The Mill and the Cross

1564. Flanders is under Spanish rule and soldiers in red coats move through the villages. Pieter Bruegel is preparing a painting. There are more than five hundred figures on the panel and each of them is doing something. The film goes inside that painting. A day begins: bread is made, animals are grazed, children play, a man is arrested. The mill stands on the rock and the miller sees everything from above. Bruegel explains his own composition; where each person will be placed, and why Christ is lost inside the crowd. Lech Majewski directs; he adapted the screenplay from the art historian Michael Francis Gibson's book. Rutger Hauer plays Bruegel, Charlotte Rampling plays Mary and Michael York plays the collector Jonghelinck. It is a Polish and Swedish co-production. The source is Bruegel's painting The Way to Calvary, which is in Vienna. The images were produced in layers; the actors were shot separately and combined with painted backgrounds. The narrative uses almost no dialogue; the film moves through image rather than speech. The matter it treats is the ordinariness of suffering; nobody in the painting is looking at the central event, and the film shows that directly. The film ties the historical violence to the politics of the period; the executions carried out by the Spanish soldiers are inside the narrative. The narrative builds no story and asks patience of the viewer. Its limit is form; there is no event, the pace very slow, and the narrative academic. Who it is for: viewers who like art history and experimental cinema. Who it is not for: it is uneventful, very slow, and the ending closed.