National Gallery: the paintings are the point

Filming 12 hours a day over 12 weeks, the documentary maker Frederick Wiseman made his latest film The National Gallery in the winter of 2012. Wiseman, who was born in Boston and is now 85, is famous for his patient and revealing studies of institutions at work. His breakthrough film, Titicut Follies (1967), was set at a hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts. At Berkeley (2013) was filmed at the University of California, Berkeley. Subjects in between have included a metropolitan hospital, several United States military units, dancers at the American Ballet Theatre and the Paris Opera, and a shelter for abused women in Tampa, Florida.

The early months of 2012 were an interesting time for the National Gallery: its mobbed Leonardo da Vinci exhibition was coming to an end. Diana and Actaeon, the Titian masterpiece it had just acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland, was touring the United Kingdom as the gallery prepared an exhibition (and a collaboration with the Royal Ballet) to celebrate its return to London. One of its greatest Rembrandts, Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback, was being prepared for restoration. And it was hosting a small exhibition—the third of its kind in as many years—of works of art in various media by 37 young offenders from Feltham prison.

Wiseman was not especially concerned with any of this—although the Leonardo show, the Titian and the Rembrandt are all addressed in his film. Instead, he focused the film’s beautiful cinematography and his subtle editing on charging the space—both literal and conceptual—between the gallery’s paintings and the people who look at them. He did this so astutely and so sensitively that the glamour of the location—one of the world’s most famous Old Master treasuries—is respectfully muffled. The gallery instead takes on a grey tint (as Vladimir Nabokov wrote of Anton Chekhov) somewhere “between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud”—or, indeed, like the unprepossessing grey of the gallery’s exterior. It is a light under which nothing is allowed to stand out too conspicuously, so that instead the smallest inflections can trigger unanticipated thoughts and unaccustomed emotions.

As the scenes accumulate—we see a framer applying gold leaf, a life drawing class, a meeting to discuss the gallery’s budget, discussions with curators, talks by gallery guides, all of it unencumbered by commentary, plot or superimposed explanation—one arrives at an awareness that seems to expand and contract according to a dynamic bound up with the experience of gallery going. It is as if Wiseman, in sympathy with his subjects, were trying to measure out the distance in years between us and the paintings’ makers, and at the same time the distance in space between the figures in the paintings and their curious, bewildered present-day viewers. The result is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen.

The first two minutes of the film have a formal feeling, as if Wiseman were briskly erecting a kind of scaffolding—an idea both of what the National Gallery is and of what a film about it might show. As the film progresses, becoming ever more intimate and nuanced, ever more real, the scaffolding falls away almost unnoticed, like one of those late Rembrandt portraits where the costume from the dress-up box just out of frame ceases to signify, and we are left with what really matters—a singular, heart-breaking human presence.

The film’s first frame is a view of the gallery’s façade taking the low, early morning sun, one of the great black lions guarding Nelson’s Column prominent in the shaded foreground, the familiar sound of London traffic and church bells. Less than 10 seconds later, we are inside the gallery before it has opened. Everything is hushed. We see a series of images of paintings, beginning with symmetrical arrangements of them, seen at a distance, across empty rooms and through vacant thresholds.

But then, suddenly, and still silently, Wiseman breaks the frame to show close-ups of figures in the paintings. The sequence begins with the incredulous Saint Thomas touching Christ’s wound; then a close-up of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows; then Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Archbishop Fernando de Valdés; and then Titian’s Noli me Tangere. A dozen or more images follow (Vincent van Gogh, Henri Rousseau, Paolo Veronese, Jan van Eyck), all close-ups.

Only then, just over a minute into the film, does the sound of a floor polisher getting closer offer a hint of the varieties of manual activity and mental absorption to come. A moment later, the gallery is open and against an audible backdrop of chatter we see visitors to the galleries, first simply occupying the same space as the paintings, and then peering intently at individual works. In the next sequence, Wiseman alternates close-ups of these subtly animated faces—each one a picture of concentration, an alloy of curiosity, yearning, puzzlement and recognition—with close-ups of northern European portraits and genre scenes.

