Review of Museum Hours (2012) by Sensaye S — 15 Nov 2013

This film begs you to compare it to Russian Ark (Sukarov) and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Ruiz), which is high praise on its own. However, it is best imagined as the film that Guy Debord would have made for the Society of Spectacle if Debord had known how to make movies.

Museum Hours is similar to checking your phone while having dinner with a friend: It demands no attention but gives you a reason to look, while you are trying to look away. Its a pretentious movie about art that is not a pretentious movie about art but instead a meditation on viewing: on the nature of looking upon the world and the unrelated unity that makes everything worth looking at.

With its inter-cutting, it contrasts modern schizophrenic viewing realities with the focused viewing of paintings that is kept caged within museum walls - the museum actually a hermitage, or rather an homage to what are in reality outdated modes of seeing. The film claims that we go to museums to undress ourselves, to view within the illusion of an earlier simpler natural mode of ocular negotiation. In doing so it challenges the viewer to critically examine the film image with the same intensity that an art historian might view a canvas. The viewing of a discarded pair of jeans is as much a documentary as the crowds of Bruegel.

Museum Hours allows no Plein Air, - no outside the studio, no outside the museum.