Museum Hours

source: Museum Hours

Critics went gaga. Some reviewers went gaga. Rented the movie based on gagaisms. Still trying to figure out why all the gaga. There are many slow movies that actually say something but this does not fall into that category. The movie is "held together" by the thinnest of "plots" providing an excuse to cruise Vienna in the wintertime (and totally discourage anyone from going there that time of year!) and cruise the KMS. Yes, it's nice that a friendship develops but we got that early on. It's fun to hear the museum guard reminisce about his job; at least there was some variety. As another reviewer has said, the most interesting part was the tour guide's observations and her rather snooty way of saying she was right even though she stated it was an "opinion". I guess "mesmerizing" has a new meaning: "challenges one to stay awake".

I have forgotten how an art movie looks like. I am satisfied with this movie. It is good to see a movie like this after some time, especially after I was busy with Oscar event and nominee movies. Although the art movie is not my type, sometimes I get bored for its slow presentation, but sometimes I will be thrilled to enjoy those great visuals. Movies without commercial values are kinda bores me. Sometime intense scenes and inappropriate scenes turn me off. There are many people who love this rare form of the movie, but my interest in those movies depends on what it deals. This movie was about art museum, I like paintings and drawing so managed to enjoy it. This movie was like a documentary about an art museum from Austria. They concentrated more on art pieces to explain behind story of those. They just added a couple of characters in the movie with a story to start and end about the beautiful Vienna museum. Yeah, it worked so well, human emotions plus great fine arts, totally an awesome blend. If you ask me, I would say it is an another form of 'Before Sunrise'. The whole movie takes place between two characters, Anne and Johan. Mostly they talk largely about paintings and Vienna city. It is a kinda educational purpose where we can get information about the city and its history. You won't like it just after a watch, it will take time. Day by day you will begin like it more and more, that is how this movie is made up of.

This film primarily made me kick myself for never having visited the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum the two times I was in Vienna (shame on me). In between kicking myself, I enjoyed the focus on Bruegel's paintings and the museum interior. I even enjoyed the potted plant scene with the guest lecturer explaining the paintings. The images of Vienna were beautifully rendered, and made for such a contrast with the usual posh images we associate with Vienna (which certainly was the point, or one of the points). So, this was a Vienna with which I as a former tourist was unfamiliar--well done, the film shook me out of my longings for tourist Vienna, sachertorte, and waltzes. But oh, if the film had only stuck with the inner life of the museum and the museum guard, his isolation, his anonymity, and his dedication to the museum and its great works of art. . . what a much richer viewing experience, at least for me. From the first scene introducing Anne with her cousin in a coma (oh dear), I felt my interest challenged. She seemed to me a completely unnecessary and irksome character, always in need of something . . . money, directions, companionship, whatever. The friendship with the museum guard was so dimly lit for me, their escape into the surrounding area a distraction, the scenes in the hospital a chore. Perhaps this was the intent, but I don't think so. I would much have preferred to explore the museum guard and his existence. Or another museum guard, maybe one in the next room, a guard with a family and happy home life to which the solitary Johann has neither access nor invitation. Or perhaps more Bruegel paintings. Or any of the other paintings. This film would make an interesting pairing with The Mill and the Cross (2011), which I admit I could not make it through for reasons outside of this review. The DVD of Museum Hours comes with a very nice pamphlet explaining the genesis of the film, and its inclusion was a nice surprise. Overall, this is a film worth watching, but not one to get excited about.

