National Gallery, the latest film by the great American documentarian Frederick Wiseman, will get a free screening at Cincinnati Art Museum at 1 p.m. on Jan. 25, 2015. No tickets or advance reservations are required.
Typical of Wiseman’s inquisitively reportorial and humanistic work, this carefully and thoughtfully takes viewers inside the world of London’s National Gallery — one of the world’s finest museums. The film is three hours long.
Wiseman, who is 84, has been making films that carefully examine societal institutions — cultural, social, educational, medical and political — since his 1967 landmark Titicut Follies, about life inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts.
His much-lauded more recent films — which did not have a showcase theatrical screening in Cincinnati — include last year’s At Berkeley and 2009’s La Danse, about the Paris Opera Ballet.
That National Gallery will be presented in a theater here — the art museum’s auditorium holds some 300 — shows the ambition of the museum’s associate photography curator, Brian Sholis, to offer more and a wider variety of films as part of his programming.
A lower-profile (compared to National Gallery) presentation last Sunday of a new documentary about digital photography, Harvey Wang’s From Darkroom to Daylight, brought a surprisingly good turnout of 55 people to the art museum’s library.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2014.