This document provides a detailed summary and analysis of the 2011 film The Mill and the Cross, directed by Lech Majewski. It summarizes the film as follows: 1) The film is inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting The Way to Calvary and attempts to bring the painting to life by translating it into a narrative film. 2) The film depicts both the events of Christ's crucifixion procession shown in the painting as well as the historical context of Spanish rule and religious persecution in 16th century Flanders. 3) However, the director's vision is not a straightforward translation and includes interruptions and contradictions that undermine cinematic realism,

1. SUI GENERIS: Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross
The actor Rutger Hauer may forever be linked to the film “Bladerunner,” in which he
plays a rebel android on the loose from a planet-colony in search of his origins—and the
means to reverse a computer program that ultimately condemns his kind to death. In Lech
Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, we go not forward in time, but backward, to 16th
-
century Flanders, and Hauer is cast as the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The focus this
time is not on artificial life and a sci-fi futuristic vision of LA, but on the artist’s painting
The Way to Calvary of 1564.
Majewski’s film is inspired by the scholar Michael Gibson’s book of the same name,
published in the U.S. in 2000 by Blackwell North America. Gibson and the director are
responsible for the screenplay. The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in
January and opened at Film Forum in mid-September. It takes as its starting point
Bruegel’s painting, which hangs beside the painter’s Tower of Babel in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It attempts to bring to life a work of art in which
Christ proceeds to his crucifixion among some 500 figures represented on the canvas.
Religious painting served a similar function, in that it pictorially concretized the
narratives of the New Testament for the illiterate masses. In any event, the conceit of
transforming one genre into another is not novel; one precedent that comes to mind is
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, whose point of departure is George
Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte of 1884. Like the Bruegel
work, it situates numerous figures engaged in various activities in an outdoor setting. The
play opens with a tableau vivant recreating the painting in three dimensions, but the
interest quickly moves to fictionalized events in the painter’s life. The Polish director also
delves into the life of the artist—Hauer depicts Breugel as he creates the work, and
Michael York plays his friend and patron Niclaes Jonghelinck—but we are never far from
the composition of the painting and the event it depicts as drivers of the narrative.
Breugel has set his work in 16th-century Flanders, a time when it was under Spanish
control. In 1519 Charles I of Spain, all of 19 years old, was elected Charles V, Holy
Roman emperor. As heir to three powerful dynasties, including the Hapsburgs, his
domains in Europe were vast and comprised the Netherlands.
To raise money for his military ventures, Charles subjected the towns and cloth industry
of the Netherlands to heavy taxation. The brutal persecution by his military of heretical
Protestants further embittered the citizenry. In Bruegel’s painting, Spanish soldiers, in
bright red uniforms, are everywhere, as Christ, bearing the Cross, makes his way to
Calvary. In Majewski’s film, we witness the barbaric measures of the Inquisition as the
Spaniards bury a woman alive, holding her down as she struggles to elude the shoveled
earth raining down on her. In another scene, soldiers capture and mercilessly beat a man
to death, lash him to a wheel and hoist it atop a pole, where his corpse is left subject to
the elements—and to scavenging crows—as his wife stands weeping below, an intimation
of the Crucifixion to follow. In the painting, the wheel, on which a crow is perched,
appears at right, sans victim but bearing a swatch of fabric. Multiple wheels raised

2. skyward are also depicted at top right in the artist’s Triumph of Death, painted just two
years before Calvary.
We will later see the red-clad Spanish military escort Christ on his procession. In the
courtyard of the stable that serves as his prison, we watch men assemble his cross. The
common thieves who will share his fate are bought out and rudely deposited in a horse-
drawn cart. Christ, rousted from a bed of straw, is ushered roughly to the courtyard to be
flogged, at which point he takes up the instrument of his crucifixion. As he proceeds
through the town’s streets, Spanish soldiers on horseback ride by his side, and further
lashing continues periodically at the hands of a man able with a whip who walks behind
him.
The persecution of Flanders’s citizens and the procession to Calvary take place in silence,
save for sounds of the action. The human voice is largely absent, at least in the sense of
dialogue. The three principal characters—Bruegel, Jonghelinck, and the role taken on by
Charlotte Rampling, who has the unenviable task of playing Mary, mother of Christ—
deliver their lines in monologues. They may speak to another, but there is no real
exchange—the listener is present only to lend verisimilitude to the lines spoken by the
actor and no more.