The faces of the absorbed viewers are beautiful, expectant, modest, full of life, mortal. What is it that they want from these paintings of other people, from so long ago? What is it that they have come for?

This is not only Wiseman’s question, but the question the National Gallery must ask itself every day. Wiseman’s film is, among other things, a long, level-headed attempt at opening up ways of thinking that might help provide a good answer.

When Nicholas Penny, the gallery’s Director, meets in his office with a woman who has been employed to advise him on marketing, the gallery’s raison d’etre is very much the subtext. The woman suggests that the gallery could be doing more to connect with its public—or with the “end person that’s going to see our communications,” as she puts it. Penny hears her out. “I understand all this,” he finally says. “But I’d like to have some examples of where you felt we failed because we hadn’t done this.” Again, she prattles on, until Penny admits: “I do have some prejudices to overcome.”

For all the talk of impartiality around Wiseman’s approach to documentary-making, editing itself is a form of narration and a form of argument. We can surmise his take on the issues raised by the marketing woman because the next scene shows a seminar room in which blind people are using their fingers to “look at” versions of a painting. The picture is a Camille Pissarro nightscape of Paris, the main lines of which have been reproduced on paper in a kind of pictorial Braille. As the blind feel their way through the image, a gallery employee describes the painting verbally. In terms of “outreach” or serving the “end user” what more can a gallery do than cater to people who cannot actually see?

Penny’s “prejudices”—his resistance to pandering to “the lowest common denominator of public taste”; his preference for “a spectacular success followed by a really interesting failure” over a flattened-out average—don’t matter much because the debate, as it was constructed in his office, is abstract. It has no reality, no grip. And so it doesn’t arise again—or at least, not in those terms. Instead, Wiseman is interested in finding different kinds of answers to the question: what are these people looking for?

And he asks it not just of the public but of the gallery’s staff. Why is this guide speaking with such passionate lucidity about the altarpiece in front of her? Why is this other guide literally on his knees as he talks to more than a dozen children about the painting of Moses behind him? What motivates this fluent, confident conservator as he discusses the chemistry and optics of aging varnishes on Rembrandt’s Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback in front of a small audience? What is in the mind of the woman supervising the life-drawing class when, in conversation with an elderly man, she spontaneously marvels at “how beautiful we are”; or in the mind of Penny when, at the end of a brilliant talk on the intellectual elitism of Nicolas Poussin, he confesses that he’s not really sure whether he likes the painting?

The film, in other words, posits many different answers to the question of what a gallery of Old Masters might have to offer. And in doing so, it provides an antidote to the cant that usually engulfs the question when it is addressed by bureaucrats, teachers, politicians and publicists.

What makes Wiseman’s film convincing is not only that his answers to the question are specific and visible—that we get to actually see what happens in an institution of this kind (all his films do that)—but that the paintings are always somehow in the frame. The film is as much about those paintings as it is about the institution that contains them and the people who buzz round them. Indeed, one of the film’s most straightforward effects is to make us feel as if we had just spent a few hours in the gallery ourselves.

Early in the film, we listen in as a guide talks about a 14th-century Italian altarpiece. She asks the audience to imagine themselves, “if you will,” as profoundly religious people, who can neither read nor write, worshipping in the kind of church the painting was designed for. She emphasises the lack of electric light, she conjures the smell of incense and the fact that “death is part of the threnody of everyday life.” She suggests that by the flickering candlelight, the sacred figures in the painting might almost appear to take on a credible reality, and to offer up the possibility of intercession on their mortal souls’ behalf. She doesn’t want, she says, to overplay all this. She’s not asking us to think that medieval Christians could not tell the difference between an image and reality. But she is trying to emphasise that there is “a very strong attachment between the representation and the thing itself.”

And there lies the mystery. In our own lives, it’s an attachment that on any given day, in any given mood or setting, can feel either slack or taut, highly charged or vacant. But the mystery permeates this film, and in the end, makes it a masterpiece.