The Great Museum
Dir. Johannes Holzhausen, Austria, 2014, 94 minutes (Kino-Lorber)
The Great Museum is a title that plenty of museums would like to claim. In this quiet measured contemplative look at the everyday operations of an institution built on the collection of an empire, that title goes to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. If you have not visited, this extraordinary place, a wonderful adventure awaits.
The elegant doc by Johannes Holzhausen is of less than Wiseman-esque proportions, just 94 minutes. We get some of the details of work inside its majestic building, with conservators cleaning sculptures that look like babies, workmen rehanging massive paintings, and a specialist unveiling a gold ship with sails decorated as miniature paintings. It’s an “executive toy” from the 16th century, as Neil MacGregor, visiting from the British Museum, remarks.
Gently, Please
The reassuring feel of The Great Museum is similar to that of La Maison de la Radio by Nicholas Philibert, which took you through the headquarters of French radio. In the museum, you get the same soothing experience of an institution that’s nurtured by dutiful staff and respectful politicians, until you get the sense of unease about future budgets and the awkward managers’ conversations about marketing the museum. How does the museum market its renovated treasury of objects from the imperial family. How do they advertise a membership promotion? You get the sense of that process being one of trial and error, with well-meaning inexperienced managers feeling their way into modern marketing, seeming to have none of the instincts required.
Preparatory Huge Cartoons for Tapestries of the Siege of Tunis by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen
The soothing film is also unsettling, but unsettling is a relative term in a country that allots a higher budget to opera than it does to its military. On recent visits to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, I saw an extensive and sensitively curated exhibition devoted to the work and influence of Diego Velasquez, which included the Rokeby Venus from the National Gallery of Art in London, a museum which itself was the subject of a recent doc-athon by Fred Wiseman – valuable, but a missed opportunity.
Still on view on the museum’s top floor is a set of colossal preparatory cartoons (paintings) by the painter Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen for tapestries chronicling the conquest of Tunis in 1535 by Emperor Charles V. Given the size of the works, the space is cramped, so you can’t help but have a sense of the pictures’ proportions.
It takes a great museum to mount a show like that. Let’s hope the marketing committee supports that kind of work.