In one scene Bruegel is seen drawing as his patron and friend sits by his side. He
undertakes an interpretation of the painting, analyzing the composition through a
commentary on a preparatory sketch whose elements and symbolism he explains to the
largely silent Jonghelinck. He compares the assembly of his composition to a spider’s
construction of his web—one he declares that “should be large enough to hold
everything,” which sounds just about right in view of the depiction of the torments of
Christ as he proceeds to his death. The metaphor is made tangible when we see Hauer,
with a stick, goad the insect on its web in the early-morning mist. In another scene, which
provides historical context for the setting of the film, Michael York, in his role as
merchant-collector, speaks bitterly about the harsh measures of the Spanish military to his
wife, who silently attends to her husband, her eyes cast upward.
There is an almost documentary quality to the lines spoken by these characters, as if they
were participants in or observers of a historical moment or art historians providing details
about the life of an artist and an exegesis his work. Absent any dialogue, the language
takes on a stilted quality, and such scenes stand out as devices for instruction. They
contrast sharply with the naturalism of the filmed action in other scenes.
Also detracting from the naturalistic footage is the computer wizardry employed in the
making of the film. It was shot on location in Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and
New Zealand, locales selected by Majewski for the resemblance they bear to the
Netherlandish landscape of Bruegel’s painting. This scenic borrowing, is however,
limited to foregrounds, whereas backgrounds are lifted by digital sleight-of-hand from
Bruegel paintings and seamlessly linked to the footage. Seamless perhaps, but in the
unnatural marriage of these different visual sources, their linkage creates something of a
disconnect.

3. There is, in the background of the painting itself, a certain irregularity. The windmill of
the title figures prominently at center left, perched high atop a curious outcropping of
rock that is out of keeping with the rest of the landscape. It begs the question of how
grain for flour might be raised to such a height. In the breakdown of the elements of
Bruegel’s composition, delivered by Rutger Hauer in the film, we move beyond the
unnatural into the realm of the supernatural: the mill, on high, serves as a stand-in for the
divine, the great overseer—and driving force—of Christ’s Passion.
The point at which the mill grinds to a halt coincides with the cessation of action in the
director presents his own tableau vivant. This is the moment at which the link between
the painting and its cinematic translation is made most explicit and emphatic. The miller,
absent from the Bruegel work, looks down on events unfolding far below. The
revolutions of the mill’s arms begin to slow, and as the becalmed sails bring them to a
halt, we cut to the procession as the action grinds to a halt, its numerous figures frozen in
the exact poses and garb of their counterparts in the painting as Christ falters beneath the
burden of the Cross.
The resemblance, however, is not quite so precise as it would seem. For the focus of the
scene is largely on Christ and the figures immediately surrounding him. Hauer’s Breugel
is an intruder among the large cast of characters, again commenting on his pictorial
intent. Yet the painting has no such focal point; rather, it is a broad panorama in which
many individuals appear, and the fate of Christ is not made visually significant. If there is
any concentration of interest at all, one would have to say it lies in the right forefront of
the work, where John the Baptist comforts the disconsolate Mary. Only in the distance, at
the center of the composition, can we make out the collapsing Christ.
In an earlier scene, Hauer’s Bruegel speaks of this device, where the important event is
rendered almost as an afterthought. He alludes to other paintings in which it plays a role,
among them his “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” a painting from the 1560s inspired
by Ovid that hangs in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Once more it is the
foreground that first captures the eye’s attention. A ploughman, aided by his beast of
burden, works the earth. Beneath him stands a shepherd with his dog and flock. At right,
a ship with billowing sails heads out into an expansive harbor. Barely visible in its wake
is Icarus, who, having flown too near the sun that has caused his wings of feathers and
wax to melt, plunges into the water. All that may be seen of him is a single leg; the sea
has swallowed the rest.
Here is a momentous event reduced to a minor detail, a tragedy to which attention is not
paid. In a W.H. Auden’s 1938 response to the painting, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” the poet
noted “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster,” how the “ship that
must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to
get to and sailed calmly on.”
