Hej! Scandinavia Film Series: The Mill and the Cross
The Mill and the Cross
dir. Lech Maiewski, 2011, Poland/Sweden, 35mm, 95 mins, color
The newest offering from Lech Majewski, one of Europe’s most acclaimed filmmakers, is a visually inspired restaging of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s epic 1564 painting The Way to Calvary. Combining a large re-creation of Breugel’s canvas (painted by Majewski), footage of actors and blue screen work, the viewer feels that they are simultaneously in the living, breathing naturalistic world that Majewski has created and the not-quite-static artificial world of the painting (the mill’s sails turn, ravens fly). Defying the parameters of conventional cinematic time and space, Majewski conjured a 16th-century equivalent of virtual reality. With Rutger Hauer as Breugel, Michael York as his patron Nicolaes Jonghelinck and Charlotte Rampling as the Virgin Mary.
The word ‘film’ seems inadequate to describe Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross. Each scene is rendered like a brushstroke. – Lauren Wissot, Slant Magazine
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