Film review: Jem Cohen, Museum Hours, 90'

Jem Cohen, Museum Hours. 90'

#review, #reality, #museum, #representation

Review by CP

Museum Hours (2012) is a film written and directed by Jem Cohen revolving around the transience of life, told through an encounter between two strangers at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Anne has flown from Montreal to Vienna where her cousin, who she has not seen in years, lies in a coma without any close family. Johan has worked as a security guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna for the last six years, after his previous careers as a road manager and carpentry teacher. During her visit to the museum, in between hospital hours, Anne and Johan start a casual conversation which will evolve into him helping her find her way around Vienna, as well as handling the situation at the hospital, developing into a friendship.

While one would expect Anne’s cousin’s condition to be the focus of the film’s story, this appears not to be the case. As it is beautifully described in a later scene, where a museum guide speaks about Bruegel’s paintings, what would at first seem to be the main topic or the most dramatic event, is not at the center of attention. On the contrary, all that seems to be important is everything that is taking place around it, the mundane.

Throughout the film, the camera continuously accentuates the human scale and the mundane in its images, focusing on the things we see through a window and those trashed on the street, when coming out of a hospital at night, visiting a city for the first time or when looking carefully at the person in front of us. Cohen stresses both the casual looker as well as the careful observer of details, and through this portrays the span of attention in which something becomes relevant to our eyes and becomes a meaningful memory.

Memory, and the idea of what remains, what we miss or think of, is strongly woven into the films’ core idea of transience. In the film one navigates through images of flea markets, photos on walls, paintings at museums, table conversations about the past. There is a strong sense that splendour and decay are complexly interconnected. Anecdotes of full and abundant lives lie next to lonely poker nights behind a screen. The death of a lonesome relative with whom bonds have diluted in time is accompanied by the appearance of a new unexpected friendship. The portraying of one’s moment of desolation can become a greatly valued work of art later in time, such as Rembrandt’s self-portrait in Vienna’s Museum.

This gesture of referencing older art works to reflect upon our contemporary experiences is something the director applies with great poetry throughout the film. Whilst watching the movie, one feels gracefully moved between epoques, as if, in its essence, human experience wouldn’t have changed much in time.

When looking at representations of beauty, the grotesque, humour, sex, power, loss, among many others, one can find experiences and emotions within oneself to relate to, a quality and richness about the museum and the art works the director cherishes and celebrates in this film.

Similarly to the camera’s focus on the human scale and the mundane, throughout the film the museum is slowly brought back to human scale also. The reflections of the narrator gently personify the museum and its art works, suddenly sharing with us the same urge to read into images, to retain memories and the things that once mattered. Stories that we keep precious, reminded of the value of what has been before us, and hopefully what will be after us.

Review by BR

For me Museum Hours is a film about the fusion of the ‘fantastic’ and the ‘real’. These two words can be interpreted in many different ways. To begin with they relate to the genre of the film, which borrows elements from both fiction and documentary. As essay films usually do, Museum Hours breaks out of the constraints of narrative patterns to bring something entirely new to the table. The layout of the depicted universe in the film rhymes this distinction of genres, represented by the two worlds of the main characters: the museum and the hospital. Johann, who works as a museum guard, is surrounded by the artifacts of the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna. Anne has been summoned to Vienna because of her cousin, who lies comatose in a hospital. The two meet and a friendship begins to unfold beautifully, building a bridge between the way we approach art and our own lives which, for Jem Cohen, are seemingly inseparable.

Johann is at the center of this piece, all threads and sub-narratives are related back to him. His voice eloquently leads us through the narrative. His inner thoughts, all spoken in German, are presented as an oral diary of his everyday observations. As a narrator he raises philosophical questions, always relating them to what art means and how it’s perceived. For instance, during the birth of their friendship, Johann ponders on why he was attracted to Anne. What makes people curious about one person and not towards another? This fundamental question of subjectivity is also a key element of how humans think about art. Building on this question of curiosity, Johann takes Anne around Vienna and throughout he rediscovers the city himself, only by having an extra motivation to see his surroundings from a new perspective. In this way the city is portrayed as a museum, with exhibits like the flee market, Holocaust Memorial or even the more abstract phenomenon of Augustin the street vendor. To further highlight the parallels between the art pieces and the reality of Vienna, subtle details of a painting are made visible and followed by close-ups of urban debris, while Johann’s internal voice comments the scene: ‘discarded playing cards, a bone, a broken egg, a cigarette butt, a folded note, a lost glove…’

The technique of merging artifacts and reality is recurring in the film, and so these realms are in constant dialogue with one another, just as the characters visit each other’s locations. For me, one of the most evocative scenes is when Anne takes Johann to the hospital where her cousin, Janet, is lying in a coma. Johann is asked to give a description of the painting he knows so well to Janet, who is in a state of unconsciousness totally unresponsive to the outside world. In this scene Johann’s position goes a step further to reflect on interpretation itself, by taking a look at how we look, giving a deeper understanding that art is, both as a living thing and a way of seeing. It’s not just the viewer who looks at the image but the image looks back 38

to the viewer, and through Johann’s gaze we begin imagining what Janet would see. To orientate the viewer in this post-modern interrelatedness, finally Johann gives a simple example of the boundary of expression, ‘It’s bluer than I could ever tell.’

The transformation of prosaic to imaginative and back, from profane to savage, is christalyzed in the moment when Johann is looking at himself in the mirror and calls out his name, phrased as a title of a painting, ‘Johanne the Elder’. These symbolic gestures represent the core of the film and are fully resolved at the end, when the two realms fully blend together. In the final sequence, we hear Johann’s voiceover in English, as opposed to his earlier internal monologues that were all in German. This switch is further highlighted by a new visual composition, namely the use of the handheld camera in settings of the museum, implying Johann’s first point of view. The only other handheld shot in the film is set in the corridor of the hospital, representing Anne’s point of view, again interrelating the two worlds of the characters. At the very end, the entire position of storytelling changes and we hear a landscape of thought in Johann’s interpretation. This sequence of static moving images of street scenes can be construed as a continuation of Johann’s description of paintings at the hospital, and as the last memories passing through Janet’s mind. Therefore, these imaginary recollections of real life events become exhibits in Johannes’s newly discovered urban museum, gently reminding the viewer that the art we see in a museum began in real life, and it always finds its way back there.