Charlotte Rampling, in the role of Mary, twice addresses the camera directly in the course
of the film. In her first monologue she speaks uncomprehendingly of how the throngs

4. who had only recently been enthralled by her son’s speeches now have turned against
him. Later, as the procession of Christ is reaching its end, the film cuts to the house in
which Mary dwells. There is a knock on her door, and a brief, almost soundless exchange
with a messenger who advises her that her son is being taken to his crucifixion. Here she
speaks wistfully of her hope that the world will come to heed his teachings.
Unlike Rutger Hauer and Michael York, Rampling delivers her lines to the audience,
without even the crutch of a listener at her side. Even Jesus is given the luxury of silence.
Perhaps her true role in the film is to lend passion to the Passion, to give voice to the
sufferings of those at its heart. But in the end, her own suffering may be best represented
by the concluding images of the film. We see her mourn in the dramatic early light of day
at the foot of the Resurrection scene. We see her watch as Christ is taken down from the
Cross. And as the film comes to an end, we see her standing before his tomb, as the
voices of Polish composer Henyrk Górecki’s Miserere beseech God’s mercy.
Lech Majewski’s credits include The Garden of Earthly Delights (2004), which he wrote
and directed, and his friend Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996), to which he contributed
the screenplay. The website for “The Mill and the Cross” adds to his roles as co-writer
and director for the film those of producer, cinematographer, editor, and composer. In some of
these capacities, he worked closely with another colleague, but the multiple titles convey
the breadth of his involvement in so many aspects of the film’s making.
They also betray an artist with so singular a vision that he requires full control of its
execution. It may be fairly asked whether that vision is realized. If the film’s premise is
indeed to translate one visual medium into another, to reconstitute a fixed event in a
painting into a filmed narrative that progresses chronologically, there are times when the
director appears to undermine his own aim.
Right off, Majewski is hampered by his attempt to tell three different stories explicitly,
whereas the Breugel work tells only one overtly: the procession of Christ to Calvary.
Though unquestionably present, the oppression of the Spanish militia and its persecution
of heretics in Flanders remains a subtext in the painting. But the director, while relating
the progress of Jesus as he makes his way to his crucifixion, not only brings that subtext
to the forefront, but also addresses the matter of the making of the painting.
All of this is accomplished through the addition of actors playing characters, a tool
available to the medium that has no counterpart in an unanimated picture. However, their
introduction and spoken lines interrupt, and run counter to, the flow of narrative, which in
its depiction of Christ and his Passion is largely conventional and naturalistic.
Rampling’s Mary does participate in the cinematic recreation of Breugel’s work, but that
she portrays a character and speaks at all—in contrast to her son, who is never heard from
—seems out of keeping with traditional pictorial renderings of the event. Majewski has
literally put words in the mouth of the mother of God. And that she speaks them at length
directly to the audience without an interlocutor is at odds with cinematic naturalism.

5. One wonders too about the intent behind the roles Hauer and York characters. In no way
do they come across as fully developed characters. Indeed, their purpose of seems largely
instructive. Scenes that feature the painter’s family may lend credibility to Hauer’s
character, yet the monologues he delivers to his silent friend and patron come across as
art historical lectures. York’s Jonghelinck is wooden when his character is utilized only to
listen to the prolix painter, and he is not all that much more animated when describing the
ills of the Spanish presence in Flanders to his wife, who stands by his side in a studied
pose and says not a word.
Moreover, the scene in which the film most directly mirrors the painting—the point at
which the action of the film halts and the many figures seen in the Breugel work are
cinematically replicated and frozen in the painting’s poses—is disrupted when Hauer
strolls into the tableau vivant to discuss the details—and signification—of the
composition, with York’s Jonghelinck following in his steps.
Equally jarring is the constant juxtaposition in the footage of the computer-generated
backgrounds—taken directly from the painter’s landscapes—with the naturally filmed
foregrounds. Though this could be viewed as an attempt to situate the film within the
painting, to meld disparate media, the effect is rather to highlight the push and pull
between the appropriated and the filmed and ultimately detracts from any cinematic
vraisemblance.
