Look/Listen

Despite is staggering size and complexity, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting, The Procession to Calvary, is not generally counted among the Flemish artist's most essential works. It is therefore somewhat unexpected that Polish writer-director Lech Majewski (Angelus, The Garden of Earthly Delights) would select The Procession to serve as the visual and narrative raw materials for his captivating new film about Bruegel, The Mill and the Cross. However, Majewski’s choice proves to be a shrewd one, as The Procession encapsulates many aspects of Bruegel’s work in a manner that is distinctively accessible to the newcomer. Illustrating Christ’s march to Golgotha in a then-contemporary, rural Flemish context, The Procession straddles two vital categories within the painter’s oeuvre: the religious painting and the genre painting. Bruegel presents an event that would have been and (remains) instantly recognizable to Christians throughout Flanders and beyond, and ornaments it with cunning political, economic, and cultural commentary. Moreover, The Procession is a vital historical record of daily life the sixteenth-century Low Countries, a feature that characterizes Bruegel’s wider body of work.

In part, The Mill and the Cross is a lucid presentation of Bruegel’s artistic method and thought process. The painter (Rutger Hauer) explains in somber, matter-of-fact tones how he conceives of The Procession’s composition and elements, both to his wealthy patron Nicholaes Jonghelinck (Michael York) and directly to the viewer in voice-over narration. Majewski leans in close as Bruegel’s stick of charcoal charts the landmarks and the lines that will bind his painting together. Here on the left, he notes, is the lush Tree of Life, and here on the right is a Tree of Death, in the form of a Catherine wheel. Engaged strictly as a work that illuminates the grand, often subtle genius of one of the masters of the Northern Renaissance, The Mill and the Cross is an engrossing object.

Yet Majewski’s film is much more slippery and brashly cinematic creature than its staid subject matter might suggest. He places Hauer’s Bruegel within a supple, dream-like world that seems to exist alongside and within the very painting he is creating. Accordingly, we see Bruegel’s humble household awaken and go about its raucous morning routine, even as the characters who appear in The Procession do likewise. Individual figures—peddlers, priests, musicians, farmers, prisoners, and crimson-coated Spanish soldiers—gradually take their place in the crucifixion ritual. Meanwhile, Bruegel surveys them, sketching relentlessly and binding them into his sweeping vision. The boundaries between the various narrative spaces vanish. It is impossible to discern where, for example, the historical Bruegel’s “outside the painting” experience ends and the film’s granular investigations of the “inside the painting” fictions begin.

Majewski and his designers achieve this blurring through a striking appropriation of The Procession’s imagery, incorporating it directly into the film through digital technology. Melding live actors, photographic elements, and animation effects, Majewski bestows on his film a potent aura of the illusory. Bruegel’s green-screened wanderings through the pastoral landscape of his own painting are blatantly unrealistic, but they recall the artificiality of the artist’s characteristic high-angle, multi-figure tableaus. Each windowframe encloses a view of the windmill from The Procession, perched improbably atop a spire of rock, even though it cannot possibly be so perfectly framed from so many vantages. This repeated, impossible image underlines the artist’s verbal elucidation: The miller is God, peering down solemnly on the virtues and folly of humankind.

Bruegel provides the hub about which the rest of the film revolves, just as a nearly-hidden Jesus serves as the visual center of The Procession. Hauer’s performance is accordingly one of physical and intellectual presence, rather than deep characterization. In addition, Charlotte Rampling appears now and then as a shattered mother, musing mournfully in voice-over on the crimes of her executed son (possibly Jesus, a Flemish heretic, or both). However, the film functions primarily without words.  Majewski stitches together anonymous, nearly silent vignettes into a symphony on the blissful and brutal character of the human condition. The viewer witnesses a couple eat breakfast, load a goat into a cart, venture out into a misty meadow, and buy bread from a merchant. Suddenly, soldiers appear and apprehend the man, whipping him and lashing him to the aforementioned Catherine wheel. The context is murky and mercurial: Are these events occurring in historical Flanders? In Bruegel’s mind’s eye? Within the reality of the painting? In the director’s imagination? Like Bruegel’s works, The Mill and The Cross presents the viewer with an intricate matrix where these realities mingle and become indistinguishable. Majewski’s film achieves a rare thing in cinema about other works of art, trenchantly capturing the essence of the work without sacrificing its own independent and enthralling identity.

St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.