Even in the rarefied world of art-house cinema, a 90-minute film taking place entirely inside of a 16th Century painting might seem a bit esoteric. But Lech Majewski, director of The Mill & The Cross, a new feature-length film whose plot unfolds on a Pieter Brueghel canvas, didn’t let that stop him.

Majewski, born in Poland, first trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and then turned to filmmaking. He emigrated in the ’80s and has since lived in England and the U.S. In 2006, he was honored with a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art; since then, he has enjoyed exhibitions around the globe. And although The Mill & The Cross is definitely a masterpiece of cinema, it might be apt to call it a “moving picture.”

Majewski chatted with GALO last week to discuss this, and much more.

GALO: The first question that comes to mind is why you chose this particular painting, “The Way to Calvary?”

Lech Majewski: Well, in a way, this painting has chosen me. Watching Bruegel paintings when I was a teenager – there’s a famous room in Vienna which has all the major works by Bruegel. He had a tremendous pull on me. I was swept into his paintings. He sort of invites you inside because the people are not posing, they’re not official. You feel like you’re a Peeping Tom, you’re spying on them. You want to enter and see what they’re doing – to be in the crowd.

GALO: Do you envision your film as a continuation of Bruegel’s eavesdropping?

LM: Well, yes. I mean, that was the initial idea, that all the people would be positioned in the field and the camera would travel and sort of listen to the people’s souls. But obviously that was just the initial idea.

I started working with Michael Gibson, the man who sent me a book called The Mill and The Cross [Gibson wrote the screenplay for the film]. In this respect I was saying that the painting found me, because Michael saw some of my movies and said I had a Brueglian mind. He sent me his book. I read a lot of books on art because I started as a painter and a poet, but I have to say that most of the books that I read are quite… well, they’re not too exciting. So once I read his book, we met in Paris and I told him, you know, I’d like to make a movie about this. He said I was crazy, but after a while he said, “You know, a real gentleman does the impossible.” So we got to work.

GALO: Did you start off from a painterly perspective or from a filmmaking perspective?

LM: I cannot divide these two. I went into cinema because I wanted to paint. I thought that the painters of yesteryear would use the camera as a painting. I studied fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts [in Warsaw] but I switched to film school, because when I was standing in front of a Giorgione painting in Venice, I realized he would be doing films now like Antonioni’s Blow-up. I connected Giorgione’s The Tempest with the scene in the park – that infamous scene in Blow-up.

GALO: Before this film, you had never done anything this technical before that involved using such advanced computer technique. Did you learn this or did you rely heavily on other people to take your vision and put it in motion?

LM: I learned as I went, because in my wildest dreams I couldn’t envisage that it would entail so much work: two and a half years in post-production, and this was a major, major undertaking. Fortunately, we were lucky that technology at the time was moving very fast forward, so we could use the newest software. Also, one program came out for the camera for our multilayer approach to building an image – the minimum amount of layers we have is 40, the maximum is 147, in the central shot, when you have the mill stopping.

GALO: Was it a natural development for you to make this film?

LM: I don’t know. It certainly is something that for at least the last ten years, I was moving toward. From, let’s say, 35 mm traditional film stock to the digital, because it allowed me to deal with greater flexibility and also to use effects. It’s a very flexible medium and it allows you to do a lot decently and see various effects, and you know, when you’re working with 35 [mm] you’re waiting for every effect. I love to work with the cameras, and I am usually involved in set design, costumes, and the entire post-production.

GALO: Now that you have a finished product, how do you view it? Do you view it as a tribute to Bruegel, an attempt to explicate his painting, or even to expose his painting?

LM: I wanted to meet with Bruegel and spend time with the master. Be in his territory, so to say. That was my goal. Basically, one might say this is homage to him, and to his fantastic philosophy and to his way of thinking, to his building a universe, basically. That’s what’s missing in the arts today. Artists are unable to produce the kind of universe that encompasses the entire picture. People are lost today; it’s like we are living in fragments. People are much more concerned with creating a standout than they are with creating a piece of art. Things like beauty are completely thrown out of the vocabulary.