It would be easy to view these contradictions, interruptions, and juxtapositions as
injurious to the film, to consider them flaws of an ambitious undertaking that misses its
mark. But to pass such a judgment, we must acknowledge that our criticism is of the film
qua film. But let us revisit the filmmaker’s intent. We said at the outset that Majewski set
out to bring to life a static painting, to reconstitute the picture in another visual medium.
It would be simplistic to consider “The Mill and the Cross” as simply a reconstruction of
Breugel’s painting in another visual medium. Yet we know from other attempts at
translation that this is a near impossibility. The Italian adage says of the translator,
traduttore, traditore—“translator, traitor.” The qualities and elements inherent in a picture
simply do not have exact equivalents in the cinema.
But in fact the Polish director has cast a wider net, one that like Breugel’s spider web in
the film, is designed to contain a great deal more. The unresolved tension between the
two media that prevents the successful translation from one into another, the awkward
introduction of Netherlandish history and art historical commentary that interfere with the
narrative flow, the inclusion of characters and technical effects whose presence
undermines naturalism, all seem to generate a Brechtian alienation effect akin to Brecht’s
that denies the audience a passive viewing experience and engage it in Majewski’s
intellectual undertaking. The give and take between oppositions, the way in which
painting and film inform each other through their dialogue, these are dialectics out of
which emerge a genre truly of its own kind. If the director set out to “give life” to
Bruegel’s painting, he has succeeded in a sense far beyond the literal meaning of that
phrase.

6. One wonders too about the intent behind the roles Hauer and York characters. In no way
do they come across as fully developed characters. Indeed, their purpose of seems largely
instructive. Scenes that feature the painter’s family may lend credibility to Hauer’s
character, yet the monologues he delivers to his silent friend and patron come across as
art historical lectures. York’s Jonghelinck is wooden when his character is utilized only to
listen to the prolix painter, and he is not all that much more animated when describing the
ills of the Spanish presence in Flanders to his wife, who stands by his side in a studied
pose and says not a word.
Moreover, the scene in which the film most directly mirrors the painting—the point at
which the action of the film halts and the many figures seen in the Breugel work are
cinematically replicated and frozen in the painting’s poses—is disrupted when Hauer
strolls into the tableau vivant to discuss the details—and signification—of the
composition, with York’s Jonghelinck following in his steps.
Equally jarring is the constant juxtaposition in the footage of the computer-generated
backgrounds—taken directly from the painter’s landscapes—with the naturally filmed
foregrounds. Though this could be viewed as an attempt to situate the film within the
painting, to meld disparate media, the effect is rather to highlight the push and pull
between the appropriated and the filmed and ultimately detracts from any cinematic
vraisemblance.
It would be easy to view these contradictions, interruptions, and juxtapositions as
injurious to the film, to consider them flaws of an ambitious undertaking that misses its
mark. But to pass such a judgment, we must acknowledge that our criticism is of the film
qua film. But let us revisit the filmmaker’s intent. We said at the outset that Majewski set
out to bring to life a static painting, to reconstitute the picture in another visual medium.
It would be simplistic to consider “The Mill and the Cross” as simply a reconstruction of
Breugel’s painting in another visual medium. Yet we know from other attempts at
translation that this is a near impossibility. The Italian adage says of the translator,
traduttore, traditore—“translator, traitor.” The qualities and elements inherent in a picture
simply do not have exact equivalents in the cinema.
But in fact the Polish director has cast a wider net, one that like Breugel’s spider web in
the film, is designed to contain a great deal more. The unresolved tension between the
two media that prevents the successful translation from one into another, the awkward
introduction of Netherlandish history and art historical commentary that interfere with the
narrative flow, the inclusion of characters and technical effects whose presence
undermines naturalism, all seem to generate a Brechtian alienation effect akin to Brecht’s
that denies the audience a passive viewing experience and engage it in Majewski’s
intellectual undertaking. The give and take between oppositions, the way in which
painting and film inform each other through their dialogue, these are dialectics out of
which emerge a genre truly of its own kind. If the director set out to “give life” to
Bruegel’s painting, he has succeeded in a sense far beyond the literal meaning of that
phrase.