The only way I can find to get started with National Gallery is to unpack it slowly. If At Berkeley is “sprawling” and “panoramic”, National Gallery is incredibly dense and hugely ambitious in terms of the complex ideas about art that it contains, so I’ve had a number of false starts trying to get my head around it. At first it looks like one of Wiseman’s “normal” institutional films, if there is such a thing, with a beleaguered museum figuring out its place in the modern world, not entirely certain how to deal with its public and concerned with keeping its treasures in good condition. It is also a film about culture, treating art in similar ways as Wiseman has done with dance twice and theater, deeply admiring of its cultural treasures and absorbed in the implications of these forms to his own work. It is both of these still, but somehow that just feels like a beginning point. It really demands thought, this one, so let me get to some of the questions.
Wiseman’s Intentions
I’ve already warned briefly that this is not the way to look at films, or any other art works for that matter, thinking that our goal is to figure out the intentions of the person who made it. Films are not puzzles, constructed to obscure what a film-maker “really” thinks or means or is ever so slyly implying. Trying to decide does Wiseman agree with this person or that, if this scene shows something he condemns or approves of, does he think this comment is smart or stupid, is just not a productive direction. They are constructed precisely to thwart such an approach. I think this is one of the basic tenets one must accept even to begin to engage with his films. We might note evidence of an attitude, if we choose to, or argue for an overall belief, but that just can’t be our goal in understanding how these films work. We’re not detectives in search of hidden clues or psychiatrists seeking out deeply underlying motivations. We need to revisit this just a bit because National Gallery presents some unusual problems simply figuring out what it’s about, how we take meaning from it, due to its unusual content, as we will discuss when this problem is faced up to a little further.
I’d say the difference starts from this not being scripted material with actors. It’s not even improvised, or people being told to do anything, or even to repeat things they might have already done on their own. A core idea, of course, is that we are watching real people engaged in activities they would be doing anyway, many times in a professional capacity. So, when Wiseman films them, can we say he has an opinion about what he’s showing? We do know the ratio between what he shoots and what winds up in the finished film has becoming especially huge in the age of digital, when no film stock has to be purchased. At Berkeley is supposed to be 250 hours filmed for the four hour finished film, and for this film, it was 170 hours to wind up with three. That is a really high ratio of stuff left on the digital floor. So what can we say of his “intention” regarding what he selects? We can say, first of all, that he might have been guided by what he found at the place he was filming. If it doesn’t happen, obviously he can’t film it. (I say this only because for a traditional fiction film, or even some documentaries, there are ways that if it doesn’t happen, you can make it happen.) Of the things he does witness during the month or two he’s at a place, clearly he makes choices about what to film, but I don’t see how that means he films some things with a plan to make a certain argument or avoids other things because he just doesn’t like them. Maybe I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, but I really believe in the idea that a principal goal is to reflect what the experience of being there was like. So if someone acts like a jerk, you’re not saying they are a jerk, you’re saying this is what you witnessed while you were there, and you viewer, you decide if he’s being jerk. “Uncontrolled” makes all the difference regarding this aspect of intentionality. Filming it doesn’t make you endorse or condemn. It makes you the medium through which real activities can be delivered to viewers.
A year or so of editing is a very serious thing. Most film-makers don’t come close. Wiseman is incredibly creative in editing, but it absolutely does not imply he’s shaping the material to “mean” a certain thing. I’m coming more to think, especially in these later films, that he can often be interested in ambiguous situations where it’s possible for viewers to watch and then find very different aspects to be of interest. That’s not just in the sense that all films might do that, but that these films are constructed to allow for a range of responses and interests, some at a surface level perhaps of performance or apparent subject matter, which is perfectly all right to do. More likely, though, with great works like these, there are more things to attend to, more possibilities for learning or seeing complexities. I think that’s the challenge of his editing, that real events and people have been broken into episodes, and then put together so that meaning comes from connections between these episodes, the big picture which the mosaic pieces have turned into when you step back just a bit. He’s found a unique brilliant style, which then brings many possibilities for thinking about how his experience has been reshaped on the way to becoming a movie. I’ve tried to suggest what a few particular techniques might be - the Abrupt End of Scene lines, the linkages where we can notice repeated elements from other points in the film (or with other of his films), the sense that a series of episodes may be exploring a common topic. There are lots of options, but none of them are obvious and none are keys to supposed intentions. They are invitations to viewers to think beyond surface content.
