National Gallery

Most of Frederick Wiseman’s recent work has centred on institutions the 84-year-old documentarian clearly admires. Joining the roll call of Berkeley campus, a boxing gym in Texas and the Paris Opera Ballet comes London’s National Gallery, into which Wiseman clearly relishes delving. His three-hour portrait is not only an immersive behind-the-scenes tour, highlighting the unseen work behind the hangings, but also an essay on the art of visual storytelling.

Some of the film’s most fascinating moments pay tribute to the gallery’s technical prowess and craftsmanship: employees intricately analysing and retouching an artist’s brushstrokes under the microscope, hand-chiselling huge, ornate frames and making minute alterations to gallery lighting. Interestingly, the private preservation scenes yield as much information as the public lectures that punctuate the film. As did Jem Cohen in Museum Hours, Wiseman draws our attention to the overlooked: the shadows in negative space that are fundamental to our reading of the painting; another (recycled) Rembrandt under the surface of his portrait of merchant Frederick Rihel which lay unnoticed for hundreds of years until technology allowed it to be spotted.

Wiseman’s films have regarded many of the institutions they survey as equally enabling and disabling for the people they interact with. By contrast, this film is an undoubtedly positive endorsement of the National Gallery as a place for learning and discovery, with curators often encouraging audiences to interpret work themselves, even if we don’t hear their reactions. Wiseman’s film marvels that these stories and visual feats are still fresh hundreds of years after they were created.

Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound

ABD Fransa
173''
2014


Cinematography
John Davey

Editing
Frederick Wiseman

Production
Gallery Film Llc
Ideale Audience

Festivals
20th Festival on Wheels
A Day at the Museum