Lech Majewski

Lech Majewski: The Man Who Walked Into a Painting

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's *The Procession to Calvary*, painted in 1564 and hanging in Vienna, is 124 by 170 centimetres and contains roughly five hundred people. Lech Majewski chose twelve of them, and built a film in which the audience walks through the canvas while the painter, played by Rutger Hauer, explains what he is doing and why. *The Mill and the Cross* premiered at Sundance in January 2011. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and wrote that "if you see no more than the opening shots, you will never forget them." It cost €1.1 million. Majewski wrote it, produced it, shot it and scored it.

Katowice, Łódź, and a Detour Through Poetry

Lech Majewski was born on 30 August 1953 in Katowice, in the Silesian industrial belt. He studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and then took his diploma from the directing department of the National Film School in Łódź in 1978.

But he arrived at cinema through literature, not through it. Before the film school diploma he was publishing poetry in serious magazines and issuing collections: *Tales of a Thousand Nights and One City* in 1977, *Searching for Paradise* in 1978, along with novels turning on urban alienation and spiritual pilgrimage. The order matters. Majewski is a poet who learned to shoot, which is why his films tend to proceed by image and accretion rather than by plot, and why the ones that fail, fail for the reasons difficult poems fail.

His first films came fast — *The Annunciation* in 1978, the independent feature *The Knight* in 1980. Then, in 1981, he travelled to Cambridge and did not come back. Poland went under martial law; Majewski became an émigré, and his career became stateless in a way that has never entirely resolved. He is now a Polish-American who belongs to both the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Wandering Decade

The exile years produced a filmography with no obvious centre of gravity: *The Flight of the Spruce Goose* in 1986; *Prisoner of Rio* in 1988, a fictionalised account of Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber living out his impunity in Brazil; *The Gospel According to Harry* in 1992. In 1996 he co-wrote and co-produced *Basquiat*, Julian Schnabel's film about the painter — a project Majewski had developed, and the first sign of what would become his permanent subject: what happens inside the mind of someone making a picture.

The return to Poland produced his first unambiguous success. *Wojaczek* (1999) follows the last days of Rafał Wojaczek, the self-destroying poet of communist Silesia. It collected more than twenty international awards, and *The New York Times* called it a "virtuoso achievement." *Angelus* followed in 2000, then *The Garden of Earthly Delights* in 2004 — another film named for a painting — and *Glass Lips* in 2007, assembled out of the video-art cycle *Blood of a Poet*, which critics praised for its "hypnotic expressiveness."

By then the gallery world had claimed him as much as the cinema had. *Blood of a Poet* premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and went into the 52nd Venice Biennale. In 2006 MoMA mounted a full retrospective, *Lech Majewski: Conjuring the Moving Image*. His work has also been shown at the Louvre. Simultaneously he was directing for the stage: *Ubu Rex* in 1995, *Carmen* in 1995 and again in 2002, *Pokój Saren* in 1996, *Harnasie* and *King Roger* in 2008 — frequently writing the music, the libretto, the choreography and the sets himself.

Inside the Bruegel

*The Mill and the Cross* took as its source not only the painting but a book: the art historian Michael Francis Gibson's close reading of it, published in French in 1996 and in English in 2001, which *The New York Times* called "as readable and riveting as a first-rate spy-thriller." Bruegel's canvas shows the road to Calvary transposed into sixteenth-century Flanders under Spanish occupation, with Christ almost lost among the crowd; Gibson's argument is about what that displacement means.

Majewski's method was to isolate a dozen figures out of the five hundred and give each a life through interlocking vignettes and monologues — Marian Makula's miller, Joanna Litwin's Marijken Bruegel — while Hauer's Bruegel, Charlotte Rampling's Mary and Michael York's Nicolaes Jonghelinck, the painting's actual patron, supply the commentary, with the painter himself explaining the picture's symbolism and structure. The Polish-Swedish co-production wrapped in August 2009. The layered compositing that lets the camera move through a static Renaissance space was assembled shot by shot. Variety's Dennis Harvey called the result "frequently entrancing"; Graham Leggat of the San Francisco International Film Festival called it "spellbinding," a film in which "the painting literally comes to life." It holds 79 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Afterwards came *Field of Dogs* (*Onirica*) in 2014, a contemporary Dante; *Valley of the Gods* in 2019, with John Malkovich and Josh Hartnett; and *Brigitte Bardot Forever* in 2021.

Why Lech Is Called a Genius

The claim here is stronger than for most performers, because Majewski is an author in the full sense and the evidence is institutional. MoMA does not give retrospectives to journeymen; the Louvre and the Venice Biennale do not exhibit them. What is genuinely rare about him is the range of the authorship. On *The Mill and the Cross* he was writer, producer, cinematographer and composer, and on his opera productions he has taken the music, the libretto, the choreography and the design. Almost nobody working in cinema does this — not because it is forbidden but because the crafts are separately hard, and doing four badly is the usual result. Majewski's films are the argument that a single sensibility controlling every channel produces a coherence that collaboration cannot.

The specific cognitive move underneath it is unusual too: he thinks in pictures that already exist. Bosch, Bruegel, Dante, the Bruegel patron's own commission — Majewski takes an existing work of art and reconstructs the experience of standing inside it, which requires simultaneously the art historian's reading, the poet's compression and the technician's understanding of how to move a camera through space that has no depth. That triple competence is where the word "genius" earns its keep, if it ever does.

The counter-case is real and not small. Majewski's films are often accused, not unfairly, of being static, hermetic and more rewarding to describe than to sit through; the plotless drift that makes *The Mill and the Cross* hypnotic makes other works of his inert. His commercial reach is negligible — a €1.1 million budget for his most famous film tells the story. He has no Palme, no Oscar, no major competitive festival prize; his honours are curatorial rather than cinematic. And there is a persistent charge that the total-authorship method is less a philosophy than a refusal to be edited. Majewski is a real artist with a real body of work. Whether the work is great or merely singular is a question his admirers and detractors have never come close to settling.

Legacy

Majewski's contribution is a demonstration that cinema can be used as an instrument of art history rather than of storytelling — that a film can be a way of looking at a painting, not a way of dramatising its subject. That idea has since become common in gallery film and rare in cinemas, and Majewski got there first and did it at feature length. For Polish culture he is also the rarest kind of exile: a Silesian poet who left in 1981, built a career on three continents, and came back to make his best-received films about Polish subjects — the self-destroying poet of communist Silesia, and, obliquely, a Flemish painting that turns out to be about occupation.

Achievements

• Officer of the Order of Polonia Restituta
• Order of the White Eagle — 2026
• Worked as film director, photographer and film editor