That’s where National Gallery to me is a challenge. I see and enjoy the obvious things, but there’s definitely more here, important and buried deep, and to get to it we have to sort out some peculiarities of this film. For one, a great proportion of it is a bunch of people each standing in front of a painting and talking about it, bringing up other subjects and opinions as they speak. I would guess there are twenty or so of these sequences all told. The audiences look quite passive. If these are teaching situations at all, the teaching seems aimed at us viewers, not those in front of them. It’s not like so much of the teaching in Wiseman films, where we see students interacting and we get a clear sense that knowledge is being passed on. Here, it’s so hard to know whether talks are going over the heads of the audience. I think we don’t have to see that they absorb anything, but it becomes difficult to know if we are getting learned instruction or casual entertainment. We can make our own judgements, I guess, but I gave up on that after about ten or so of these. Because when are authorities really authorities? Are these speakers being derided as academic blowhards or applauded for the depths of their knowledge? Some of the things I heard sounded on the dumb side, but maybe that was just me. I didn’t have this problem with the teachers in At Berkeley, because it was clearer those were people who knew what they were talking about. With National Gallery, I just decided I had to listen to what they were actually saying and see what I liked, and I could stop worrying about whether Wiseman intended for them to look smart or foolish. Take them as they come. Like I would if I were there. Once I was over that, I was ready to move on to more substantive matters, like what was I getting out of this film.
So here’s the big plan, my view of what’s going on: National Gallery is very film aware. The first way to think of this is to see two cinematic subjects come up a lot - Narrative and Light. From there it’s to another step - Wiseman seeing himself in these artists, or giving us the possibilities to think about the similarities between how these artists are spoken of and how we might speak of his work. Third, he presents for us connections between arts, which this film itself is a great example of - a film about art.
Film - Narrative and Light
From the beginning, we’re told versions of that Rod Stewart song title, “Every picture tells a story.” Enticing a group of young kids to appreciate a painting of Moses, a speaker exclaims: "All these amazing stories in Nattional Gallery paintings!” Soon after, still with the Bible, we’re before a Rubens, as another talk begins "This is the story of Samson and Delilah”. She’s rather elaborate and over-dramatic in her recounting, full of big hand gestures. (Fun part: “After they slept together, he has fallen asleep. This can happen.”) She also tries to encourage identification with Delilah, something a film might do: "I want all of you to imagine you are a spy”. I think she redeems herself a bit when she says Delilah "is looking ambiguous”, and gives them some space: "I'm not going to tell you what you think she's feeling, we'll all read it differently.” This is a pretty good version of talking about a painting in a very filmic way. A third example of film talk is when (I think it’s) an artist with a bunch of kids says he wants to “talk about storytelling”. His main point is about how much time different arts have to do that. Speaking admiringly of film, he says “A film unfolds over two hours. You’ve got time to introduce characters. You’ve got time to show the plot going in and out.” Whereas: “A painting has the speed of light to tell you a story.” The big payoff on this painting-film connection comes when a docent talks to some school kids and says very directly: “You have to view paintings, or narrative paintings, as early films, and as forms of entertainment.” He’s another one very good on ambiguity that suggests films too: “Paintings are very very ambiguous. You can look at them one way, you can interpret them in another.” That’s four examples of storytelling and narrative being related to painting in a way that suggests that the newer is just following along the path set out by the earlier art.
