회화, 무대, 영화

• 영문명: Painting, Stage, and Cinema: The Mill & the Cross and the Legacy of André Bazin’s Film Aesthetics
• 발행기관: 한국영화학회
• 저자명: 박노출
• 간행물 정보: 『영화연구』제57호, 81~118쪽, 전체 38쪽
• 주제분류: 예술체육 > 예술일반
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2013.09.30

영문 초록

This essay analyzes the style and narrative of The Mill & the Cross (2011) directed by Lech Majewski a Polish filmmaker. The motion picture is a film adaptation of The Way to Calvary (1564) a painted work by Peter Bruegel the sixteenth-century Flemish artist. Characteristic of the film are disruptive sequencing of the shots and inconsistency in the diegesis construction. This study is an attempt to illuminate the intentions of such unconventional elements in dramaturgy and their possible aesthetic effects. It notes that the film’s disjunctive organization of the style and narrative results from the combination of the two distinctive worlds of the painting and of the fiction film. Whereas the characters are three-dimensional real-life human figures, the setting of the film imitates that of the original painting. Drawing on André Bazin’s film theory that cinema is an evolutionary process to achieve total reality beyond artistic manipulation, this study argues that the co-existence of the two representational modes is intended to discover phenomenological reality lurking behind artificiality of art works. Attention is drawn to the fact that the original painting is already a complex work in which as many as five hundred human figures participate in the great biblical drama, the persecution of Jesus. The painter,however, transforms the Roman soldiers into contemporary Spanish mercenaries and the Israelites into Flemish people. That way, Bruegel makes artistic commentary on the present-day Flanders where the Spanish King crushes the budding Protestant Reformation and its followers. The painter sees in the tyranny and its atrocities the universal human tragedy. He summons the Christ in his work as the redeemer of human beings from such perpetual agonies. Thus the painting offers a tripartite interlocution between myth, reality, and art. The Mill & the Cross preserves the three components of the original work. At the outset the film unfolds a stage on which the animated characters from the painting perform tableau vivant or a living picture. The living picture shows the process of Bruegel’s making of The Way to Calvary and constitutes in itself the diegetic world of the film. The painterly backdrop also composes that of the living picture where the selected characters from the painting play their given roles to dramatize the crucifixion of Jesus in the contemporary setting. In the process, the three main characters, Bruegel, Jonghelink, and the Virgin Mary, appear on the stage to impart meanings to the work. Bruegel, for instance,explains how he has designed the composition and arranged the icons of the painting. Jonghelink narrates political reality of Flanders which is analogically portrayed in the painting. Lastly, the Virgin Mary reinterprets the Flemish reality and its artistic representation in the biblical perspective. Bazin suggests that realism of film should lie less in the medium’s function to record outer reality than in its capacity to debunk pseudoauthenticity of artificial representation. To Bazin, for instance, it is quite salutary to capture the painting in the cinema because the latter would reveal the ways in which the former has been designed and drawn. The process, rather than the output, of the painting is the very reality that the film can secure regarding the painterly representation. Thus, Bazin hypothesizes a dialectical middle-zone where the cinema meets with the filmed subject and discloses its existential reality. This study proposes that Bazin’s film dialectics and realism illuminate the aesthetic effects of co-existence of the cinematic and painterly modes of representation in The Mill & the Cross. What results in both Bazinian theory and its application to the film is the extension of the viewer’s phenomenological experience of the world.

목차

1. 들어가며

2. 피터 브뤼겔의 <갈보리 가는 길>

3. 회화에서 영화로

4. 회화와 영화의 존재방식: 앙드레 바쟁의 영화미학

5. 글을 마치며: “확장된 영화”

키워드

The Mill & the Cross The Way to Calvary tableau vivant Peter Bruegel André Bazin cinematic realism