Reviews

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  ★★★★½ review by laird on Letterboxd

  A few transitional sections focus on frame makers at work, and that may relate to the most important idea in National Gallery: the importance of framing/context and how this affects the creation, observation and interpretation of the artworks. Observation and imagination, the spiritual and the material, the immediate and the distant, the ephemeral and the eternal, and The National Gallery where all of these points converge. There's a popular sentiment that goes something like "you change, but the art stays the same," but what's reinforced over and over by Wiseman's subjects is that that's a bunch of baloney. Time, biological degradation, and the context both cultural and physical (as in the very space in which the art is displayed) all change a work of art independent of what any one observer brings to it. These underlying ideas are presented as the ocean upon which the institution of this specific gallery (but really any classic fine arts repository) must navigate, trying to bridge the gap between hundreds of years of meaning to keep these works vital in a world that will never stop changing. Note how every lecturer in the movie begins or ends sentences with, "...I think...", a humble uncertainty that their perspective is definitive. When a treasure trove of fine art is founded on money made through slave trade and a beautiful portrait of a horse was mastered by the manipulation and mutilation of several horse carcasses, at some point it becomes more interesting to discuss history, context and process than intention anyway.

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  ★★★★★ review by Scott Renshaw on Letterboxd

  It's tempting to look at this in elegiac terms--an 80-plus-year-old filmmaker exploring an institution dedicated to preserving and teaching people about art, continuing vital conversations about centuries-old works and granting their creators a kind of immortality. And I suppose it's even quite effective on that level. But the scope here is utterly transfixing, moving from the gallery spaces themselves and the gaze of laypeople to the educational efforts of docents and scholars to the behind-the-scenes work on everything from budgets to how to light an installation. As a result, it somehow manages to be one of the most extraordinary experiences I can remember about the full range of art within the human experience: as a commodity, as a transcendent view of genius, as something that requires nuts-and-bolts architecture to function properly, as craft passed from one generation to the next. It's about creation and critical engagement, about understanding what you want to know about a work and how it collides with what you can never know, about how many people whose names we will never know or remember play a crucial role in allowing miraculous art to appear before us. Wiseman paints on a breathtakingly large canvas and manages to give us three hours where, if I wanted the most concise way possible to answer the question, "What is art?", I'd show them this movie.

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  ★★★★★ review by Sean Gilman on Letterboxd

  The latest from Frederick Wiseman, National Gallery, about the British art museum of the same name. In a brisk three hours, Wiseman takes us on a tour of the place, following his now well-established structure: alternating long sequences of people at work, both "on-stage" (the tour guides, the restorers) and off (the frame-makers, the construction workers and janitorial crew) and administrative meetings where the war between commerce and art is fought, with breaks in-between made of "pillow shots", in this case usually close-ups of people looking at the art interspersed with close-ups of the faces in the art itself. He even manages to weasel in a couple of "interviews" wherein he films a person being interviewed, rather than having to break his cinematic code and interview them on-camera himself. It's great of course. I've watched a lot of Wiseman in the last month and I simply can't get enough of his films, the ones about art especially. It's beautiful and fascinating and that structure is so entrenched because it works so well to make a very long movie seem much shorter than it really is. But one thing is for sure: next time I go to a museum, I'm going to join a tour. Those guides are terrific. The less I say about the dance scene at the end, however, the better.

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  ★★★★½ review by Rakestraw on Letterboxd

  Expert documentarian Frederick Wiseman excellently conveys the power and importance of art in a seemingly effortless manner. Information is disseminated at every conceivable instance with Wiseman fixating his camera on any and all aspects and/or department within the National Gallery; be it through behind-the-scenes closed doors discussions or a multitude of craftsmen working on a variety of restorations, just about every possible viewpoint is represented in some context immersing the viewer in the various ins-and-outs of the legendary museum. This all-inclusive approach makes National Gallery one of the most comprehensive visual documents of any institution in cinema.

  Even though National Gallery contains an abundance of behind-the-scenes footage it’s important to realize that at the center of all the scenes is the art. Whether it’s discussions revolving around bringing the art to a wider audience, budgeting for future exhibitions, restorations of said art or simply the visual frames of the hanging artwork itself – the art is the main focal point. The film is an immersive anthropological tableau vis-a-vis fly-on-the-wall voyeurism devoid of sit-down talking head interviews; even the employees showcased in National Gallery appear without their names attached just their deep reverence and appreciation of the artworks imbuing their sequences with contemplative compassion.

  This viewpoint is brilliantly communicated through Wiseman’s deft handling of compiling and organizing the overflowing content that shapes National Gallery, molding this wealth of visual content into a quasi-exhibition (not unlike the Leonardo exhibition discussed within) exhibiting the footage in a rhythmic series of vignettes; at first, appearing rigid in its structure the film gradually melds melodic into a perfectly-curated mosaic of the logistical, the academic and the aesthetic.

  The behind-the-scenes sequences of the private meetings and inner workings of the museum serve as contextual interludes segueing into the main attraction – the art – as the camera captures these magnificent works in the thoughtful stillness of static frames. These artwork interludes, mingled with the faces of the visiting public and their concentrated gazes, act as a punctuation mark to the preceding private sequences; an exclamation point, once again emphasizing the museum’s (and the film’s) main mission – the importance of art, their effect on culture and history and sharing these works with the public.

  Original Review

  That art restorer discussing Rembrandt's Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback was akin to watching The Avengers duking it out in the streets with aliens and exploding buildings and chaos and screaming people running about and more aliens and lasers...except better, much much better.

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  ★★★★ review by davidehrlich on Letterboxd

  A veritable cathedral of Western paintings, the National Gallery has been entrenched in London’s Trafalgar Square since 1838, with access to the sprawling facility convenient (and mostly free) for the public to whom it belongs. But while the art technically belongs to the museum’s visitors, the guests can’t take it with them—like many of the world’s most famous collections of fine art, the National Gallery doesn’t allow photography. That fact, in and of itself, is enough to make Frederick’s Wiseman’s unrestricted, nearly three-hour portrait of the place significant. But the ultimate value of the famed filmmaker’s latest documentary—a subject National Gallery turns into a reflexive concern—is not that Wiseman makes it possible for a broader audience to see these priceless works of art, but that the scope of his project invites all audiences to look at them through an illuminating new lens.

  FULL REVIEW ON THE DISSOLVE: thedissolve.com/reviews/1184-national-gallery/

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