Museum Hours

Front 1

Production

Back 1

• 2012
• directed by Jem Cohen
• set in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum
• starring Mary Margaret O'Hara and Bobby Sommers (not an actor)
• Cohen worked as a guard on Scorsese's After Hours

Front 2

'Museum Hours'

Back 2

• opening hours of public institution
• time spent in the museum
• time and museum objects
• access to art is still regulate
• time of longevity/posterity
• city becomes a museum itself
• human lifetime
• signs of life now gone

Front 3

Film and the past

Back 3

• film about ways of seeing the past: Johann, Anne, dying cousin, pasts of figures in the paintings, Johann uses objects to explain his own past, everyday objects like cigarettes
• how grand narratives of history and everyday life relate together: where do they overlap?
• filming the museum: museum as a film in itself; captures passing of time
• art as mediator; Bruegel; wide panorama of everyday life
• film as a repository of past experience; makes palimpsestic nature of history apparent (Sochak); history that looks at the remains/detritus of the past
• offering training in the art of looking
• offering reflection of the role of the viewer: children; responses informed by what we see before and after viewing; main device is the figure of Johann always finding new things in the paintings
• offering reflection on how location affects ways of seeing
• critical of the museum as institution as well as celebrating it (cleaner)
• what is worth preserving

Front 4

The look of the past

Back 4

• to picture the past is to interpret the past
• to reflect upon picturing the past is to reflect upon how the past is interpreted and constructed
• skills needed to work with objects
• interpretation thinking about the theoretical framework
• translations between word and image
• ethics of working with visual material
• responses of spectators
• location of the past

Front 5

Ways of Seeing: John Berger

Back 5

• gap between how an object was originally seen and how we see it now: changes meaning and purpose; reproduction devalues the object; museums detach the object from its original purpose
• reflecting upon how we see the past reveals something about the way in which we live now
• seeing depends upon habit and convention: children look at objects for what they are, not how they have been trained to see them
• meaning is not stable, but changes according to time and location

Front 6

Walter Benjamin

Back 6

• idea of history and the dialectical image (images placed together, i.e. in a montage)
• historical field which contained without resolving the contradictions of the image-object
• fossil: visible remains of the past
• fetish
• wish image: dream form of the potential for the dialectic of awakening
• ruins: the rubble of "loosened building blocks...out of which a new order can be constructed"

Front 7

Urban detritus

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• historical meaning to be salvaged from urban environment
• comparison of Breugel paintings with litter and street scenes
• 'gleaners'
• ragpickers: historian as ragpicker; emblem of idea of history as material; flea market scenes in film

Front 8

Interpreting the past

Back 8

• Johann offers viewer new insight into looking at the past
• Anne offers Johann a new insight
• visual interpretation of art heavily influenced by history and context
• parallels drawn between paintings and modern world
• not just one perspective on history: multitude of attitudes, contexts and interpretations

Front 9

The Insistent Fringe: Vivian Sobchak

Back 9

• "historical discourse takes the form of both saying and showing moving images and written words"
• "historical consciousness is sparked and constituted from both showing and saying"
• cinematic images depicting historical objects are not reductions but are historical
• historical knowledge is a "palimpsest of ways of knowing the past" (multi-layered record)
• past constantly interrupted by present, just like viewing of paintings is interrupted by modern-day Vienna

Front 10

Jim Cohen interview: Wandering in Vienna

Back 10

• interaction of Johann and Anne allows Cohen to shift from distanced gaze to more intimate involvement with characters
• magic strength of the outsider: fresh eyes
• Breughel as a passageway into the film
• emotional ties to street art tradition
• "explore how the works on the way;s of the museum are important to people now, not how they've read about it"
• "it troubles me from a distance that people might think about it as elitist work about an elitist institution"
• rewrote script to incorporate earlier Bolex shoots
• "the street should be a free space, belonging to everyone, where anything can happen, where everything isn't controlled"

Front 11

The World Viewed: Max Nelson

Back 11

• lots of shots from Cohen's time spent wandering Vienna with a camera
• Breughel paintings have such a prominent place because their world is so disordered and "radically unconcentrated": 'The Conversion of Paul'
• something everyday about art
• contrast between constant motion of Vienna and absolute stillness of paintings