GALO: Do you think that’s because of a lack of dialogue with the past?

LM: I don’t know what the reason [is]. I think the world is slightly going berserk. In the last hundred years we’ve been doing everything to destroy the past, to detach from the past. If you look at the history of art, there were thousands of years that people were trying to capture the—what would you call it?—the epiphany, the image of God, the sacred geometry, and 20th Century art destroyed it. There’s an ongoing argument about what came first: the distortion of the object or the distortion of the people; the killing of the people in the two World Wars and the Holocaust. If you look at the broad history of the world, the 20th Century is the [cruelest] century of the entire humankind. And if you look at the art of the 20th Century, it’s also quite cruel.

GALO: Would you elaborate?

LM: Yeah, I mean, you see the bodies of human beings being disemboweled, destroyed. If you look at the Cubist paintings or de Kooning or whatever, it’s an attack with an axe on what the art of the past was trying to achieve. It’s an attack on harmony; it’s an attack on form. Art became kind of like a pop sticker, or a Warhol painting that’s just like plastic figures. The arts became a field of price games, shock games, and scandal games. It abandoned entirely the field of being the sacred language, so to say.

In the academies of today, the object is something which is rotting and broken and torn. You rip yourself into two pieces and hang yourself in a gallery and the critics will come and say that this depicts the torn soul of a great artist. Everything is shock, that’s what counts. If you call it a concept to shock people, to beat them up with a baseball bat, then there’s a concept behind it. But it’s not thinking; it’s not even really a concept. People try to show they exist. People try to yell at you.

GALO: Would you say that more than anybody else, Bruegel speaks to you the loudest?

LM: No. It’s just that he’s one of the most important artists in the history of art. There are other artists that are important, but these three years I spent with Bruegel, so I can talk about him, and how wise he is; how knowledgeable he is about the hidden language of symbols that he painted and has hidden throughout his paintings. And how beautiful his composition is, what he managed to do with perspective, how he captured all these people. [The Way to Calvary] is a tremendous work on every level. It’s beautifully documented. It’s almost like a chronicle of his time, with all the minute details, like belt buckles.

That’s one level. Then he creates a completely surreal landscape because, you know, he comes from the lowlands and suddenly we are in an unbelievable landscape with sheer rocks. The surreal presentation of the windmill atop a sheer rock – that defies any logic. What miller would put his mill on a sheer rock? He would be out of business in one day. He wouldn’t be able to get the wheat there and he wouldn’t be able to produce flour himself. Also, I could talk and talk about the way he deals with perspective. And then the story, how he manages to symbolize every square inch of his painting, the left side as the living side, [and] the right side as the side of death; how the sky condensates on the right into this dark, ominous threatening sky. All the minute details are there, and he took time and pains to hide it from us.

GALO:How many years did you work on the film, from start to finish?

LM: Four years: one year of pre-production, of all sorts of camera tests, costume tests, textile tests, [and] color tests, then half a year for shooting and two and a half years for post-production.

GALO: Was it difficult to explain your vision to the actors?

LM: No, no, no, no. They were good actors, so it was easy. They were very friendly [and] incredibly open to suggestions. They knew my work as an artist, so they were giving themselves to me and trusting my eye, and my thinking about the film.

GALO: Are you working on anything new? Is it similar to what you’ve just done?

LM: Yes, but I usually don’t talk about new things until after I am done with them, because it’s a process, so it’s still happening. It’s very visual, so in this respect it is similar, but not so much. I am finding my tools – that’s for sure. I’m learning a lot. But, you know, this learning would be nothing if I didn’t have Bruegel as a master. His way of capturing humans, the way he coordinates small space, basically, and shows his time and the pain of his times, and the entire idiom. It’s just unbelievable. You have everything.

The Mill & The Cross, directed by Lech Majewski, is showing at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., through September 27. 91 minutes, in English.

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