Museum Hours

Museum Hours is an unusual and interesting film - a lightly dramatised poetic film essay. It concerns two people. Johann is an attendant in the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum in Vienna. He is middle aged  and reflects in voiceover and in accented English at the beginning of the film that he is happy enough in his job, and he tells us of things he did earlier in his life, which include being a roadie. He finds that most of the people passing through the museum don't seem very interesting, but there are a few who seem in some undefinable way to be potentially worth knowing. A woman, Anne, a Canadian, asks him how she can get to some hospital and he tells her which trains to take, and they become friends, wandering around Vienna together, looking at the city and dropping into bars. She is in Vienna because she has a friend here who is in hospital in a coma. There are long passages in the film where we see museum guides and overhear what they are saying about the paintings, and also we hear snatches of the commentaries on electronic guide devices. There is a particularly long passage where a guide discusses a Bruegel painting with a group of tourists.

This film is not about Anne, or Johann, or the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum or even Vienna, it is about our sensitivity to beauty.

As the couple walk about Vienna we see many found urban street scenes, many of them striking and even beautiful. The guide, speaking of the Bruegel painting, asks the group to say what they think is the centre of the painting, which teems with figures and details. Some respond with the easy answer - that is is what the painter says it is - the name of the painting, while the guide points to several details and parts of the painting which might as easily be central.

The film is inviting us to find beauty for ourselves and to arrive at our own conclusions - that beauty is not just where we are told it is, in galleries and in frames or cases, it is everywhere. The film makes more explicit this meaning at the end, when there is a sequence of filmed urban street scenes, framed, and on the soundtrack is an electronic commentary describing their interest, balance and beauty, as though they were exhibits in a gallery.

Further adding to the interest of this film are the facts that a coproducer is Patti Smith, and that Anne is played by the ever-elusive Mary Margaret O'Hara, who made the classic album Miss America, and who has never been able to make another album because of her excessive fastidiousness; so this film has music in its DNA.