Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours

The Kunsthistorisches Art Museum in Vienna is one of those grand institutions where visitors can get happily lost for hours.  Filmmaker Jem Cohen will play a game of hide and seek with his narrative there during the course of Museum Hours (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.

Anne is not a traveler by nature, but her estranged cousin picks an opportune time to fall into a coma.  Leaving the mess of her life in Canada, she flies off to Austria, to do all the helpless waiting around one does in such a situation.  Fortunately, Johann, a late middle-aged museum guard takes her under his wing.  He acts as her translator and arranges a comp membership for her, giving her a place to while away the hours of pleasant alienation.

Most Seinfeld episodes are about more than Museum Hours, but the docudrama-cinematic essay definitely has its moments nonetheless.  Probably the best of which happens in the Bruegel room, where a visiting scholar gives a lecture that would serve as a nifty little companion piece to Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross.

Johann is also an intriguing character with a wonderfully soothing voice for narration.  Played by the non-professional actor Bobby Sommer, who shares a similarly colorful background, Johann is a former rock band manager and high school shop teacher, for whom the novelty of working amongst some of the world’s finest art has not yet worn off.

However, the drama is rather thin stuff, mostly involving Anne’s daily visits to her expiring cousin and the slow evolution of her ambiguous relationship with Johann.  Do not think of this as the adult analog of E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, because Cohen’s approach is ruminative and deliberately fragmentary.  He also includes plenty of his signature observational tracking shots of the surrounding streets, which are likely to sharply divide Hours’ critics and partisans.  In small doses, they nicely establish a real sense of place, but a little goes a long way.

Arguably, Museum Hours is a film whose whole is less than the sum of its parts.  There are some fascinating individual scenes, but a tighter, shorter film would have better served the overall effect.  Still, if you enjoy cerebral cinema, it is probably your best bet this week, whereas those requiring robust narratives are likely to be frustrated by its hybrid nature.  For those looking for a cheap way to tour the Kunsthistorisches, Museum Hours opens this Friday (6/28) at the IFC Center.

Bruegel & Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a truly subversive old master. Known for his paintings of the Dutch peasantry as well as Biblical episodes, his five hundred character masterwork The Way to Cavalry depicted the Spanish Militia then occupying Flanders as the Roman soldiers crucifying Christ. While Bruegel’s pointed commentary on the Spanish occupation is inescapable, the painting is rife with hidden signifiers, which the painter himself explains in Lech Majewski’s unclassifiable The Mill & the Cross (trailer here), a painstakingly crafted cinematic recreation of The Way to Cavalry, which opens this Wednesday at Film Forum.

Employing state-of-the-art computer generation, scores of seamstresses and artisans, and an enormous 2D background recreation of Bruegel’s celebrated work (painted by the director himself), Majewski brings the great tableaux to life on the big screen. Amongst those five hundred characters are Brueghel and his friend and collector, Nicholas Jonghelinck, to whom he explains his projected new painting, The Way to Cavalry.

It is impossible to hang a pat label on Mill. Though it screened as part of the 20111Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier track for more experimental work, such a rubric really does not fit Majewski’s film. It certainly is not non-narrative filmmaking, since it encompasses the greatest story ever told. However, it completely challenges linear notions of time, incorporating Christ’s Passion and the world of 1564 Flanders, in which Bruegel and Jongelinck are simultaneous observers and active participants.

Years in the making, Mill is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking. Majewski represents the complete social continuum of Sixteenth Century Flanders, recreating the mean living conditions of the peasants, the clean, unadorned quarters of the relatively middle class Bruegel, and the privileged environment of the well-to-do Jongelinck. Majewski’s visuals are often arresting, like the scenes of art director Stanislaw Porczyk’s towering mill, which resembles the enormous set pieces of Terry Gilliam films. Perhaps most stunning are the wide shots of the Cavalry landscape, with the figures literally coming alive on Bruegel’s canvas. Yet, Majewski also captures moments of both tender intimacy and graphic torture, rendered with powerful immediacy.

Indeed, the wealthy collector clearly serves as the conscience of the film, decrying the capricious religious persecution that was a fact of life for Flanders under the Spanish Militia. Despite the almost overwhelming visual sweep of the film, Michael York gives a finely tuned performance as Jongelinck that really sneaks up on viewers. Rutger Hauer (worlds away from his other 2011 Sundance film Hobo with a Shotgun) also brings a forceful heft to the rather mysterious artist.

A brilliant personal triumph for Majewski, who also served as producer, co-cinematographer, co-composer, and sound designer, Mill effectively blurs the distinction between film and painting, yet it is more of a “movie” than nearly anything ever deemed “experimental film.” A unique, category-defying viewing experience, Mill is very highly recommended indeed when it opens this Wednesday (9/14) in New York at Film Forum.