Frederick Wiseman: The National Gallery

I've grown up with Frederick Wiseman being someone to look up to on the documentary stage. That was - until this.

bbc.co.uk

accessfitness.ie

This 3 hour blank canvas of mundane nothingness. It's like we're looking at rushes back to back. There was no selective editing of conversation, no pace, no additional audio, no name-straps, no music, no voiceover - essentially no production. Wiseman manages in three hours to completely starve the National gallery of the very thing it stands to hold - art. The documentary is literally the outcome of a man and his camera (sometimes 2) filming anything and everything with no direction. It is perhaps the dullest documentary I've ever seen on screen - and that statement comes after last week's Channel 4 broadcast of 'All Aboard: The Canal Trip'.

rete.re.it

I understand that yes, the 3 hour duration is probably representative of the time it takes to walk around the gallery itself. I understand that the documentary's aim is possibly to allow us to observe and experience the REAL National Gallery, rather than an authored one that is made to be more entertaining. BBC Four just please, for the sanity of us all, remind Wiseman that we pay our licence fees to gain something in return, and all I gained from this is an education in how NOT to make an observational documentary. It's as though even he got bored of it.

wikipedia

I was more interested in the janitor mopping the floors outside my own evening study room than I was in anything that the lady onscreen was attempting to relay to a very bored and tired looking trustee. At times I did feel I was studying the film as I would a painting, but watching on television is NOT the same as being there, no matter how much defendants of Wiseman attempt to persuade me that THIS TIME it is. If I wanted a three hour tour of the gallery I would go. I don't expect to turn my television on to such an empty exhibition.

There is no narrative, no structure - it almost echoes the tragedy of my early re-edits of film trailers using google images and windows movie-maker. The images might be a little sharper, but the edit is more or less the same.

Most critics seem laboured in offering an opinion on this absolute waste of everybody's time. So if they won't stand alongside the Guardian's Jonathan Jones, I will. He's right when he says it is 'crushingly elitist', 'smug' and 'patronising'. All evidence points towards the admission that Wiseman might be past it. It was rubbish. Bring me back the canals!!!



You can read Jonathan's review here: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/jan/05/frederick-wiseman-national-gallery-dull-elitist-jonathan-jones