Digital Alchemy

Venice, 1971. A major retrospective of the avant-garde — Pop art, Op art, Hyperrealism and Conceptualism — is under way at the 36th Biennale of Contemporary Art. The young protagonist of Lech Majewski’s novel Pilgrimage to the Tomb of Brigitte Bardot the Miraculous is moved by his encounter with paintings by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wunderlich and Kimura. But it is a subsequent meeting with the work of an old Italian master at the Galleria dell’Accademia that becomes a truly formative experience.

“Painting is alive, quite openly so, but with some other life, a life alien to me. A life that has nothing in common with the inky green of Giorgione, with The Tempest, which could be squeezed like a pomegranate. It is steel, plastic and inorganic. I admire its power, but it leaves me on the outside; it will not let me lose myself within it, penetrate it. I could stand before Giorgione for weeks, continually finding new details; before Lichtenstein, for a few minutes. Giorgione and Lichtenstein. Ambivalence and obviousness. Mystery and openness. Today belonged to Lichtenstein, but I lived in Giorgione’s yesterday. And suddenly, hearing the rustle of his painting, I realised that I had heard that rustle before. I had felt a similar tension — mystery. […] The mystery of Giorgione’s green was the mystery of the park in Blow-Up. And like the bolt of lightning illuminating The Tempest, an illumination pierced me: if Giorgione were alive, he would be making films now, films like Blow-Up, while still remaining on the canvas, in the realm of shadows.”

This pivotal episode from the 1996 novel, a work of exceptional importance to Lech Majewski — he calls it his opera vitae — is autobiographical. Recalled in the artist’s infrequent public statements, it explains why a young painter already showing considerable promise decided to become a film director.

The next chapter of the ADVENTURE WITH THE TEMPEST — to remain with both Antonioni and Giorgione — occurred more than thirty years later during rehearsals for Majewski’s latest feature, The Garden of Earthly Delights. By chance, the place where the artist was staying adjoined the Galleria dell’Accademia. A violent storm erupted during the night: every half-second, lightning illuminated the contours of the building housing La tempesta (The Tempest), its outlines softened by streams of water. Filming this clue offered by reality, pinning the moment of a unique coincidence within the frame, produced a video work several minutes long. Documentary footage shot with a small digital camera became a visual poem. Or perhaps a poetic image — one of Lech Majewski’s many DiVinities, forms whose name is itself a play on words, combining divine with DVD, the digital technology.

In the history of cinema, the arrival of a new tool — light, handy, ubiquitous video cameras that eliminated distance — brought a breakthrough that the director of Angelus has called “digital Neorealism”.

And what did the new medium mean for Majewski himself once he had made it his own? Did it affect the style of his art? Did it initiate yet another aesthetic turn in his work? Many find disorienting the freedom with which the artist moves between poetic compression, operatic decorum and the scale of outdoor spectacles — I am thinking of the London production of The Odyssey on the Thames. And a phenomenon difficult to classify is easy to ignore…

The fate of The Roe’s Room offers a telling contribution to the history of this work’s reception.

A poem of that title from one of Majewski’s youthful volumes grew into the libretto for an opera, composed together with Józef Skrzek and staged in Bytom. The milieu’s ostracism of the “arrogant amateurs” continued until the International Society for Contemporary Music placed it among the golden twelve — selected from six hundred — of the world’s most important contemporary operas, as a work reaching back to the mystery-play origins of the genre. Only then did funds become available to record it. Yet this is no straightforward record of an existing stage production. The Roe’s Room: An Autobiographical Opera is a film photographed with great sensitivity, richly inlaid with the painting of Giorgio de Chirico and told in a slow, hieratic rhythm in which a personal family history becomes interwoven with the cycle of nature. Underappreciated in Poland, this musical poem found its own distinctive route to the viewer: it meets its audience in gallery spaces. For many years it was an exhibit in a Buenos Aires museum. In collaboration with the Venice Biennale, it was projected as a video fresco in the setting of a sixteenth-century oratory in Palazzo Graziussi. The next event was a screening of The Roe’s Room as part of the artist’s full solo retrospective at New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art. The title of the New York exhibition — Lech Majewski: Conjuring the Moving Image — indicates which aspect of this body of work is regarded as its dominant quality and unifying formula.

Beyond the more spectacular existence of this art lies another dimension: it flows as an undercurrent, reaching those prepared to read a metalanguage that extends to archetypes. Somewhere, almost clandestinely, a “community of initiates” is expanding — people who discover one another through their fascination with The Garden of Earthly Delights, Wojaczek and Angelus, or who uncover the topography of Venice by following the signs scattered through The Hypnotist and Metaphysics.

Interestingly, these are usually young viewers. It is no coincidence that the director of The Gospel According to Harry frequently and willingly sits on juries at festivals of young independent cinema.

I shall return to the question left hanging: did use of the new instrument, the digital camera, significantly affect Majewski’s work? The Garden of Earthly Delights, his first feature made with this technology, offers the best field of observation. Few films have employed a technical medium so fully justified in both aesthetic and philosophical terms, so closely fitted to the story being told and so immanently inscribed within it. This is not the banal device of self-reflexivity, but the creation of a credible visual language capable of posing so-called fundamental questions persuasively rather than declaratively. Questions that contemporary art avoids, questions of which it is ashamed — although the very category of shame is today a discrediting anachronism.

