Museum Hours
Screening Dates:
Mon 16 September 6:15pm
Thu 19 September 5:00pm
In German with English Subtitles
Director: Jem Cohen
Starring: Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
Vienna, winter. Johann (Sommer), a guard at the grand Kunsthistorisches Art Museum encounters Anne (O’Hara), a foreign visitor called to Austria because of a medical emergency. Never having been to Austria and with little money, she wanders the city in limbo, taking the museum as her refuge. Johann, initially wary, offers help, and they’re drawn into each other’s worlds. Their meetings spark an unexpected series of explorations – of their own lives and the life of the city, and of the way artworks can reflect and shape daily experience. The museum is seen in the film not as an archaic institution housing historical artifacts, but as an enigmatic crossroads in which, through the artworks, a discussion takes place across time with vital implications in the contemporary world. While the “conversations” embodied in the museum’s collection revolve around nothing less than the matters that most concern us all: death, sex, history, theology, materialism, and so on; it’s through the regular lives of the guard and displaced visitor that these heady subjects are brought entirely down to earth and made manifest.
***** “THIS MOVIE IS RIGOROUSLY AND INTENSELY LIFELIKE, WHICH IS TO SAY THAT IT’S ALSO A STRANGE AND MOVING WORK OF ART” New York Times
Critic: Trevor Johnston
Date: 2013-09-04
Publication: Time Out
Quote: Its encouragement to let ourselves be captivated by everyday humanity as well as the old masters is both richly illuminating and quirkily endearing.
Critic: John Hartl
Date: 2013-08-29
Publication: Seattle Times
Quote: An enthralling and sometimes droll meditation on life, art and mortality, not to mention Internet porn and its influence on modern art.
Critic: Ann Hornaday
Date: 2013-08-15
Publication: Washington Post
Quote: "Museum Hours" is every bit as masterfully conceived and executed as the art works that serve as the film's lively cast of supporting characters.
Critic: Kenneth Turan
Date: 2013-08-15
Publication: Los Angeles Times
Quote: Difficult to describe but not to enjoy.
Critic: Tom Long
Date: 2013-08-01
Publication: Detroit News
Quote: A lot of it works, some of it doesn't.
Critic: Mark Feeney
Date: 2013-07-18
Publication: Boston Globe
Quote: One of the world's great art museums, the Kunsthistoriches is the true star of the movie "Museum Hours."
Critic: Liam Lacey
Date: 2013-07-05
Publication: Globe and Mail
Quote: It's a hybrid drama/art-history essay about how looking at art recasts our experience of looking at the world.
Critic: Linda Barnard
Date: 2013-07-04
Publication: Toronto Star
Quote: The languid pace, long silences and lack of purpose and dramatic tension will leave some looking at their watches.
Critic: Anthony Lane
Date: 2013-07-01
Publication: New Yorker
Quote: It finds the time to look at looking, and to offer a slow revelation: to the lonely and the stranded, it is art that feels like home.
Critic: Farran Smith Nehme
Date: 2013-06-28
Publication: New York Post
Quote: The film shows how quiet exteriors can mask deep interior lives, and how art feeds those lives.
Critic: A.O. Scott
Date: 2013-06-27
Publication: New York Times
Quote: This movie is rigorously and intensely lifelike, which is to say that it's also a strange and moving work of art.
Critic: Mark Jenkins
Date: 2013-06-27
Publication: NPR
Quote: Ultimately, the movie's easygoing narrative turns to loss, but without melodrama. An awareness of life and art offers perspective, and perhaps a measure of consolation.
Critic: David Fear
Date: 2013-06-25
Publication: Time Out New York
Quote: The real strength of Cohen's occasionally didactic drama ... is in the way the film redirects your focus to the periphery and reminds you of the richness that resides there.
Critic: Calum Marsh
Date: 2013-06-25
Publication: Village Voice
Quote: Museum Hours, despite that almost documentary-like distance, in fact expresses a thoroughly subjective experience ...
