GamerTab
That was an excellent one.
Borserie
it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.
Voxitype
Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
Martin Bradley
As observational documentaries go, Frederick Wiseman's "National Gallery" is pretty close to sublime. In typical Wiseman style there's no voice-over and no score; he simply places his cameras and his microphones inside the buildings and lets us see the paintings and hear the words spoken by the staff, at meetings or in discussing the art with the public. It lasts for three hours and if you love great art you just might have an orgasm watching the flow of masterpieces lovingly framed and spoken about. However, if art isn't quite your bag this might be the most boring film ever made.At least Wiseman doesn't do it all in one continuous take, the way Sokurov did with "Russian Ark" whose roving camera induced in me a feeling of seasickness. Wiseman plumps for detail and how. The art is, of course, extraordinary but so too are the faces of the punters who come to stare. The screen itself becomes a canvas in which Wiseman's camera paints the faces of these onlookers and it is beautiful to behold. What's less beautiful are the commentaries of the gallery's guides as they try to 'explain' the paintings to the various tour guides. Love it or loathe it, it isn't like any other film about 'art' that you are likely to see which is some sort of achievement in itself.
pdxjasmine
This film is composed of snippets of life inside the National Gallery. There is no narrator or text to provide an overall chronology or identification of who's who and what's what. I found this to be a little distracting. I kept wanting to know more about the people and activities being presented. Who was that man speaking at the meeting? What was that substance the conservator was using? I would loose focus on the next scene while thinking about those questions. Overall the film was very interesting but not very informative. I like documentaries to be both. And I think documentaries are most successful when they are both.
rspear-97870
It's hard to know where to begin when analyzing what's so wrong with this long, boring film. Fundamentally, it's that museums are embedded in history, collecting and displaying great art from the past, and educating the public about their collections. Director Wiseman is not just ahistorical in his approach, but anti-historical, in his affectation to identify no one in the film. It DOES matter that the NG's director at the time was Nicolas Penny, just as it's important to know that Larry Keith was head of conservation. What they say isn't ahistorical gospel but very individual opinions. To erase their identity is to erase history. What we are shown instead well could serve as a PR effort to get money from the government because one would think, on the basis of the film, that the museum does nothing but cater to the public. How tiresome are Wiseman's head shots of the audience! How irrelevant are his juxtapositions with painted heads! Collecting? That is a primary mission of museums, if not its first purpose; but not a word about that activity in this film. Rather, what we are subjected to for three hours could pertain to any great museum: to the Louvre, the Met, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, etc. That the film gives no idea of what is special about the NG underscores its superficiality and disregard of history.
Scott44
"National Gallery" (2014, Frederick Wiseman), a documentary about the renowned British art museum, makes a strong case for major arts institutions. With a three-hour running time, we finish with a firm idea of both the inestimable value and fragility of The National Gallery. With a haphazard, seemingly random structure, the documentary shows people regardless of their actual involvement with the museum. We see patrons silently absorbing art; board members discussing their goals; curators discussing philosophy and techniques; janitors; wall painters; a board meeting where the discussion is about an unwelcome public marathon; budget cuts discussed at another board meeting; various educators, various video crews, museum guides analyzing master works; a male and a female nude model separately posing for what appears to be an advanced art class; adventurous Arctic activists bravely hoisting a banner at the museum's entrance; a pianist performing amid priceless paintings and a reasonably erotic, heterosexual ballet dance. Wiseman makes a compelling statement about the worth of visual arts, and it couldn't arrive to this brutal world at a better time.Curiously, Wiseman does not introduce museum employees with captions or inform the viewer what event is occurring. This helps makes his statement universal. Rather than just a story of the National Gallery, the viewer is encouraged to gain appreciation for his or her local cultural institutions. There are some memorable segments. I really enjoy the brief excerpts of lectures where experts interpret details in master works. The discussion of Paul Reubens's "Samson and Delilah (1609- 1610)" is interesting. So is the curator's lecture describing a Rembrandt portrait with a hidden second composition of the same subject. One of the senior museum big shots tells a laugh-out-loud joke about Moses and the Ten Commandments. Another museum guide informs a group of adolescents, several of whom are Black, that the Gallery owes its early funding to the Slave Trade. Leonardo da Vinci's power is also expressed or suggested multiple times. Finally, the ballet dance that is staged in the vicinity of two large master works reminds us that visual arts tickle the public's imagination in many ways.It is an uneven journey, but it finishes with rising interest. "The National Gallery" will likely be enjoyed by artists of many disciplines who wish to be reminded of culture's power. It sure would be nice if the arts flourished in this particularly barbaric period while the world's militaries languished.
