NATIONAL GALLERY

Frederick Wiseman’s NATIONAL GALLERY takes the audience behind the scenes of a London institution, on a journey to the heart of a museum inhabited by masterpieces of Western art from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century. NATIONAL GALLERY is the portrait of a place, its way of working and relations with the world, its staff and public, and its paintings. In a perpetual and dizzying game of mirrors, film watches painting watches film.

RELEASED 2014, 181 MINUTES, COLOR

Mr. Wiseman’s touch is deft but light here, and the experience of watching ‘National Gallery’ is pleasurable and immersive because he’s a wonderful storyteller. It is also unexpectedly moving. Because his other great theme is how art speaks to us, one he brilliantly expresses in the relay of gazes that finds us looking at museumgoers looking at portraits that look right back — at artists, art lovers and moviegoers — even as Mr. Wiseman, that sly old master, looks at all of us in turn. . . Magnificent . . . The movie is at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach. It’s about art and process, money and mystery. . . (a) privileged three-hour virtual tour of the museum.

–Manohla Dargis, New York Times

This is one of Wiseman’s richest and most thought-provoking films, and easily one of his best.

–Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine

…There can be nothing ordinary about such an extraordinary place. Furthermore, Wiseman’s special gift as a filmmaker has been to show how searching attention reveals that there really is no such thing as ordinariness. Yet, even bearing in mind those strictures, Wiseman captures some remarkable, wholly unexpected moments.

–Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe

Meticulously crafted, intellectually intricate, and touched with profundity. An invigorating portrait. A tribute to the wonders of creative expression. A film about classics and their illustrious home that itself has been made by a modern master.

–Nick Schager, Village Voice

Indeed, he’s America’s foremost practitioner of documentary-as-metaphor, building sweeping arguments of small details.

–Ben Kenigsberg, RogerEbert.com

A tour de force

–Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

Truly inspiring…a great, great film. It’s like being lulled with intelligence.

…It’s beautifully organised, and there’s no way you could possibly watch it without learning all kinds of stuff.

–Tim Robey, The Telegraph (UK)

Wiseman’s film is all about the studious reverence for the brush-wielding geniuses, and the shepherding of their reputations through the vagaries of restoration and exhibition. . .it’s neither propaganda nor melodrama, but a clear-sighted attempt to establish, with honesty, what working at the National Gallery is like – and that is its principal value.

–Andrew Pulver, The Guardian

But as one specialist points out, “Paintings change, and how you look at them changes as well,” and what’s most fascinating about Wiseman’s approach is the way it captures hidden or unfamiliar aspects of certain pieces, especially in scenes detailing the painstaking labor that goes into conserving the museum’s massive collection.

–Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter