The bulk of Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours takes place in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Art Museum. I haven’t visited that particular museum myself, but the interiors will feel familiar to anyone who has spent a month or two backpacking around Western Europe. Old paintings with gilded frames hang from solid-toned gallery walls. Multilingual placards sit next to each work, informing visitors of titles and artists. Bored guards stand in front of the art, making sure bored visitors don’t entertain themselves by putting their dirty fingers on it.
During my own travels, conversations would often occur amongst cash-strapped students such as myself about “museum-fatigue.” We complained about the ennui we encountered while wandering through a maze of art that provided us with no point of personal engagement. The museums, we felt, were an obligation. They were something to do during the day, a touch of self-imposed cultural education that would proceed the acultural drunken debauchery that made up most evenings.
It’s not that museums have nothing to teach us, but that they have become a ritualized thing-to-do for tourists, a method of countering the guilty conscience they might incur if they visited Barcelona for a week just to sleep on the beach every day and get shitfaced in the hostel bar every night. At its best, a charismatic guide enriches one’s museum visit by providing context to the art. From guides, this context usually comes in the form of shallow observations about artistic techniques and sensationalized narrative accounts of artists’ lives. At its worst, one trudges through indistinguishable rooms, barely registering the differences of each work through the haze of a punishing hangover.
Of course, my experiences as an ignorant 19-year-old Canadian in Europe shouldn’t be representative of every museum attendee, but it’s probably closer to the way most people experience museums than the ideal of an engaged visitor who both knows what he or she is looking at and cares about it. Museum Hours is a film for the latter type of museum attendee. Jem Cohen, the director, has had a career that splits the difference between filmmaker and visual artist. Likewise, Museum Hours splits the difference between a narrative film and a visual essay. Ostensibly, the film is about two middle-aged people, a museum guard (Bobby Sommer) and a Canadian visitor (Mary Margaret O’Hara), connecting over a shared appreciation for art, but Cohen provides plenty of screen time to montages of the Kunsthistorisches art collection as well as the snow-filled streets of Vienna.
Museum Hours acts like a good teacher– without judging its audience’s naivety, it shows us how to appreciate art. As a tour guide says, during an extended scene devoted to the works of Dutch Renaissance painter Peiter Bruegel, “these scenes are less quaint and more radical than they appear now,” and that shouldn’t stop us from letting our eyes explore the canvas, looking out for details and patterns that may reveal something deeper. As she says this, a visitor with a North American accent looks at his cell phone, obviously too busy for something so quaint.
Museum Hours will play at the TIFF Bell Lightbox tomorrow, where you can see it, relatively free of distractions, in an air-conditioned theatre. I, on the other hand, watched the film on a laptop in my non-air conditioned bedroom. Whether it’s an online screener, a Netflix stream, or an illegal DVD rip, the supposed “convenience” of having a film available online somehow makes it more of a chore to watch (albeit a less expensive chore) than going to a theatre. Despite rather liking the film, it took me two days to finish; I was interrupted on separate occasions by a cold shower, a nap, and the urge to type out a snarky tweet when street posters for Robert Rodriguez’ Machete appeared in one of Cohen’s shots. Like the rude (and probably American) museum attendee from the paragraph above, I can’t focus on the art without checking for text messages.
Cinemas and art museums alike are threatened by the easy distractions of technology (or, in the case of backpacking 20-somethings, alcohol). This same technology has necessitated a change in distribution for independent film. In a few years, movies like Museum Hours will be distributed solely for festivals and home screenings. There’s nothing wrong with the new distribution model; it’s an inevitable effect of technological advancements. But Museum Hours is the type of film that benefits from being seen in a theatre. Viewing a film this quiet in a dark room with a like-minded audience will doubtlessly allow you to get more from the experience. Unlike the crowd up the street at the Scotiabank Theatre, the audience at the Lightbox will frown on you for taking out your cell phone. The only thing to do, then, is to look at the screen and, like the characters within it, absorb everything you can from this wonderful little work of art.
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Alan Jones writes about film (and sometimes music) for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
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