A young woman is dying in Venice in the presence of her lover — Lech Majewski does not fear so obvious an association. Her attempt to reconstruct Bosch’s vision of an earthly paradise for her own use expresses resistance to disintegration and death. This heroic effort takes place in the presence of a camera, the story’s third protagonist. At one point the director relinquishes his omnipotence and leaves the two actors alone on set. They film one another and lend the characters their own names, thereby blurring the boundary between fiction and reality. In cinema, such a gesture is never innocent or transparent; in documentary, for example, it can endow the filmed subjects with agency and thus elevate them. In The Garden…, I believe the creator’s withdrawal performs a dual function. Symbolically it tightens the intimate space between the lovers. More importantly, it manifests an attitude — and simultaneously a method. Majewski, the author of carefully considered and meticulously completed works, regards himself above all as… a medium. He does not impose himself upon reality but allows it to open, remaining in symbiosis with it. He listens intently to its whispers, testing his visions against the concreteness of life. He once told me that the experience of making his debut feature, The Knight, amid the extraordinary dune landscape of Łeba was a lesson in humility. At the time he painstakingly and precisely storyboarded every shot and camera movement. Yet in his complete devotion to executing the plan, he turned his back on the photogenic phenomena surrounding him. The mistake was fortunately corrected and was probably the last of its kind in the artist’s practice.

Members of the Blood of a Poet crew told me that whenever the call “Ready! Camera!” was given, the wind rose in accordance with the screenplay — and did so in four successive takes. If a shot is meant to be good, Majewski argues, nature itself helps us. Otherwise it boycotts us!

Shot conventionally, The Garden… would have been an entirely different film; the DiVinities would probably never have come into being.

Digital technology — often treated as an economic necessity — gave the artist autonomy: freedom from the dictates of producers, deadlines, an elaborate production machine and substantial financial resources. Lech Majewski, a total artist, works like a Renaissance painter among a small band of apprenticed pupils, overseeing the entire process by which a work comes into being. Filming the subject is merely priming the canvas and attempting the first sketch. The work attains its finished form only after laborious, time-consuming computer processing. This is why the water of a Venetian canal in the captivating portrait of his wife, Doris, acquired the dense, oily consistency of liquid glass. And Forest (Aria) owes its oneiric texture to the delicate vibrations of a slowly panning camera.

Yet for the maker of The Annunciation, the “digital camera” is merely “a different model of brush”, whose possibilities he has mastered perfectly. The DiVinities contain none of the casual shoddiness of Dogme’s imitators. He creates them with cinematic — which is to say painterly — means. In this exceptional case there is no conflict between the two. He has attained mastery in composing the frame; the camerawork in all his films is economical because he considers movement a powerful and meaningful device. (The Knight is the most orthodox in this respect, told through a series of static images inspired by Quattrocento art.) At the source of each elaborate work — regardless of the material in which it is created or the aesthetic code it employs — is a vision brought forth from the unconscious. In the working process of Wojaczek’s director, this comes first.

Contrary to the occasional claim that this work is internally divided, I regard it as exceptionally coherent. It is bound together by a network of self-quotations and obsessively recurring motifs and figures that the artist tests and… exorcises in different genres and media. Above all, it is united by the Schellingian belief dear to Majewski — and permeating every work — that art can induce a state of grace.

Blood of a Poet. A poem in thirty-three images, an experimental form in which Majewski freed himself from the tyranny of dialogue, likewise enters the bloodstream of the entire oeuvre.

So far I have seen only fragments — it is still being made: several powerful, intense and moving video works, and a few beautiful monochrome photograms. I also know the shooting script, which resembles free verse more than a set of technical instructions. This is enough to identify familiar trails:

The figure of a young poet, an artist in conflict with the world, recalls Wojaczek, Basquiat and the boy from The Roe’s Room. The demonic Baden echoes Basquiat’s violence-laden relationship with his father. As in earlier works, the “visual poems” are inspired by works of art close to Majewski, including Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross and Böcklin’s painting. Aquatic motifs known from earlier works reappear. So too do selected elements of religious symbolism in startling contexts: the crucifixion of a young patient in a psychiatric hospital, a contemporary version of Abraham’s sacrifice, and the protagonist’s name, which alludes to the title of Majewski’s volume of poetry St Sebastian.

Blood of a Poet is a theme developed through three independent orders. Work on the project produced a series of black-and-white photograms, thirty-three autonomous visions — DiVinities — and finally a feature-length film assembled from selected video works.

This “quasi-narrative” will be projected onto eight walls, while the remaining pieces will loop on twenty-four individual monitors. The arrangement of monitors in the gallery does not impose a direction of travel or settle anything arbitrarily. Entering this thicket — this labyrinth — each viewer passes from one station to the next and assembles an individual story from the ready-made elements. Cortázar once invited readers to a similar game in Hopscotch. This conception challenges the logic of linear succession and stresses its conventional nature, chiming beautifully with Blood of a Poet’s discourse on the nature of time. Its symbol is Wolf, who moves backwards, obsessed with turning back the hands of clocks. If we entrust ourselves to Wolf’s madness, we shall accept that nothing is a final boundary, that even death is reversible. And old women emerging from the water become laughing, beautiful girls, as in the final (?) poem of Blood of a Poet, inspired by Cranach’s Fountain of Youth. The cycle is complete.

*Magdalena Lebecka is a film scholar and regular contributor to the monthly KINO, the quarterly KAMERA.FILM&TV, the quarterly KRESY and the monthly WIĘŹ.