Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 4:56 pm 
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A lot of rich old paintings and a lot of wordy gallery talks from Wiseman off Trafalgar Square

Last time he turned his cool eye on the University of California in At Berkeley. This time Frederick Wiseman goes to London's National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. Founded in 1824, this great palace of art, originally funded, one docent points out, with money from the slave trade, houses over 2,300 paintings that date from the mid-13th century to 1900. The rest of art history is in the British Museum (for the ancient part) and the Tate Gallery and Tate Modern (for post-1900 and modern art). So in the world of art, this first look by the octogenarian documentarian is only a glimpse, and winds up being a verbose one. As Jay Weissberg says in his Cannes review for Variety, Wiseman "studies paintings and bears witness to staff meetings, curatorial discussions and gallery talks." Lots and lots and lots of gallery talks, some better than others, and lectures by experts and curators, ranging from highly articulate (by a master restorer) to stumbling (by a frame-builder talking about ebony frames). It's a mixed bag, and the view offered of the 2,300 paintings is limited and somewhat arbitrary.

The National Gallery's most famous works include Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks, Holbein's The Ambassadors, and Turner's The Fighting Temeraire. These are featured in filmed gallery talks recorded here. Van Gogh's Sunflowers is briefly mentioned by a lecturer to teachers, and the articulate restorer (he's the American Director of Restoration Larry Keith, though in Wiseman's non-obtrusive method, nobody is identified on screen) talks interestingly about varnishes and under-painting and ground color and restoration in relation to Rembrandt’s Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback and Caravaggio's famous Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Stubbs's Whistlejacket is discussed in some detail, appropriately because Stubbs is such an English painter and this is the masterpiece of his remarkable equestrian paintings. Michelangelo's Entombment gets a quick look for its bold frontal nudity of Christ.

Wiseman misses some notable works in the museum, Van Eyck's iconic Arnolfini Portrait., for instance, another painting among the museum's most famous. One might have liked more of a look at the museum's works by Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Bellini, Pollaiolo or Bosch. But Wiseman ends with a silent series of Rembrandt portraits as if they are the culmination of the whole show. Are they? That's perhaps his taste, which seems to run to the Germanic and the blowsy (Rubens), or what docents have something colorful to say about. One older docent tells a joke about Moses bringing the tablet with the ten commandments and saying: "There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is Adultery is still there." There is a long and interesting docent talk about the painting Samson and Delilah, identifying with Delilah as experiencing the conflicts of an espionage agent. No mention, though, of the fact that the attribution of this to Rubens, and the painting's merits, have been contested since it was acquired in 1980. A website presents evidence against the attribution. It's an interesting painting, but it does't look like a Rubens. These gallery talks lean heavily on the paintings' storytelling side. It's even hinted that a painting "must" tell a story. It would all be different at Tate Modern.

It is good to be taught to look and look, cooly, withholding judgment. But in this film Wiseman comes off at times as a somewhat naive and uncritical observer. The material he gives us is, as Weissberg also notes, repetitions, more so than in the longer but more varied At Berkeley. Mere length in any case isn't proof of thoroughness. In At Berkeley, about a great university, students were never shown in an informal setting, studying, drinking beer, in their dorms. Wiseman seems to like giving an institutional impression that is on the chilly side. In both films there are administrative meetings where policy is discussed. But the life of the museum goers' experience is missing here. A great museum comes through more as a living, throbbing thing in Jem Cohen's fine film Museum Hours, admittedly only semi-documentary; but that is its beauty. Cohen's film takes us to Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, where we get to know one of the guards, and he befriends one of the visitors, a Canadian woman temporarily in the city to visit a sick friend. Museum Hours gives us a sense of the Kunsthistorisches Museum as a living place, and of the individuality of its staff, and its visitors.

I waver back and forth on Wiseman. Sometimes he seems a diehard and a bore, and sometimes he draws me in and I'm fascinated. The latter effect happened with the four-hour At Berkeley, even though it left those key things out. With National Gallery, despite the beautiful paintings and the (half the time) interesting talk, he becomes a bore again. There's one thing about this new film that's great, though. Wiseman photographs the spectators a lot, showing them often in closeups and in small groups, and the more we see them, the more we realize they could be the people in the paintings, and the people in the paintings could be them. Faces have not changed. But the world has, and that's why an important topic in the film is how to make the public aware of the National Gallery's contents and their worth.

National Gallery, 180 mins., debuted at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight. It was screened for this review as part of the Spotlight on Documentary sidebar series of the 52nd New York Film Festival. It's included in many other festivals. US theatrical release in NYC 5 November 2014 (Film Forum). San Francisco Landmark Opera Plaza 19 Dec. Released in France 8 October, it received excellent reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2).
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(For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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