LIFE IMITATES ART

Art, life, past, present merge in meditative 'Museum Hours'

If you've ever been to the venerable Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, you're in for a nostalgic treat with the film, Museum Hours. But you need not have ever been to Vienna to be drawn into the odd, languid spell cast by this Austrian-American co-production. Anyone who has ever haunted any Old World museum with a rich collection of Late Middle Ages and Renaissance paintings may find herself strangely beguiled by this meditation on art and life, past and present, and the many ways and places in which they intersect.

The film is written and directed by American Jem Cohen, who has an extensive list of credits in music videos and documentary shorts. Museum Hours has a bit of a documentary vibe to it; the main character, a museum guard, narrates his thoughts and observations as he goes about his daily life, and onscreen conversations have an unscripted feel. There's not much in the way of plot or action, yet the film is thematically rich in its ideas on the secret symbolism of pictures, and art as the social media of its day.

Bruegel, "Fight Between Carnival and Lent," 1559

Johann (Bobby Sommer) is a uniformed guard at the KHM. He spends his days on a chair in a niche before a heavy wooden door and behind a red velvet rope, although he often gets up and wanders around the colossal picture galleries.

His favorite is the Bruegel room, large canvases teeming with messy life in all its diversity—allegorical wedding or hunting scenes, religious or mythological scenes radically reimagined in terms of 16th Century peasant life.

Johann "always sees something new in the paintings" that continue to speak to the human condition.

One day, he strikes up a conversation with Canadian visitor, Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara). A distant cousin is in a Viennese hospital, and in the absence of any other family, Anne has come to spend time with her. Johann offers his services as a translator, and soon they become allied art explorers, soaking up the pictures and viewing art through the lens of life (and vice versa). It's especially fun to see the way filmmaker Cohen composes every exterior shot like a Bruegel canvas. (Read more)

The lack of narrative drive will frustrate some viewers, but Museum Hours is more about reverie than story. It would make a great double-bill in your Netflix queue with Lech Majewski's splendidly nutty Bruegel-movie mash-up, The Mill and the Cross, but it will be so much more compelling on a big screen.

Meanwhile, take a mini virtual tour of the museums of Vienna in this blog I posted after my visit there last summer!

PAINTER OF LIFE

Enter a teeming Bruegel painting in audacious, exciting 'The Mill and the Cross'

I don't know much about Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski, but he's made one wild, weird-ass movie about art and the artmaking process in The Mill and the Cross. It's a fairly awful title for such a grand, edgy cinematic experiment. Yes, a mill and a cross figure prominently in the painting under construction in the movie, but this title not only makes the film sound dull and plodding, it suggests none of the originality and sheer visual audacity that makes this movie so exciting.

In general, it's about the 16th Century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, caught in the act of creating his vast masterwork, "The Way To Calvary," in 1564. Majewski's film is inspired by a non-fiction book on the subject by art historian Michael Francis Gibson, but Majewski's approach is completely unconventional. We never see the artist actually painting; instead, Majewski creates an onscreen landscape that already looks like a Bruegel painting, especially the background, with its sky full of roiling clouds and the distant hills.

The foreground is occupied by the local peasants that Bruegel always painted with such gusto going about their daily business. Bruegel himself (played by the iconic Rutger Hauer) trudges about in the extreme foreground, deciding how he will marshal these people for allegorical purposes within his composition. He shares these ideas with the audience, sometimes in private voice-over contemplation, at other times in conversation with his wealthy patron, Nicolaes Jonghelinck (Michael York). Now and then, the busy activity onscreen stops dead in its tracks while Bruegel and Jonghelinck prowl around on the outskirts, discussing the various images and what they mean.

But this is in no way a dry history lesson or art critique. And forget about narrative: Majewski isn't interested in telling a linear story. Instead, life sprawls across his cinematic canvas, in all its messy, teeming, tragi-comic, absurd humanity. A weathered miller looks down on it all from his millhouse perched high on a craggy hill, as his windmill blades slowly churn, and the massive gears grind away.

Bruegel explains that the miller, high on his hill, represents God in his painting, "the Great Miller of Life." In Majewski's view, the painter himself (and by extension, the filmmaker) is also a godlike figure, grinding the raw grain of life and human activity into art. Those enormous wooden gears and cogs grinding away inside the millhouse are like the artist's imagination, set to work by the full sails of inspiration. (Read more)

You won't believe how amazing this movie looks. But don't take my word for it; here's the trailer.

Whatever you do, don't miss seeing this wonderful, questing, radical art film on a big screen, where it belongs! Why are you still sitting there?