Museum Hours (2012) is a unique film, written and directed by Jem Cohen. One of the stars, Mary Margaret O'Hara added "additional dialogue." Although I described this movie as "a unique departure from standard filmmaking," it does have a plot. The plot is conventional enough. Mary Margaret O'Hara plays Anne, a middle-aged Canadian woman who isn't exactly poor, but has to borrow the money to travel from Montreal to Vienna to be with her desperately sick cousin, who is hospitalized. Bobby Sommer plays Johann, a guard at the famous Kunsthistoriches Museum. They meet and interact, and become friends. (No romance--Johann lets Clara, and us, know that he's gay.) They see each other in the museum, they go out for dinner, and sometimes they act like tourists. It sounds conventional enough, but it isn't. It isn't conventional because Jem Cohen doesn't really believe in narrative. He's a documentary filmmaker, but he doesn't exactly create the documentary. He goes somewhere, shoots a lot of video, and then fashions that into a documentary. I haven't seen any of his documentaries, but watching "Museum Hours" makes it fairly clear what they'd look like. That's because, every so often, Cohen swerves from his narrative, and shows us streets in Vienna, trains, churches, stores, statues. This isn't the tourists' Vienna, but Cohen doesn't just show us grime and degradation either. We start to get a sense of what this large city looks like. (Also, a sense of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, where my wife and I spent seven hours, and could have spent more. It has a great collection.) This is somewhat unusual filmmaking, but it gets more unusual. Cohen devotes 11 minutes to a (staged) docent presentation by a woman named Gerda. The role is played by an actor name Ela Piplets. She's called a "Visiting Lecturer" because the museum didn't want anyone to think that she was really a museum employee. Gerda discusses some of the museum's many paintings done by Pieter Breughel the Elder. It's a really great lecture. What makes it more amazing is that Piplets doesn't speak English! Can you imagine giving a long lecture, in barely accented English, when you're doing it by rote memory? We saw this film at the wonderful Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. Jem Cohen was present, and it's obvious by listening to him that he's going to make films his way, whether he gets rewarded for it or not. He's a very unusual person. This film will work well enough on the small screen, but it's probably better to see it in a theater. It's really great to see it with the filmmaker present to answer questions. In any event, this movie is worth seeking out and viewing. How often do you see a narrative film (well, sort of) made by a director who doesn't like narrative filmmaking? This is that film. Note: Cineaste reviewed this film in its Summer 2014 magazine. There's some excellent information about this movie on pages 66 and 67.

I've liked the earlier work I've seen by independent film maker Jem Cohen,who has experience in documentary and punk rock. (Museum Hours is co-produced by Patti Smith.) This new movie straddles the borders between his non fiction background and a made up story, as it shows us two characters played by non professional actors and presents a number of scenes that could very well be real.(One probable exception, the episode where visitors to Vienna's prestigious art museum are naked.)The key scene in "Museum Hours" leaves the main characters behind for a lengthy time as we watch a lecture by a lady docent in that museum's Bruegel room, an articulate presentation on that artist's depictions of peasant life. The idea we most take away from this woman's talk is that the main points of interest in a painting are not necessarily its ostensible subject. Thus in a canvas on Saint Paul we are drawn to a boy with a helmet and even the rear ends of several horses! Similarly at one or two points in the movie instead of continuing the story of a museum guard and a visiting tourist we are invited to look at a street flea market in windy weather, with its accumulation of things. Cohen also uses a technique I like where instead of always giving us the soundtrack that matches the visuals at that moment, there is sometimes a disjunction between audio and image (For example while we are seeing something else we hear the recorded guide that patrons listen to.) Cohen also plays with a contrast in texture between digital (for the interiors) and 16mm (for the exteriors) though unfortunately this aspect doesn't come across in the DVD that has been made, The DVD however does have some fascinating comments by the director, with which I sympathize, on the distinction between movies that dictate to us where to look and how to feel, and those that invite our eyes to wander, to shift between foreground and background, that leave us more free to make our own connections. In sum, as a movie centered on a museum this is a more stimulating work than Sokurov's showy one-shot wonder on the Hermitage, Russian Ark, which has gotten more of the critical attention.

I was interested in seeing this film because I love art and seeing movies that are not main stream and have something different to show. When I first watched the trailer for this film it looked like a story that intersected the beauty and art of the museum with a friendship that would form between a security guard working there and a woman visiting her ill cousin and their bond over the art and life. Boy was the trailer misleading. I appreciate "art house" films and those that want to portray something different but this was so terrible that I struggled to stay awake pretty much throughout. I was strongly contemplating not finishing it at all but I felt bad for the time I invested into watching some of it already and kept hoping that maybe something more would happen and it never did. There was no character development or any connection between the characters at all. You could as easily just film people walking by on the street and probably have more excitement then what was portrayed here. There was no plot nor any connection between any of the scenes. I think as far as a film it deserves less than 1 star, I gave it 2 because I did enjoy seeing the pictures of some of the art but those would be better served perhaps in a documentary about the city, here it had no connection to anything. I don't understand all of the high reviews that this movie is getting. This is just one of those films that is 'artsy' for the sake of being 'artsy' with no point or reason. Don't waste your time with this one, you'd have more fun watching random people walk by on the street.

