Frederick Wiseman’s "National Gallery"

In a sense Frederick Wiseman was the wrong person to make National Gallery, which is currently completing a run at Film Forum. His signature reticence, characterized by a total lack of narration, becomes the work of art itself. In other films about schools,  hospitals, the welfare system, an insane asylum (Titicut Follies), La Comedie-Francaise, and even the Crazy Horse in Paris, Wiseman’s almost diaphanous docu-novel style with its omniscient seemingly absent author, lets the content breathe. The feeling of seeing a Wiseman film is that of being parachuted into a war zone; the absence of plot, of a beginning, middle or end is mitigated by leitmotifs that create a music. But here the subject is looking itself and at times you end up gazing admiringly at the film, more than the collocation of art works comprising its subject, London’s National Gallery. Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in the Guggenheim has often been criticized as competing with and also being unfriendly to art. National Gallery is hardly an unfriendly witness, but in a museum which exhibits many da Vincis, the film is a “Mona Lisa,” continually calling attention to its own enigmatic gaze. All that being said National Gallery is amongst many things a Thomas Struth party. Struth as you may recall is the a photographer who records people looking at art and National Gallery's portraits of people watching Rembrandt portraits and other masterpieces are a singularly affecting part of the movie (in one an attendee with earphones is caught gazing at a docent giving a lecture he can’t hear). The recent The New Rijksmuseum film portrayed another art institution with a similarly broad canvas, but it had an axe to grind, in terms of the museum’s relationship to its surrounding environment. The New Rijksmuseum is to the National Gallery what Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is to say O’Neill Long Day’s Journey Into Night. National Gallery, which includes a moving scene where a class of blind and visually impaired people are lectured on a Pissarro, ultimately deals with museums and museum going in such as way as to demonstrate what one of Wiseman’s subjects calls “a wonderful opportunity to study the human condition.”

Crazy Horse

Frederick Wiseman’s Crazy Horse, currently playing at Film Forum,

is numbing. If one of Wiseman’s objectives was to make a film about a burlesque house that is totally devoid of sexuality then he has succeeded. And if numbing is the intention then perhaps Wiseman’s next film should be Dentist in which he uses his signature naturalistic method (he uses no voice overs or other forms of commentary in his documentaries) to follow patients walking into the dentist’s office to receive shots of novocaine. Both dentistry and stripping partake of art and commerce. Dentistry is a business, but its aim is also beautiful teeth and burlesque is putatively about beauty too. If there is any dramatic tension in Crazy Horse, it lies between the desire of the Crazy Horse’s choreographer, Philippe, to create imaginative works and the need of the management to make money. Tensions arise when art gets in the way of commerce and some of the best scenes of the film center around the commodification of pleasure, from the lines of champagne bottles to the assembly line approach to the girls epitomized in the film’s audition sequence. In Crazy Horse Wiseman is returning to the subject of dance, which he dealt with in an earlier film on the Paris ballet, and while both films remain faithful to their creator’s credo—which is to keep the camera in observing as opposed to editorializing status—both miss the grand scope of his early films which dealt with things like mental institutions (Titicut Follies), the police (Law and Order) and hospitals (Hospital). Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message, but the documentary form can induce atavistic urges in the filmgoer--like the desire to see meaningful subject matter addressed.