Oddly, so soon after I wrote here about “Mr. Turner,” the British film about J.W.M. Turner, I just learned about a British documentary called “National Gallery” about that august London institution. It, too, was shown at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival and it’s on view in New York City from today through Nov. 18. It’s at the Film Forum, which describes it like this”
London’s National Gallery…is itself portrayed as a brilliant work of art in this, Frederick Wiseman’s 39th documentary and counting. Wiseman listens raptly as a panoply of docents decode the great canvases of Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Turner; he visits with the museum’s restorers as they use magnifying glasses, tiny eye-droppers, scalpels, and Q-tips to repair an infinitesimal chip; he attends administrative meetings in which senior executives do (polite) battle with younger ones who want the museum to become less stodgy and more welcoming to a larger cross-section of the public. But most of all, we experience the joy of spending time with the aforementioned masters as well as Vermeer and Caravaggio, Titian and Velázquez, Pissarro and Rubens, and listen to the connoisseurs who discourse upon the aesthetic, historical, religious and psychological underpinnings of these masterpieces.
Now, the film is 181 minutes–very long for a documentary on one institutions, and even one by 84-year-old Wiseman, who uses a fly-on-the-wall technique, never straying into interviews, voice-overs or identifiers.
But, and this is where I learned of the film, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis on Wednesday called it “magnificent…at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.” And that’s just the first paragraph.
Dargis goes on to say that Wiseman delves into the NG’s history (including the slave-trade origins of a founder’s fortune) and, to her, the very important role played by money concerns at the NG. She concludes:
…the experience of watching “National Gallery†is pleasurable and immersive because he’s a wonderful storyteller. It is also unexpectedly moving. Because his other great theme is how art speaks to us, one he brilliantly expresses in the relay of gazes that finds us looking at museumgoers looking at portraits that look right back — at artists, art lovers and moviegoers — even as Mr. Wiseman, that sly old master, looks at all of us in turn.
Last May, the Telegraph also wrote a very positive piece, including the words:
The real joy of his film is that it never needs to strain for effect; it sits back. It’s like being lulled with intelligence. However long it is since you last climbed the gallery’s steps, you’ll watch this truly inspiring piece of work and rue the interval.
 The Guardian didn’t like it as much,
I have not seen the film, and though I hope to I’m not sure I can get to the cinema before Nov. 19. Perhaps it will move somewhere else in New York.
Meantime, here’s a short trailer.