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| National Gallery, London. Image from Wikipedia. |
Halfway through Frederick Wiseman’s
National Gallery, a new documentary about the celebrated fine arts
museum in London, I fell asleep. A combination of information overload, darkness,
warmth, and staying up late the night before carried me off to the land of
Morpheus, until twenty minutes later I was awakened by an animated discussion
of some obscure technicality. By the end of the film, which runs three hours, I
wanted both to escape from the movie theater
and
stay in the Gallery for another hour or two.
National Gallery immerses
the viewer in a high-density stream of images of museum rooms, paintings, and workshops
as well as excerpts from talks and lectures and even scenes from staff
meetings. The film shows the Gallery as a gigantic enterprise, a complex and
perennially busy household in which the work is never done, a magic palace filled
with untold riches and populated by a host of curators, scientists,
conservators, construction workers, performers, and visitors from all over the
world. I noted with pleasure that the visitors and staff were shown
sympathetically, with appreciation of their eccentricities and respect, which does not always happen in films
about public places. Wiseman keeps the pace leisurely and information quantity
high and provides no commentary or titles. At first
sight the director appears to be completely detached from what is happening on screen, until
you realize how effectively he manipulates the viewer’s perception through the
choice of footage and clever editing.
You cannot help but notice in this film a surprising number
of people appearing with crossed arms, expressing a range of attitudes from not knowing
what to do with one’s body to calm contemplation to stern opposition. In one of
the opening scenes, a curator cautiously suggests to the Director of the Gallery,
Nicholas Penny, that the museum could probably try a bit harder to make its exhibitions
and marketing more accessible to the general public. The Director, with his arms tightly knotted in front of his chest, exudes palpable distaste for the mere idea of pandering to the masses.
Eventually he arranges his face into a polite grimace – and firmly
says that he refuses to “bring everything down to the lowest common denominator”. This makes
you want to cheer, at least until you read that Dr. Penny is planning to resign in 2015. In another segment, filmed during a staff meeting, the
curators discuss whether the Gallery can benefit from the upcoming marathon
whose finish line will be positioned right in front of the museum. On the one
hand, millions of viewers will be watching the event on TV, but on the
other hand, as the Director points out, the crowds will completely
block the entrance to the museum, – and this is coming from the man who staged a massively successful exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci, for which the lines formed overnight, winding
around several neighboring blocks.
The film takes you through a series of excerpts from talks
for the general public, schoolchildren, people with disabilities, and a
privileged group of patrons. Although these talks focus mainly on the “greatest
hits” in the collection, some of them provide interesting technical and
historical facts and draw your attention to unusual details of some paintings –
or to the whims of art experts. A powerful scene early in the movie shows a
class for the visually impaired people, during which they examine raised
relief prints of Pissarro’s
Boulevard Montmartre
at Night while listening to a curator’s commentary. Addressing a group of schoolchildren, a curator talks about Bellini’s
Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr,
in which woodcutters continue working in the background, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding in the foreground, where St. Peter and his companion are being ambushed by knife-wielding attackers.
In another scene, a group of scientists debate with amusing seriousness whether the musical
score in Watteau’s
The Scale of Love is real guitar music
or not. A guide speaks of how
George Stubbs, who was trained as an anatomist, spent eighteen months studying
horse anatomy by buying carcasses, suspending them from meat hooks in a barn,
and cutting off the flesh layer by layer and studying each layer in minute
detail, until only the skeleton remained. Another guide discusses Hans
Holbein’s double portrait,
The Ambassadors, with its symbolic
objects and an anamorphic skull on the floor – a distorted image that can be
viewed correctly only from a certain angle. No such enigmas are to be found in Holbein’s
other well-known portrait, of Christina of Denmark, whose hand in marriage Henry
VIII sought - without success, because the lady had enough common sense and
self-preservation instinct. Rubens’
Samson and Delilah reveals the secrets of its lighting, when a guide describes
how it was painted
in situ, in the patron’s room. Yet another curator explains
how the pattern on the frame of the Rembrandt's late self-portrait was formed by
scraping ebony with a sharp tool, which left behind a groove with wavy edges.
None of these talks contain groundbreaking revelations, but it feels good and healthful to be confined in front of a screen, to withdraw your mind from the mundane and instead to focus it on the details of
these marvelous paintings while listening to the high-brow murmurings of the erudite and dedicated museum staff.
Several fascinating segments show the work of the conservators
who clean, restore and retouch paintings. Larry Keith (whose title is the Head of
Conservation Department and Keeper) talks about restoration work of a Rembrandt
painting of a nobleman on horseback. An X-ray image of the picture reveals
another male figure underneath the image of the horseman, rotated ninety degrees
clockwise. As the oil paints grow more transparent over time, the original
image becomes more and more visible through the layers of paint. Another
segment shows how the lighting of a Renaissance altarpiece triptych is adjusted by trial and error. In
another scene, two experts discuss the new arrangement of paintings in the room
and agree that Leonardo’s
Virgin of the Rocks may not be in the best spot:
“Downstairs it
sang, but here it does not sing.”
Towards the end of the movie, Dr. Penny makes another
appearance, this time as a guide and art expert, a role which he obviously
enjoys more than that of an administrator. With a twinkle in his eye and an
expression of a cat that ate the canary, he talks about Nicolas Poussin’s “sculptural”
paintings that were intended to appeal to the most sophisticated taste and the most
informed audience. He shares inside stories in front of the two Titian paintings
(
Diana and Actaeon and
Diana and Callisto), which he acquired for the museum during his tenure as the
Director. His speech is witty and his manner is reserved, yet they cannot quite
conceal the satisfaction of a successful hunt radiating from the owl-like Director.
While watching
National
Gallery, I longed for a “pause” button, because many of its scenes invite
you to do research, look things up, learn more or refresh your memory. But if you get hold of this button (e.g.,
while viewing the film at home), you may lose the author’s narrative and the
feeling of being immersed in the atmosphere of the Gallery and having an intimate, seemingly real-time view of its inner workings. The screening on Thanksgiving afternoon at
Film Forum was
surprisingly well attended, and although like me, my fellow viewers
occasionally drifted off to sleep, the film was worth every minute and every effort.
