Film still from “National Gallery”, 2015.
After documenting a prison, a ballet, a mental institute and a strip club, America’s master documentarist is more than ready to take on an art museum. This time around, Fredric Wiseman’s institution of choice is the National Gallery, one of London’s most celebrated art museums, and home to a prized collection of Western art dating back to the Middle Ages. The results might well be his most self-reflexive film yet. A slow-burning rumination on how we look and decode meaning in great works of art of antiquity, the film is also a study of elusiveness—of how to document, restore and explain the intangible beauty of a work of art. In his characteristically long-form and voiceover-less approach, Wiseman examines the minutiae of running such an institution, showing us the action as it happens both behind and in front of the paintings.
A guide muses on the transience of life via a Dutch still life of a fresh pink lobster. Another helps her visually impaired students visualise the depth of field and colour in a painting through touch, as hands trace the embossed detail of a reproduction. Above all else, “National Gallery” is a paean to craftsmanship and the artisanal process. Wiseman’s camera lovingly traces the chips and grooves of the framer’s craft, the trembling wisps of a fresh sheet of gold leaf, the nuts, bolts and sawdust involved in putting up a show.
By focusing on painting and how it is represented through the film, Wiseman returns to one of his main concerns in his filmography: how mediums might interact with each other and what qualities are original to each of them. He films the paintings by obscuring the frame—showing us vast expanses of canvas or honing in on the details of face or gesture. One painting he returns to in the film is Caravaggio’s “Boy Bitten By a Lizard”. By closing in on the boy’s face, it is only later that we become aware of the source of his expression.
Film still from “National Gallery”, 2015.
The final scene crystallises this interest in the dynamics between mediums, and has the bewitching quality of a painting come alive. Wiseman films the rehearsal of a ballet performance at the museum: a dance of desire between a couple surrounded by paintings on the black gallery wall. The dance was choreographed by Wayne MacGregor in response to the exhibition “Metamorphosis: Titian”, a moving piece between two people who lunge at each other in a fractured battle of love and restraint. Seeing two bodies moving in time animates the gestures of those crystallised in the backdrop.
A painting doesn’t have time. It must say what it wants to immediately. Books and films, however, have the space to introduce characters and plot developments. And “National Gallery”? It has plenty of time to do neither of those things. At over three hours long, the film’s overt wordiness gets a little trying, but Wiseman is not a director to underestimate his audience. We hear from gallerists, curators, visitors and conservationists as they go about their work, allowing us to consider how a painting (or film) might function to document a nation, a culture, a time irrevocably lost to us. If I have a criticism to make (and I make it sparingly and fully aware of Wiseman’s style of quasi-objective film-making, in which a narrative is brought out during the editing process) it’s that the film doesn’t interrogate some of the more political complexities of the founding and running of such an institution. In a key, and frustratingly brief, moment in the film, a guide informs a class of ethnically diverse schoolchildren that the collection was founded on slavery. And yet the power lunches, the high-profile meetings, and those lugubrious meet-and-greets with funders and donors are emphatically white, over-privileged affairs. If this collection is a crucial document of the past, how do we make sense of its bloody colonial past and its problematic legacy of acquisition?
Text by Sophia Satchell-Baeza
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