A few weeks ago, on a bright summer weekend, with time hanging heavy on my hands, I decided to get me some culture and ventured to the Tate Britain, London — that great repository of British art famous for the works of Moore, Constable, Blake, Hockney, Bacon and more. Upon arrival, I fell in with a tour conducted by an extremely well-informed lady, who took our group through the venue’s history in what had to be one of the most enthralling hours of my life. Unsurprisingly, post-tour, my mind wandered to cinema. In 2002, I had occasion to watch an astonishing piece of cinema. Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark is a journey through the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and along the way, we are treated to 200 years of historical re-enactments that bring the artefacts to thrilling life. What is truly astounding is that the entire film was shot in one take — one long, mesmerising take with no cuts. Imagine the rehearsals involved to get everything just so.
It is tempting to segue to films that are shot in one take and there are several, but let us confine ourselves to art for now. It is impossible to think about museums and cinema, and not remember the elemental thrill of the-running-through-the-Louvre sequence in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964). To return to London, Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery (2014) is a majestic and thorough exploration of the venue’s treasures. It is also a fascinating portrait of how a gallery works and the sheer amount of effort that goes into creating an art experience. At three hours, it can at times feel like a hard slog, but is ultimately a rewarding experience.
Johannes Holzhausen’s The Great Museum (2014) can be viewed as a companion piece to Wiseman’s epic. Holzhausen explores the diurnal rhythms of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. While the venue boasts of the likes of van Eyck, Dürer, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael and Vermeer, the centrepiece is undoubtedly Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel. Holzhausen also examines the process of art restoration, and delightfully, the documentary is presented in a series of elegant cuts without a voice-over. In the case of this film, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. A worthy television addition to the genre, again returning to London, is the BBC’s Museum of Life (2012), a detailed six-part look at the Natural History Museum, London. Watching Museum of Life ,in a way, seemed like the completion of a journey that began with One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1975), a childhood favourite of mine, a caper where an important Chinese microfilm is hidden in the bones of a dinosaur at the Natural History Museum.
While on the subject, let us move on from the sublime to the Night at the Museum films, which we shall gloss over and remember chiefly as footnotes in the late Robin Williams’ career.
While on mediocrity, it would be churlish not to mention Jeans-Paul Salomé’s Belphégor, Phantom of the Louvre (2001) that despite being shot extensively in the iconic Parisian venue, fails to rise above its thudding dullness. But at least, it has Sophie Marceau in it.