It's hard to review a film this incredible, but I'll try. MUSEUM HOURS looked like it might be kind of boring, but after watching, I can't see why any more or less adult person would not be intrigued by at least certain aspects of this film. Though pretty distractible, I was held spellbound from start to finish. Like most people, I generally like a strong plot-line with tension, surprises, and all of that. While MUSEUM HOURS has very solid character development and cohesion between its scenes, it just isn't a story-story and is one of those rare films that doesn't need much sequence of events. It's far less depressing than it may appear and actually quite funny in certain--naked people casually strolling the Kunsthistoriches, Johann's narration of missing strategic body parts on ancient sculptures--places. This film is, of course, all about art imitating life and vice versa. But don't let that scare you off. It's totally lacking in pretense and plays no tricks with its audience, carrying the casual viewer along with it. If I'm making MUSEUM HOURS sound like stoner-food, I can only say that it's a drug of the very best kind. Brilliantly simple, without any of the obscurantist b.s. we often encounter in films of this sort. There's a lot about Bruegel, one of the few painters who's ever meant much to me. Yet, even if Bruegel doesn't move you, other things in this film most likely will. A myriad of miscellaneous images, some "everyday," some "famous art": MUSEUM HOURS gives new insights into even the simplest, oft-ignored imagery. You'll never be able to look at another landscape--real, imagined, on canvas, whatever--in a cursory way again. Forgive me, but MUSEUM HOURS is truly mind-expanding. The biggest reason why this film succeeds in being artsy without any of the negative connotations of that term is that it's narrated by Johann, a guard at the famous museum in Vienna who, though he's never been a particular fan of painting, has had much time to stare idly at the artwork--which, of course, includes the visitors and everything else around him--until it becomes so familiar that he notices new details and meanings with every view. Anne, the visitor from Montreal who likes art-in-general but is in Vienna mainly to visit her sister in the hospital, provides further perspectives in her conversations with Johann. There is also a very memorable five minutes with Gerda, amazingly keen in her descriptions but still friendly and open-minded with her tour group. I don't give ten stars to many films, but anything less would be an injustice here. Though I'm sure that I'd EVENTUALLY grow tired of it, I could watch MUSEUM HOURS every night for quite a while.

If you didn't get the analogy, that's OK, because this movie is much like it. I think the other reviewers who gave it a 1 were, like myself, constrained by the scale, which does not allow negative scores. If any movie deserved a negative score, this is it. OK, yes, it's comparing life around us to art. And so? I got that in the first few frames. You didn't need to pound me on the head at the end. But IS art like life? Well, no, of course not. Art is selective (which of course proves this movie is NOT art…). Art is ABOUT something. Art is emotionally moving. If (?) the movie is trying to compare itself to Bruegel, then something is really, really out of whack. Sure, Bruegel is painting scenes of everyday life, but they are scenes observed from a certain angle containing a host of details you would not see together in real life. There is humor, etc. etc. I have absolutely no idea what the movie was trying to do other than fill in almost two hours of my time. Unbelievable that I watched it all the way through, but I gave it a fair chance! Be warned! Nothing to see here, move along!!

Nothing much happens in MUSEUM HOURS in terms of plot: the action focuses on the experiences of a guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Bobby Sommer), as he observes the different types of visitor and reflects on the exhibits in the art gallery. He has a chance encounter with Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara), a Canadian visitor who has come to see her sick relative in Vienna; and together they visit different parts of Vienna, as well as making regular visits to the hospital. Filmed on a minuscule budget. Jem Cohen's film reflects on the relationship between art and film, concentrating in particular on how (and whether) paintings by the Old Masters 'speak' to different types of viewer. Through brilliant use of visual compositions, Cohen shows how the daily rituals of Viennese life bear a strong similarity to those compositions portrayed in the paintings (for example, the work of Brueghel). This is designed to prove how the artists drew their inspiration from life, as well as their imagination. Other sequences are quasi-surrealistic - at one point we see three visitors to the museum who are naked, adopting poses very similar to those represented in the paintings. This technique emphasizes the importance of the imagination in the way we look at paintings. The relationship between art and life is reinforced by Johann's voice-over, as he reflects on the paintings, the visitors, and his reactions to both at any given moment. Beautifully shot (by Cohen and Peter Roehsler) in muted colors on a series of winter days, MUSEUM HOURS is a masterpiece of cinema, reflecting on the viewer's relationship to visual objects.