“I thought it was a bit pathetic to resist. We had been approached by other filmmakers previously, and there was a tremendous amount of distrust at the idea. When Fred approached, I thought, well the safest way to go is with someone who is really an artist, because he won’t have an agenda.”
“Something all artists are in interested in is how paintings can kind of freeze reality so someone who died a long time ago is still here, looking at us.” As the guide in London’s National Gallery speaks, his assembled listeners turn their gazes to the painting he describes, one of Willem Kalf’s 17th-century still lifes. “This lobster,” instructs the guide, “which existed a long time ago, which now doesn’t exist at all, of course, is preserved, the amazing preservation, here it is.”
“Here it is.” You hear such sentiment repeatedly in National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s newest observation of institutional machinations. Not only do guides, guests, and administrators look at art, but they also talk about it. Earnestly and insistently, they talk about how to understand and frame it, to define and preserve it. As they talk, you see what they describe as well as where they are and with whom they speak. The camera observes a face or a gesture, a reflection in glass or a hand on a table, the camera pulls out or pushes in on one of the London museum’s 2400 paintings, inviting you to consider not only the many efforts to situate art but also how art might elude definition, and how people’s stories about art can be awkward and self-regarding, however earnest and insistent.
Storytelling shapes National Gallery. Following several close views of paintings in the collection, you hear a sound, a floor polisher, which then emerges into a shot of one of the viewing rooms, a composition that emphasizes the huge gold frames on art, as these frames are reflected in the brilliantly shiny floor. The worker pushes the polisher, the frame cuts to a shot of the floor to how him and his instrument, blurred and evocative. And then the day begins, visitors contemplating images by Vermeer and Rembrandt, Titian and Jan Gossaert. Within three minutes, the film connects stories across time (the collection includes art from the 13th to the end of the 19th centuries), stories told by painters and observers together, the stories embodied by workers and repeated or transformed each day.
As these scenes tell stories of how an institution exists, the film tells other stories too, peripheral and propulsive, thematic and referential. Again and again, people in the Gallery tell stories about paintings, and about themselves trying to figure out paintings. Many rely on what they think of as history, the artists’ conditions, maybe, or their ambitions. A docent describes for her assembled listeners the context for another painting, how the church housing the original painting offered little light (narrow windows, no electricity) and how the image renders a subjective understanding of life then, Filtered through now, of course, that understanding is changed, and for each viewer as well, it will be individual and new. “We must remember how this was originally intended to be seen,” she intones, as you realize you can never know, but only piece together fragments of stories about painters and patrons, subjects and spaces.
From here the film cuts to another story, narrated in steps by the Gallery’s director and an associate, as they discuss the changing functions of the Gallery, or maybe not. As the director contemplates the traditional mission, the difference the Gallery might mean, his interlocutor raises the specter of new possibilities, the way the institution’s “public voice” might adjust to a new generation of potential museumgoers. She asks how the Gallery might advertise events and exhibits, how to arrange collections, how to use TV and sponsorships, how to appear in public? How might it appeal to desires and create change, how might it manage the expectations of viewers? And how might it negotiate the changes occurring outside its walls?
Each story is a negotiation. Another guide suggests a “message” within Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors.” “Maybe the message was something like this,” she offers, her face vibrantly expressive, her gestures narrative in themselves. “That no matter how rich, young — he was in his 29th year, he in his 25th year — or handsome you are,” she says, shrugging and mugging as if on a stage, “interested in and worried about the world you are, in the end it all comes down to the grim invincible, and the only thing to be considered in this world is salvation, represented by the almost hidden crucifix, top left.”
And with this phrase, “top left,” the guide pauses, her case apparently made. Just so, the scene cuts from the painting she’s defined to another room through a doorway, another chance for another story, another definition and perhaps another undoing, the thunk thunk of footsteps marking the transition. It’s an exquisite moment, indicating not only the pleasures of such assured reciting, but also the delights of not knowing, of anticipating, of moving on. For as much as art can be ascribed meaning by way of the maker’s conceivable intention, so too, another choice can be made, another doorway entered, another circumstance recounted or detail revealed.
The film shows observers of paintings as much as it shows paintings by Camille Pissarro, George Stubbs, and Rembrandt. If, as one expert suggests, work by Leonardo, say, the “Madonna of the Rocks,” might solicit its own audience, based on celebrity and duplication in the world beyond the Gallery (work by “someone like Leonardo does it itself,” says one expert), still, the space where it appears inside will affect how people understand it. Relocating the “Madonna” from a prominent display to one that is not, might lead to surprises, suggests one observer, it might help viewers feel they’ve made a discovery. And it might also say something about how the institution is working, how it evaluates and values its objects, how it tells a story about itself.
“Paintings change. And how you look at them changes as well,” offers an instructor. It’s a process familiar in academia as much as on television, contexts. In the Gallery, truths swirl and ebb, enchanting, encouraging self-understanding. A speaker describes a woman in a Vermeer painting as inviting you to “step closer and get to know her, but as you get closer, just like impressionist paintings, that sense of realism dissolves into abstraction and it remains forever elusive, again creating a barrier between our world and this ideal world represented into the paintings.” The speaker takes a breath. “I think that is intentional on Vermeer’s part,” she essays, “Because of the painting’s restraint, because of the absolute regularity and almost austerity of composition, it’s hard to tell exactly what the painting is about, what might be going on in this painting.”
Neither can you “know if that’s precisely what’s in Vermeer’s mind.” And yet, this is the job, the job of storytelling, the job of reading. That ambiguity,” the speaker asserts. “That I firmly believe is absolutely intentional on the part of the best artist, because it’s designed to keep you intrigued to keep up coming back.” Of course, you come back. What else can you do? “It’s the idea of something being ephemeral,” offers a guide. “The artists were really intrigued by the idea that they could do that preserve something forever, really. Well, it won’t last forever, but it will last longer than us barring some disaster and that’s an interesting idea.” Interesting, however true and untrue it may be.