Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery

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.