"The Mill and the Cross" di Lech Majewski. Il film come opera teorica

In 1564 the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder completes "The Road to Calvary", a painting that represents and actualizes the story of the Passion of Christ and is composed of a large number of figures. In 2011, the Polish director Lech Majewski realizes "The Mill and the Cross", a film that aims to reconstruct the production context and process of Bruegel’s painting through a set of tableaux vivants. The artist — the main character of the film — leads the viewer inside the painting and invites him to observe its compositional aspects and recognize, in the drama of Christ, the anachronistic transfiguration of events that shook Flanders in the sixteenth century. Analyzing Majewski’s film helps to problematize one of the crucial questions that characterized film and visual studies during the twentieth century: the relationship between films and paintings. Working on the edge of the “frame” — between Majewski’s and Bruegel’s pictures — this article reflects upon the status of the artist as a humanist able to contribute — through visual storytelling — to organizing the cultural references of his community.