Do Art influence moviemakers? There are a lot of movies about Artists and their life, but fewer in number on paintings or artworks. Artworks are not a matter for filmmakers, and the artist’s life is usually depicted as an anarchist or (ab)normal habits.
The Mills and the Cross (2011), directed by Polish-born filmmaker Lech Majewski, dramatizes the visual narration of Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 painting “The Way to Calvary,” a profoundly touched reaction to the Spanish occupation of Flanders is a classic in this genre. Majewski uses the Bruegel painting as a source of creation or a visual feast, finds threads between Painting and visual representation, and uses it in a broad terrain; more than 500 figures are depicted there. Lech Majewski uses a visual exploration to go further into Bruegel’s painted world of 16th-century Flanders life and the Christian element of crucifixion, people living in a windmill, depicted in the corner of the Painting.
In this movie, the director brings the multi-layered narration of the Painting and goes beyond the Painting. The fascinating thing in this movie is that the director studied the background of an image and went further into the (un)realities. This movie, based on a painting by Peter Bruegel, examines what Bruegel studies in his paintings, of humanity, in all its beauty and ugliness on a large geography in which numerous tiny topics and details, peasants, and grotesques, go about their everyday practice as an overarching harmony persists in the work.
As clear from the title of the Painting, The Procession to Calvary is a painting about the Christ Crucifixion, and the director of this movie changed the title to ‘The Mills and the Cross’. Through this title change, the director’s intention is precise. Majewski depicts the story to cross luminously with the surroundings of Bruegel’s textures, watchers, wanderers, and those utterly clueless to what’s transpiring elsewhere in the artwork. The movie goes to the home of Bruegel’s peasants and woodcutters, older adults, and children.
Bruegel and Bruegel Painting
The significant turn of this movie is Bruegel plays the main character of this movie. Bruegel comes and goes with his sketchbook and studies characters and a spider web throughout this movie, symbolically narrating as structural nature of a painting as a spider web that fills every individual cell with its activity, from its finely detailed focal point centre to its immense outreaching borders, as writes by Brian Eggert. The stunning beauty of greenish landscapes gives the viewers a fantastic experience of Bruegel’s paintings, characters and ironical tone of life and death in religious faith.
This movie is preserved as a panoramic adaptation of Bruegel’s Painting, with a gorgeous study of dress codes and anatomy, style and fashion of that time. As a movie of an image, ‘Majewski renders Bruegel’s Painting in undeniably impressive visual splendour, as writes Brian Eggert.
No dialogue, Visual Will Talks
Majewski leaves the dialogue to be visual and relies on the beauty of visual language more than spoken. Two things are the central character in this movie; one is the painter, Peter Bruegel, and the other is the Painting. From beginning to end, there are no entertaining things in this movie, as in the Painting, and from the opening shot, the grandeur scene of a group of people preparing to pose in a valley. The artist, Bruegel, runs behind the characters, checking and studying them.
One thing is clear; this movie may fail commercially, but artistically, this movie makes a move into history. As we know from the Painting, there are hundreds of people in Bruegel’s Painting, and the director is asking them into their homes and lively atmosphere.
When we go into the deep of something, as Majewski did in the mills of Bruegel’s Painting, we have reached the uncommon life of a people who may not be able to be visible suddenly. In the Painting, we see the direct actions of the people, but in the movie, the director directs us to what’s behind the actions.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad.
