Real Bodies in (Un)real Spaces: Space, Movement, and the Installation Sensibility in Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross

Live-action bodies traverse digitally-constructed and digitized spaces in Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (Młyn i krzyż, 2011). Majewski, a Polish artist who has worked across media, imagines his film as an animation of the world represented in Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Procession to Calvary. His unprecedented blending of real and painted bodies, spaces, and worlds in The Mill and the Cross draws attention to the necessity of acknowledging space and movement in contemporary approaches to embodied spectatorial experience. This essay considers how the film imagines and treats its space(s) and the relations it establishes between the film-as-text, painting-as-text, and the museal space that traditionally contains painting-but also, with increasing frequency, cinema. It proposes a reframing of the terms of discussion in intermediality, shifting from painting/cinema to installation/cinema. Finally, it explores a long-neglected notion of art and its space (and the possibility of inhabiting that space) as they (re-)emerge in contemporary expanded cinema.