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It's tempting to look at legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman's three-hour exploration of London's National Gallery 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 and to the behind-the-scenes work on budgets or how to light an installation. As a result, National Gallery somehow manages to be one of the most extraordinary cinematic portrayals ever about the full range of art within the human experience: as a commodity; as a transcendent view of genius; as something that requires nuts & bolts architecture to function properly; as craft passed from one generation to the next. It's about the act of creation and the subsequent act of critical engagement. It addresses what you want to know about a work and how that desire can collide with what you can never know. It conveys 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 you wanted the most concise way possible to answer the question, "What is art?", you'd show them this movie. (Scott Renshaw)
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Utah Museum of Fine Arts
- 410 Campus Center Drive, University of Utah, Salt Lake City SLC-University / Emigration Canyon Utah 84112
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801-581-7332
- www.umfa.utah.edu/
