top; life within the mountain on top of which the Mill stands, reaching towards the sky. In order to compose the most extensive canvases of the film, with a mix of staged/filmed and painted subject-material, Mr. Majewski exploits the potential of current digital technique as fully as his compatriot Zbigniew Rybczyński did analogue video and green-screens through the 1980’s. From the most subtle images of daily routines to breathtaking composed travelling shots staged with a composed technique on the basis of the painting, the film is really a delicious expansion on a work of art I now feel familiar with in a way I’d like to get to know more paintings (Guernica, anyone?).
Having said that, I have a problem with the film, which may not be the author’s fault. At the center of Bruegel’s canvas, there Jesus hides behind a cross being carried along the road – while the women in the foreground of the frame would be the women who mourned him, his mother Mary figuring off-center between the others. Calvary is another name for Golgotha – Bruegel thus transposes the Passion onto his own times, creating a modern juxtaposition upon which the whole work is built.
The film does not factually betray Bruegel’s decency (or whatever the motivation was behind his decision) to hide the savior’s face behind the cross. Jesus’ face is not revealed in the film. In spirit, however, it takes a turn inconsistent with the prima facie artistic decisions of the painter: not satisfied by exposing the importance of the painting’s understated central scene, Majewski dramatizes the procession and crucifixtion, making it serve as a climax in a film which might not have needed one. Whereas Bruegel’s painting is wonderfully earthly, and can be devoured with or without any relation to the Christian faith, the film is not. This is already problematic for those of us who are not so much avowed atheists, as simply lousy when it comes to the whole religion-faith-belief thing. I’m not speaking in terms of thought, ideas or disliking any sort of message – but merely in terms of the cinematic experience: at the point in the film when a mixed pan-tilt-crane-dolly shot made it unambiguously clear that the audience was supposed to be awed, I was bored. It didn’t work. It was so much dead time for me.
This decision of Majewski, to explicitly awe the audience through the painting’s religious motive, whereas the painting itself stays nonchalantly impassive towards the viewers’ interpretation of the scenery, also involves an interpretation that bothered me: that the Mill on top of the mountain, reaching towards the sky, thus symbolizes heavenly powers, and the Grinder a visual representation for a divinity. This misses the point, however, of the absolute earthliness of the mountain, the Mill and the Grinder: towering above Humanity, above Christ and above the two trees, of life and death, the Mill does not represent any divinity to me. On the contrary it strikes me as a representative of the logic of times to come: the logic of the mill is the logic of a looming industrialization: a means of production that abstracts wheat from grains, a tool upon which workers and others become wholly dependent for their output, their purchasing power and their survival. This may be overtly marxist of me, but at least old Bruegel was polite enough to keep the matter ambiguous for the lot of us. Which Majewski did not.
It’s an impressive film, but probably still more impressive for those of us unaffected by the secularization ongoing since the 16th century.
After I cooked and ate my rice, I went to see some more films. More about that later.
Alterseptemberism
Sing Your Song is based on the life and times of singer Harry Belafonte. And as luck would have it I sat next to his youngest daughter, Gina Belafonte (and producer of the film), during the screening. And at one point, she started singing along and I realized then: it was her song
