Frank Corcoran

I reel. I rawl.
Lech Majewski´s film: ” THE MILL AND THE CROSS” , visually gorgeous, enormous, newest technology and 3D an´all and this extraordinary Kattowice painter/ poet/ film maker/ composer ( YES ! Yes.- Blessed are the self-styled…. ) extraordinary; eccentric is not the word . Let Majewski speak.
” Transporting the painting ( i.e. Peter Breughel The Elder´s 1564 Nicolas Jonghelinck´s painted commission, ” Crucifixion”, into such a different medium, however, took patience: The result is a mix of old-fashioned craftsmanship and the latest in digital film-making technology. Costumes were hand-sewn by Polish seamstresses and dyed with tints made from boiled onions, beetroots and apples, as they would have been in Bruegel’s day; the “right” color black was achieved by burning a candle against a pane of glass, rather than relying on computers to recreate the exact hue. ”
Majewski himself had to take up Bruegel’s brush and complete a partially-visible tree in the top-left corner of the painting to extend the field of vision for the camera to pan across.
– So: is Majewski´s “DIE MÜHLE UND DAS KREUZ” , then, close to Adorno´s “Kitsch ? Yes ! Too close ?
Yes! it is too close . Hmmm. Pity. – Behind its gorgeous ( Polish, ” Catholic” ) camera´s masterfull ecstasy , taking its slow, visual pleasure in torture, in peasants´ over-lovely ( – operatic ? perhaps even Visconti? )
costumes , crimson Spanish Inquisition murderers´ horses, Majewski´s Catholic cameras ( plural , polyphonic, many layers ) , I am afraid, wallow ( – is he aware of this ? – surely not? ) in – a great sin, an aesthetic sin, Polish Jesuits would nod – TAKING VISUAL PLEASURE, my son ( ” How many times! ? ” ) in ” violent sacrifice ” theology, in “Electric Chair Theology” , in Sacred Sadism Theology .
Behind his ( laudable ) silences and lush pannings and delightfully, deliberately slow tempi is an attitude towards holy pornography ( – Miles better , I grant you , than the truly awful Mel Gibson ) which thus sadly betrays his great filmic mastery. Unholy. Verily. That aesthetic of his message nukes thus his seen, felt, dreamed, filmic massage of me, the composing viewer. Pity. Beware Kitsch in all its ( lush, even lovely ) meretricious forms. Even in music. Especially in music.