There are more examples (as always!) of narrative talk, but I think the idea, as I’ve just said, is that storytelling in film is repeatedly invoked as a technique already underway in painting. Since National Gallery is essentially a film about the Old Masters, this seems a good ploy on their part. Especially with biblical tales and stories of kings and such this can be an inviting entry point. With twentieth century art, you might have a tougher time. And Wiseman himself may not be as attached to storytelling as these lecturers (or docents, or whoever they are) appear to be. But if we take narrative to be how a film is constructed, naturally he’d be interested in the subject, and especially in the idea of painting being a precursor to film in terms of storytelling.
We already did a big number about light in Crazy Horse, which I feel even better about now with seeing it come up seriously here. Wiseman is interested in it, and I’d say it’s about as cinematic a subject as there is. Turner is one of the main touchpoints, pretty explicitly when we watch a television show (probably some British art expert everybody recognizes) being filmed in front of a stunning example and the guy extolls “It’s through the doing and redoing of all those answering elements that makes light on the Thames into such a tremendous metaphor.” Conveniently enough, the show we see a bit of is called "Turner Inspired - In the Light of Claude” the latter a perhaps lesser-known painter who was an inspiration for Turner. This is the start of practically a light section of the film, as the next immediate scene is a nearly comic one of trying to adjust gallery lights in order to fix a problem with “a huge frame shadow”. We watch very extended light adjustments, and repeated measurements, as one of the gallery people keeps calling out “tweak it, take it away” to a guy near the ceiling who’s turning lights on and off while they then continue multiple readings of the light levels. The funny/sad last shot shows the triptych they’ve been toying with looking pretty much the same as when they started, a shadow still quite visible in about the same spot. The light theme continues in the next sequence, which begins with a man talking to two women: “We were discussing natural light and how now no one knows where the lighting is in the painting, like where is this one lit from” and that in the 17th Century someone “recorded every painting and whether it was lit from the left or the right.” In the modern day “We’re so used to electric light coming down and doing it all for us, we don’t realize . . . “ Continuing the light obsession, they go on to the Rubens gallery, where windows and candles are examined as light sources. And just as one last example, to show they’re not all stuck together in this one part of the film, there’s a good discussion of light in a Holbein portrait: “The use of light across the features again is very very subtle and carefully modulated" - a little vague but still thinking visually.
So with light, like narrative, I think we see a desire to link painting and film as kindred arts, interested in the same problems and deeply connected with each other. I think it’s a great way in a film about painting to merge the two arts in terms of how we might think about them.
Wiseman Sees Himself in the Gallery, and We Should Too
This one is either incredibly obvious or I’m the only to get here, but many of the things said about artists in this film have a strangely specific applicability to Wiseman’s work. Maybe he’s just sensing kindred spirits across the centuries, raising some interesting questions, or engaging in inward examination. I’m not going to speculate. What we do get from this is not self-reflexivity (go back to Model for that) but more like allowing us to think about his place in the pantheon. After forty films, you have a right to give that question serious consideration.
Let me give you a few quick quotes:
“At a certain point it becomes a mosaic, perhaps, rather than a seamless narrative.”
“At the same time, you're beginning to see these works together.”
“So i suppose what I’ve been doing is seeing the works together, thinking about what makes them a complete oeuvre by a single artist."
“What I’ve been amazed by is how profound and layered and endless the viewing experience is.”
“He's an artist who revisits certain themes over and over again.”
“This gallery provides you with wonderful opportunities to explore the human condition.”
“There's a magic that all of a sudden happens when works start talking to each other. . . . there are relations that all of a sudden start to become more evident.”
So do these sound like they’re talking about Wiseman? Granted that a few are a little on the general side, those speaking about an oeuvre and the values of looking at works together, but Wiseman would clearly be seen as fitting these descriptions. I think I’ve been pushing more for the variety and differences, but very clearly, he’s got a unique style, a consistent set of rules, subject matter preoccupations, all the stuff I’ve been talking about - that make you think when you hear things like these that, yes, these apply well to Wiseman. And that first comment about mosaics seems almost too good to have actually been spoken, and that human condition thing is pretty spot on, especially as Wiseman’s work has jumped the bounds of being about certain kinds of institutions. Oh, and by the way, these are all said about Leonardo da Vinci. Mighty company indeed.
