Museum Hours

I’d say Museum Hours is an incidentally self-reflexive movie. It’s an intense work of art about the advantages of engaging in art, whether the visual arts, film, storytelling or music. Writer/director Jem Cohen rejects the tradition that art is an imitation of life -- and vice versa. His film argues that life is art and art is life. Any gap between them is our own insentience.

When the Montreal single Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) borrows money to visit her ailing distant cousin in Vienna, she finds her comatose and dying. Isolated, Anne visits the famous, gigantic Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, where she befriends a museum guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer), who gives her a variety of assistance. Between the visitor and this gay man there is no sexual tension. As their rhyming names suggest, both characters share the need to be re-enlivened. As Anne remembers her free spirited first lover, Johann remembers his heady days as a band agent, before the free wheeling of rock’n’roll hardened into “event management.”  If Anne goes to the museum for an escape from her care and solitude, what she rather finds there is the way to a more intense experience of the world around her. Johann finds beauty and charm in off-beaten spots in Vienna that he had forgotten.

Birds are one of the film’s major recurring symbols. An early shot that appears to be a still of a bird flying away from a tree turns out to be a background detail from a Breughel painting. That shot segues into a shot of a real bird flying. The bird signifies the spirit that soars through and to make art, of whatever medium. Later Anne sings a song about a bird and “the glories of a strong story.” The couple will walk into the country to see a reported flock of birds at a church. Anne describes seeing a real bird that seemed part of the tree, i.e., like a painting.

The cousin dies just when Anne and Johann are on a tour of underground water caves. That is, the real death plays out against a literary archetype, Charon rowing the dead across the river to the other side. The news of the death prompts a montage of antiquities, a reminder that art preserves a lost culture, lost artists, a lost community. Though Anne is stricken by the news, a rowdy neighborhood pub singalong effectively provides her a wake. Later Anne sings herself another song, about absence. “You have not gone away,” her chorus concludes, but in its last verse she omits that line, as if the loss can not be denied even in a song. The cousin’s absence is imaged in Anne’s emptied hangers in the hotel closet.  In the next shot as Johann walks alone through his museum we share his sense of Anne’s absence. In the reticence these images allow, the film is -- as the art historian describes Breughel -- neither sentimental nor judgmental.

A central scene presents that woman’s commentary on some Breughel paintings. A visitor insists that St Paul must be the center of a painting titled The Conversion of St Paul. The historian instead points to the emphasis given a small boy dwarfed and blinded by his military suit, or the prominence of two -- literal -- horses’ asses. She contends that the painting’s more profound meaning lies in the mundane material that effectively marginalizes the epic, titular action. In support she cites a famous Auden poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” where Breughel’s attention is not on the heroic Icarus but upon a ploughman about his work, unfazed. For her and for Auden the function of art is not to celebrate the unusual and the heroic but the quiet, quotidian reality. Art is not larger than life but the ability to see the beauty and animacy in the mundane. Thus the film ends with Johann describing five real sites with the aesthetic percipience usually exercised -- as that academic did -- on a work of art. Life is art.

Constantly the film interweaves reality and art. Anne describes being touched by the soft mien of a man who couldn’t speak English to her; cut to a painted portrait of such an ordinary man. Once we are attuned to art, the detritus in the street speaks and touches like a Rauschenberg, the abstract patterns on an old exposed wall a Rothko, a bar’s wallpaper of snapshots a Boltanski installation. These artists aren’t mentioned but neither is Rachel Whiteread when the couple visit her Holocaust memorial. They don’t have to be. This film preaches to the converted, with the intention of deepening a faith already entrenched. After all, its audience chose to attend a subtitled art movie with the word Museum in the title. They’re probably not expecting Ben Stiller. This film won’t convert anyone to art but it could correct any artsies who may prefer it to life. With the winter setting, Vienna at its bleakest reveals a touching beauty. The physical world itself blossoms from this effect. A large frozen tree sprouts a new leafy twig; a stone wall bursts into a drawing of a bear’s head. 

After the couple considers nude portraits of Adam and Eve we see three museum patrons shamelessly nude, open as Anne remembers her first lover. This surreal frisson suggests the liberating power of the experience of art. The proper feeling in such a rich museum is comfort because it provides a community unfortunately less available outside. Anne’s connection with Johann typifies the community art gives us with our past and with our present communicants. That may explain why Anne increased her debt in order to visit a cousin from whom she had grown distant. She had an instinct to recover that community; in art she found a broader one. 

The film closes on an antique store window, focused on two abstract silver figures on a seesaw. That emblematizes the brief union of Anne and Johann but also that other union, usually considered antithetical but here seen as a fusion of two functions in a single game: art and life.