The miracle of Mâcon

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Movie
German title The miracle of Mâcon
Original title The Baby of Mâcon
Country of production Great Britain , France , Germany , Netherlands
original language English
Publishing year 1993
length 122 minutes
Rod
Director Peter Greenaway
script Peter Greenaway
production Kees Kasander
camera Sacha Vierny
cut Chris Wyatt
occupation

The Miracle of Mâcon (Original title: The Baby of Mâcon ) is a film by Peter Greenaway (screenplay and direction), in the leading roles play Julia Ormond , Ralph Fiennes and Philip Stone . The film was released in late 1993 and is one of the most controversial films by the English director due to its idiosyncratic treatment of religious issues and its depictions of violence. In general, it was discredited by critics and, for example, hardly ever came into distribution in the USA. Some critics have found The Miracle of Mâcon to be the most disturbing work of Peter Greenaway.

action

The film takes place in the 17th century in a city ravaged by disease and sterility. In the city, an ugly old woman gives birth to an exceptionally beautiful child, which the residents greet as a miracle. The child's 18-year-old sister takes the child and presents it as her own, which she wants to have born a virgin. She hides her mother and uses her brother to gain wealth: the desperate residents of Mâcon pay high prices for the blessing of the baby, recognized as miraculous, from whom they hope for fertility and prosperity.

The representatives of the Catholic Church are both suspicious and envious of the success. The bishop's son, a scientist, doubts the daughter's assertion. She tries to convince him of her virginity by offering it to him. Before seduction can occur, however, the child actually works a miracle and gets a cow to kill the son. The bishop arrives and accuses the daughter of responsibility for the death of his son. He takes over the guardianship of the child and so the child is exploited far worse by the church and the believers. In response, the daughter secretly suffocates her little brother. The bishop sentences her to death, but because of her virginity the sentence cannot be carried out. The daughter is taken to the militia in order to be able to be executed after a brutal mass rape and dies in the process. In a religious intoxication, the believers dismember the child's body and seize its body parts as relics . As a punishment, hunger and misery again overtook the city of Mâcon.

Interpretations

The Miracle of Mâcon is not a mimetically narrated film adaptation of a legend , but rather the film plays with the creation and destruction of theatrical and cinematic illusions : the legend described is played as a play. You can see not only the stage, but also the audience and the areas behind the scenes. The audience of the play interferes in the action and becomes part of it. At the end of the performed piece, not only the actors on the stage, but also the theater audience bow in the direction of the cinema audience.

Cosimo III. de 'Medici (Jonathan Lacey), a young and naive nobleman and guest of honor at the theater performance, is the only not purely fictional character in the film. He crosses the line between auditorium, stage and plot of the play. The ten-minute rape scene links the narrative levels in a particularly drastic way and blurs the lines between reality and fiction. In addition to playing with illusion and reality and the realities of the theater, the film also deals with other topics such as the abuse of power and the exploitation of a child.

reception

The film was shown in Cannes in 1993 outside the festival.

criticism

Ulrich Greiner von der Zeit calls the film “a Christmas fairy tale of the darkest kind, an orgy of murder and music, of lust and horror.” Greenaway's “cunning” ideas never come down to simple horror: “the message of this blasphemous, A berserk view of the Christian story of the birth of Jesus is obvious ”. The film is a provocation, the horror it creates remains without a secret, so it leaves the viewer indifferent: “Greenaway's Christmas fairy tale is just a sensation, the nerves and minds of the viewer are attacked with a veritable inferno of baroque music that has been picked together, with countless crowd scenes that the camera flips back and forth and then again in parallel movements to the right and left like the pages of a leather-bound rind. "

literature

  • Micha Braun: Tantum umbrae ad parietem. On the appropriation of early modern media discourses in Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Mâcon . In: Günther Heeg, Markus A. Denzel (Eds.): Globalizing Areas, Cultural Flexions and the Challenge of the Humanities . Steiner, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-515-09922-6 , pp. 111-133 ( publisher information ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Greiner: Greenaway's Christmas Tale Die Zeit online: November 12, 1993, accessed on November 3, 2016