Several
panels of Duccio’s masterful Sienna altarpiece Maestà have been lost, but at least experimental filmmaker Andy Guérif
had the pieces he needed. Panel by panel, he stages scenes from the Passion of
Christ, but in a way that is radically different than the traditional cinematic
conceptions of Mel Gibson or Franco Zeffirelli. Artistic disciplines blur
together in Guérif’s Maestà (trailer here), which screens
during the 2016 edition of First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image in
Astoria, Queens.
Whether
it works or not it, Maestà demands a
wide-screen. There is a lot to see, but Guérif starts by bringing to life the
hardest panel to tackle on any level: the crucifixion. “Bringing to life” is a
relative term in this case. There are indeed flesh-and-blood actors acting out
the Greatest Story. However, Maestà
is a much different animal than the obvious comparative film: Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross. While the latter
is truly immersive, Maestà is
deliberately flat and static. Majewski brings us into the painting, Guérif
keeps us on the outside looking in.
Even
though it only runs a hair under an hour, Maestà
is still likely to make reasonably patient viewers a little fidgety. More
problematically, there is an intentional artificiality to Guérif’s aesthetic
that compares rather badly with Majewski’s lush, exquisitely detailed production.
Maestà’s incidental dialogue also has
a ring of contemporary casualness that sounds like it was intended to undercut
the sacredness of the subject matter, but comes across as rather “cheap”
instead.
