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Oh God, what are we to say about Godard�s Passion (1982)? Passion is a movie about (it doesn�t actually have a plot, but this is an approximation) a Polish filmmaker (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) transplanted to France who�s trying to make a movie that will consist of live actors forming tableaux of famous scenes from Western painting. The running joke is that Jerzy�s movie (like the Godard movie in which he finds himself) needs a story (from an investment point of view), so what the hell is he doing with these tableaux? Jerzy�evidently the Godard stand-in�thinks that movies don�t need stories, or that perhaps every image is inherently a story, or at least carries within it the seeds of a story.
Here's a detail from Goya's The Third of May, 1808:
And here's Godard's rendering of it:
So we have a movie about a director making a movie largely out of tableaux of Western art and I thought, �Hey, you know what would be interesting? To contrast Passion with Lech Majewski�s The Mill and the Cross (2011), which consists in large part of people acting out tableaux from Pieter Bruegel�s The Procession to Calvary.�
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| Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Procession to Calvary. |
But before we get to that, I want to talk about Vladimir Nabokov again.
In Nabokov�s 1933 novel Laughter in the Dark, the protagonist has an idea for a series of animated films which would take well-known European paintings and �bring them to life.� So you would have a Bruegel scene depicting the Netherlanders ice-skating, and you could actually see them skate around; the hunters in the snow would actually walk into their homes and close the doors behind them. Nabokov�s character proposes this idea relatively early in the history of cinema (just twenty-eight years after the Lumi�re brothers had filmed a train arriving at a station) so imagine how novel and exciting must have seemed the possibilities, even if one were only pursuing what was essentially a gimmick, like walking (and why not talking?) Bruegel paintings.
Think of how wonderfully new cinema must have seemed in its earliest years. I am reminded of an episode in Takuboko Ishikawa�s Romaji Diary(circa-1910) in which a friend of the writer asks him if he�s �been to see the motion pictures yet?� and the writer responds, no, not yet, but he�s been meaning to, and his friend assures him that they�re really something.
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| Takuboku Ishikawa, who never didn't look young. |
Now, to go back to Nabokov�s idea, Godards� and Majewski�s movies are the only ones I�ve seen that have attempted something like it (although I'm sure it's been done elsewhere, probably even in other Godard movies), although they both engage in live action reenactments of the paintings in question, rather than animations of them. Majewski�s film is much more exclusively focused on the tableau of the painting (and of only one painting), whereas Godard has plenty of other issues and subject matter to attend to (this being Godard, after all). So in addition to the tableaux, Godard�s movie also deals with: labor organization, evil bourgeoises (is there any other kind?), exiles from communism living in France, Polish Solidarity, and the depredations of Hollywood and all the other moneyed interests that can come between a director and his film.
Whereas Majewski seems to have said, �I want to show Bruegel taking images of his social and political reality and using them for his painting.� Now, there�s plenty of politics at work here, too, mind you, as the film show the Spaniards perpetrating terrible atrocities against their increasingly rebellious and heterodox Dutch subjects. And we also get to see how an artist can persevere in trying circumstances that aren�t exactly conducive to art. This hearkens back to what I said about Nabokov in a recent post, namely that his response to twentieth century horrors was not to directly combat them, either by taking up a gun or wielding the polemicist�s pen, but rather by building �glittering fortresses of civilization� to oppose them. Perhaps Bruegel�at least in Majewski�s film�has done the same thing.
