By Kiša Lala
Film still from The Mill and the Cross, 2011 Directed by Lech Majewski - Credit: Kino Lorber, Inc.
Some time ago as part of my long fascination with Venetian culture, I came across Lech Majewski’s impassioned film, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a doomed love story told through meditative and erotic enactments of Bosch’s painting, a contemporary vision of Visconti’s Death in Venice, shot in that fabled floating city, which the Polish filmmaker now calls home.
An accomplished artist and composer, Majewski, also wrote and co-produced Basquiat, directed later by his friend Julian Schnabel. His new feature film, The Mill and the Cross with Rutger Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling playing Mary, is an elaborately layered, computer-generated tableaux of another classic, Pieter Bruegel’s 1564, The Way to Calvary – a composite of multiple light sources and seven different perspectives that Breugel had used to trick the eye.
In the painting, Jesus’s crucifixion becomes marginalized by a vista of colourful onlookers, bread-sellers, squabbling hawkers, inquisitors and their victims strapped to Catherine-wheels, all strewn across the landscape. A windmill perched on a high crag casts an all-seeing messianic gaze over the landscape, its lazy blades turning the cogs of time.
Charlotte Rampling - Film still from The Mill and the Cross, 2011 Directed by Lech Majewski - Credit: Kino Lorber, Inc.
During our conversation Majewski and I chatted about animal suicides, latent cruelty, and the art of animating paintings.
