"For those who were perhaps getting worried that Frederick Wiseman was mellowing with his recent “dance” documentaries— La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, Boxing Gym, Crazy Horse— his 2013 film At Berkeley represented a return to the probing institutional examinations that made his name. In that light, then, his latest film, National Gallery, could be seen as a synthesis of the two major threads of his long and distinguished filmmaking career: By choosing the famous London art museum as his subject this time around, he is not only once again putting an institution under his cinema vérité microscope, but also recalling his more recent fascination with, broadly speaking, artistic creation.
"Art appreciation is certainly one thing on Wiseman’s mind in National Gallery: This film abounds in scenes of both patrons reacting to works of art they see at the museum and guides offering historical and aesthetic context for tour groups. But there is a more mundane concern behind the scenes: not only trying to achieve its cultural mission on a tight budget, but simply trying to define what that mission is. In one scene, for instance, museum director Nicholas Penny and another authority figure civilly butt heads over whether the museum needs to be doing more to appeal to the wider public, with Penny arguing for maintaining its lofty curatorial standards, suggesting a never-ending tug-of-war between artistic idealism and economic practicality.
"National Gallery is hardly pessimistic about such matters; Wiseman, as always, prefers fair-minded observation over easy point-making. The most surprising thing about this film, though, lies in how it gradually adds up to something more uplifting: Though Wiseman recognizes the difficulty of keeping it relevant for the public, he ultimately deems it as a mission worth maintaining. Only a filmmaker as attentive as Wiseman would think to focus at length on art restorers hard at work attempting to refurbish masterpieces to their original brilliance, turning such scenes into quietly hypnotic arias. But Wiseman saves his most astonishing coup for his final scene: an interpretive dance sequence in one area of the museum that suggests a communion of sorts—one art form conversing with another. Suddenly, National Gallery vaults from the thoughtfully observant to the lyrically poetic. When is the last time one could say that for a Frederick Wiseman documentary?" ~ Kenji Fujishima
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