The Journeys of Lech Majewski

Being oneself is the only religious

experience we all undergo.

An experience that can be communicated only

partially, through the language of art.

John Updike

Lech Majewski is a singular artist. An outsider. A restless wanderer, as though from a tarot card or a painting by Bosch. Continually searching for new cities, new landscapes and new sources of inspiration for his imagination. A film director by profession, a painter and poet by vocation. A man of art — although in the age of the internet, such a phrase may sound anachronistic. Yet it suits Majewski perfectly. He is modern in his thinking, in combining varied means of expression and techniques, and in his use of digital cameras and video installations. At the same time, however, he is precisely anachronistic — or perhaps it would be better to say old-fashioned. He is absorbed by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by Bellini and Giorgione, or, to remain within the twentieth century, by the metaphysical Giorgio de Chirico.

He is equally absorbed by the old masters of Mediterranean cinema, Antonioni and Fellini. Blow-Up prompted Lech Majewski to choose the Łódź Film School rather than an academy of fine arts. At the Directing Department, he wrote his master’s dissertation on magic in 8½. The creator of La Strada presided not only over the young director’s debut volume of poetry, but also over his occult interests and his aquatic and lunar fascinations.

Alchemical and magical motifs occupy a central place in Majewski’s work. It is no accident that he made Angelus, a film about the primitivist painters Teofil Ociepka and Erwin Sówka, Silesian alchemists and Rosicrucians. Nor is it accidental that his film invoked Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a work of secret initiations. Bosch — Fellini’s favourite painter, a spiritual disciple of Jan van Ruusbroec, the greatest fourteenth-century Netherlandish mystic, and a member of a hermetic sect in ’s-Hertogenbosch — drew on ideas of alchemical transformation in his works. The degeneration and decomposition of matter were to lead towards more perfect forms of spiritual life. One might discern concealed analogies between the figures of the Silesian Sunday painters and the master of ’s-Hertogenbosch.

In her essay Symbolism in the Visual Arts, Aniela Jaffé, Carl Jung’s student and collaborator, considers the character of avant-garde art in the first half of the twentieth century. She writes of the search for “the spirit in matter through a process of transmutation” and of artists’ search for “the unchanging core of life and things”. “The spirit in which this art was immersed,” Jaffé writes, “was an earthly spirit, a chthonic spirit, called Mercurius by the medieval alchemists. In the artists’ view, it lies hidden beyond nature’s external appearance. […] Like the medieval hermetic movements, modernist art must be understood as a mysticism of the spirit of matter and therefore as an expression of our age that compensates for Christianity.” Amid a bizarre, Surrealist landscape, the protagonists of Angelus attempt to transform matter into gold and liberate the spirit imprisoned within it. Their mysticism could confidently be described as Mercurial, as could the position of the film’s creator. Alchemical and Masonic symbolism, references to mystical treatises and Angelus Silesius form one layer of Angelus. On the other hand, as in other films and novels by the author of The Gospel According to Harry, Christological themes are visible, especially the theme of sacrifice, which announces the prospect of resurrection and therefore the redemption of matter.

In one sense, Angelus resembles a palimpsest. Successive layers overlap and, under attentive reading, reveal different meanings and interpretative possibilities. It is an interestingly stylised Silesian story, almost an allegory and markedly different from Kutz’s films. It is divided into chapters. Its dialogue remains in dialect, even when esoteric subjects are being discussed. It unfolds between earth and a sky that encloses the earth like a bluish dome, with the conical hill where a sacrifice is to take place, between folk realism and spirituality. Somewhat in the manner of Fra Angelico.

Like every obsessive artist, Majewski has his favourite motifs and conventions, which return in varying forms across different films: Felliniesque “beauties” with ample breasts; distinctive scenes of copulation suggesting an alchemical wedding, the union of opposites; performances by provincial artists in the spirit of Fellini; dances, banner slogans, the elements of fire and water, and so on. Songs once in fashion create a musical and simultaneously historical background. They characterise the atmosphere of an era, and at times a note of singular nostalgia can be heard in them. The creator of Angelus skilfully combines the plebeian and often bawdy humour with esotericism. Like the hermetic artists, Bosch among them, he encodes the meanings of at least some of his films in a symbolic layer. Its significance need not enter the consciousness of every viewer, but it may act upon their imagination and emotions — upon the unconscious.

Majewski creates a closed world, isolated from real space and yet immersed within it: Silesian tenement buildings and backstreets, pubs and cultural-centre halls; a sandy wasteland and the labyrinths of Venice. Water is Majewski’s favourite element. It is therefore no surprise that Venice became an important stage in his journey — a city, as Fellini wrote, “built on water and painted in the air. […] Reflected in the mirror of the water, it vibrates with light and reflections, […] an artistic dream wonderfully made material, a magical city threatened with annihilation.”

Majewski therefore set The Garden of Earthly Delights in a Venice permeated by the spirit of death. It is, I believe, a highly personal film: a film about dying and the decomposition of the matter of which the human body is made, but also about resurrection. Art — the spirit inhabiting matter — triumphs in its duel with death through the magic of new technologies. “A recording of light and shadow,” the director says, “and suddenly someone materialises, becomes a figure — we look at someone’s face.”

Death, “present throughout our lives”, as he said in one interview, is indeed a subject close to the creator of The Accident. It accompanies his protagonists, the artistes maudits. In Majewski’s vision, art saves but also destroys. It carries a charge of self-destruction. The highest price is paid for being an artist: for “opposing stereotypes and the lifelessness of society”, for refusing to accept life’s meaninglessness, the misery of the human condition, and the ugliness and painful emptiness of the surrounding reality. Basquiat dies of a drug overdose; Wojaczek takes his own life in an alcoholic stupor.

In a sense, the director appears to identify with his protagonists: with the painters from Janów who seek to save the world from final catastrophe; with the painter unable to adapt to the standards of an ethnically alien society; and with the poet suffocating in the claustrophobic reality in which he must live and from which he desperately seeks to escape, even into death. Contrary to prevailing tendencies, Lech Majewski — filmmaker, painter and poet — therefore identifies with the model of the Romantic artist, the artiste maudit. For him, art is the most perfect creation of the human spirit, the alchemical gold that redeems our earthly sins and confers immortality.

In my view, the film about the tragic and eternally rebellious poet from Mikołów — a fictionalised essay of extraordinary formal refinement — remains Lech Majewski’s most artistically mature and moving work. It is a manifesto of his creative and perhaps personal stance. “Wojaczek is me,” he might say — metaphorically, of course, setting alcoholism aside. The structure of Wojaczek approaches poetry to a certain degree. Himself a poet, the director attempts to melt the matter of the image into the language and rhythms of poetry. A similar aspiration to draw the spirit and rhythms of poetry from visual matter can be found in the film version of the opera The Roe’s Room.

In the most recent period of his practice, Majewski is clearly moving towards a syncretic art, towards an expression that exceeds the limitations of a single language and a single medium.