Vermeer isn’t too shabby either, and let’s go with a few of these from a single talk about his “A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal”:
“He has an absolutely unique style.”
“It’s hard to tell exactly what the painting is about."
“There's always an element of ambiguity, a question there.”
“It's designed to keep you intrigued, to keep you coming back, to keep your attention.”
Once again, the suspicion has to creep in that Wiseman is valuing remarks about an artist he’s seeing affinities with, or at least allowing us to entertain those possibilities. These just feel too close to be accidental, that great Wiseman feeling that he’s putting stuff out there and then it’s up to us to see the connections. No doubt there are other artists discussed in the film that he might feel strong connection with, such as Turner, but statements like these hit too close to home to be ignored.
The last artist I’d like to toss into this ring is far lesser known, which makes his inclusion in the film even more of a tipoff. He’s the 18th Century George Stubbs, “the great horse painter” as the talk about him begins. The lecturer reels off a few remarks about his work, including “that he devoted a year and a half to studying the anatomy of horses” and that he would take horse carcasses and “suspend them, literally, for hooks, on a ceiling like a piece of meat.” The devotion of a year and half sounds like all these editing-following-shooting periods of Wiseman which he’s described often as intense periods of studying his material. Horses have been a clear interest for him too, as we saw certainly with Racetrack. And seeing horses hung on hooks like pieces of meat gets a little too close to those cows in Meat. No doubt Stubbs is here because about 350 years ago there was an artist who shared a lot of his interests and methods. Like these things said about da Vinci and Vermeer, Wiseman is connecting himself across the centuries.
Film and the Other Arts
We’ve already talked about connections National Gallery offers between painting and film, but its ambitions go even further, reaching toward no less than a kind of Unified Field Theory of the arts, also including sculpture, music, dance, poetry, and photography. There aren’t just references to other arts, it’s more along the lines of interchanges, encouraging notions of fluidity between the arts. Paintings that are musical, poetry about a painting, paintings that are like photographs, all sorts of crossovers. This becomes an overriding argument of the film, but for a good while, at least, you have to work to get at it, hovering somewhere between explicit and submerged, perhaps a layer that rises in prominence. Let’s see how it develops.
There’s a sequence where an artist talks to students and gives a version of this idea: "It's the brilliant thing about art. It encompasses everything. It's not just about either drawing or painting. It's about life. It's about music. It's about film. It's about philosophy. It's about mathematics. It's about science. It's about literature. Anything you are interested in goes into art." That covers the waterfront, as he acknowledges, but it’s good he spells out some possibilities and gives a sense that we better be on the lookout. Painting is about more than itself, he would argue. I think Wiseman will take up this challenge in adventurous ways - through the variety of arts he locates within gallery talks and also importantly through finding cinematic means to express these connections. A nice combination of these can be found in a sequence about Hans Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors”, which a lecture presents as what you could do in the sixteenth century if you wanted to record an event and were rich enough: "Clearly there's no handing a camera to a passer-by or a waiter. the only way, until the advent of photography, to have an image is to have a painter paint you.” So here, painting is pre-photographic, or is serving a function where later technologies would excel, first photography and we know what comes after, media which could capture and preserve images of events with a high degree of fidelity. The brag here is that painting was already doing this when it wanted to, and the connection is well argued for. An extra wonderful bit of cinema trickery and painting-camera fun is in the painting's use of anamorphosis, not only explained well by the lecturer but also visually demonstrated by Wiseman. The Holbein contains a smudgy distorted image of a skull which, when looked at from the proper distance and angle, pops out as a clear 3D-looking image. Wiseman shows how the effect works, which is what widescreen film technologies like Cinemascope long used to move their images from film to the big screen. So much future art and technology in a single painting.
