Hallucinations of the Real

Jem Cohen's Museum Hours is a quiet film. At times it's almost silent. The 'hours' to which its title refers – as well as the days and weeks – unfold in the spacious calm of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. One of its guards narrates the advent of a friendship with a visitor from Canada. She is in Vienna to comfort an ill friend, whom she hasn't seen for years. Lonely, stranded by language and inexperience, she finds solace in the guard, the gallery and its extraordinary collection of artworks. It is within these simple parameters that Cohen unfolds a world of connections and reflections.

Midway through this hushed tribute to life in a major gallery space, a member of the Kunsthistorisches Museum's staff guides a group of visitors through its famous Brueghel room. Vienna has a particularly enviable collection of Breughels – The Massacre of the Innocents, The Procession to Calvary, The Conversion of Paul and several others. They provide a tantalisingly dramatic backdrop to what is a deliberately and impressively passive film. 'They are not sentimental, nor do they judge', says the guide, in a metacinematic moment.

She also cites Auden's poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts' and the displacement of suffering he describes, just out of view, just out of a window. Her 'speech', a consciously staged moment in a seemingly aleatoric film, makes us ponder where the heart of Cohen's drama lies, whether it is in the paintings of Vienna's KHM, in a suburban hospital or between Bobby Sommer and the Toronto-based artist and singer Mary Margaret O'Hara.

In a series of quietly touching moments, the sharing of coffee, a folk song at the invalid's bedside, Cohen summons a whole series of suggestions and places the narrative in our hands. 'One is reminded of the transience of things', it is said in the film. Yet one is also reminded of the magic, both in the extraordinary art featured on the walls of the gallery and in the cold, grey days we see unfolding in a small capital city in a landlocked republic. When the narration, which has previously accompanied images of the Breughels, the Michelangelos and the Rembrandts turns to sections of Cohen's own film, another boundary magically disappears between art and the everyday. Click here to order a copy.

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