I’ll quickly point you to a couple of other arts showing up, because we’ve still got really big further examples ahead, but you can look to the discussion of Poussin’s “Triumph of Pan” to catch a a cross-media discussion of what the speaker calls "the contest between the arts" - between painting and sculpture, where Poussin was trying to be sculpture-like in paint: “kind of a reversal of what everyone else was doing.” Music can be found in an examination by some scholars of a Watteau painting that incorporates some sheet music, where much work has been done they say on whether it’s actual music that’s depicted, one making a joke that the sheet itself might not be part of the original but could have been added later by a restorer.
Poisson and Watteau covered, we’re now at what I would label the most sublime sequence in all of Wiseman, and I really mean it, even if I’ve said something like that earlier. Here’s a rare time reference to savor this over and over, two hours and seventeen minutes in, and it lasts for all of about two minutes. A pianist is playing part of a Beethoven sonata to a small audience in a gallery filled naturally enough with paintings. Neither the pianist, the music, or the art is identified. We first see on the wall next to the audience a painting, and then we see an image of the whole painting, a cinematic “master shot” as it were, for what is to follow. A quick screen grab and a google image search identified it as “Perseus turning Phineas and his Followers to Stone” by Luca Giordano, a fairly minor 17th Century Italian. The work has a rather dramatic image of a beheading in the midst of a chaotic melee. What Wiseman does with it is to follow the full image of the painting with 31 shots of close-ups, with the first about 10 coming from this painting, and then from there including some from other works. The Beethoven continues to play throughout, and I was stunned by what I was watching - Wiseman had created a narrative film sequence out of details from this and several other paintings. So, he took the painting that just happened to be on the wall next to a piano recital, one not especially distinguished, and then appropriated both that music and painting for a sequence of his own. No lecture, no dialog is needed, and none are supplied. It is a tremendous example of the inter-related nature of music, painting, and cinema - of works brought to life through artistic obsession, as I wonder what it took for Wiseman to work this whole thing out. He uses what we could call found objects, things in that room that he didn’t put there, and fashioned a new work out of it. Go look at those couple of minutes and see if I’m making too big a deal out of this. I assure you I’m not.
As we head toward the last part of the film, the emphasis is quite firmly upon arts in conversation with each other. We’d already had a docent talk about connections between Titian and the Roman poet Ovid, as the painter created a series of paintings which he felt were the visual equivalents of poems. We’re told that Ovid “really used words in a very, very visual way”, while Titian “could conjure poetry visually”. Some film-makers are doing a film about Titian, and Wiseman joins in to watch them filming the poet Jo Shapcott read her poem “Callisto’s Song”, which is based on the Titian painting “Diana and Callisto”. Wiseman matches some lines from the poem with their correspondences in the painting - “A goddess, her arrow arm pointing” and “dogs crouched” are two such moments. So we’ve got a film combining the poetry and the painting - art forms merging. Then continuing to a bravura conclusion that carries art combinations along in a most Wisemanesque manner, we see a ballet in a Titian room, two dancers in front of two paintings, silent for a minute before music begins, and their dance somewhat echoes the two paintings - outstretched arms and poses looking as if they extend from the paintings. Ballet is certainly by now a Wiseman thing, and here film combines dance, music, and painting in another assertion of the connections between art forms and of Wiseman’s attachments to them.
As the dance ends and the two exit the room, we get an important and beautiful restatement of a device seen throughout the film. There have been dozens of times when Wiseman has set up looks between gallery visitors and people in the paintings, a kind of shot-reverse-shot that has them looking at each other, especially bringing the painted figures alive, as he’s good at choosing shots with matching eyeline directions between the cuts. As the music dies down, there are nine final close-ups of figures now looking directly at us viewers, coming alive across the centuries, art showing no age, the dead still speaking to the living. We owe to Richard Brody of the New Yorker the astute observation that the very last image, a Rembrandt self-portrait, perhaps resembles Wiseman himself more than a little bit, so the final look of National Gallery is shared between us and the film-maker.