Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary clocks in at a cool 173 minutes. But don’t let that put you off. If his recent documentaries are anything to go by (LA DANSE and AT BERKELEY), Wiseman likes to take his time. Watching his documentary takes up about one eighth of your day. Spend the equivalent three hours in the National Gallery, slap bang on London’s iconic Trafalgar Square, and there is absolutely no way you will cover as many of the goings-on in the gallery as Wiseman offers here.

The film flits from informative, and often funny art history tours around the gallery (for anyone who enjoys the Concerts at Kings season in Cambridge’s King’s College Chapel, Sarah de Chambre has a doppleganger in the delightful tour guide who helps decode Rubens’ Samson and Delilah); to business meetings behind closed doors, discussing the cost-to-benefit ethics of projecting a Sports Relief montage onto the portico of the gallery; over to the work of restorers in the Conservation Department, methodically scraping away years worth of grime and varnish from various classics of the art world; to scenes of gallery visitors interacting with the paintings on display – or is it the other way around?

… visitors interacting with the paintings on display – or is it the other way around?

A particularly memorable scene involves Camille Pissarro’s The Boulevard Montmartre at Night being deconstructed by a group of visually impaired art lovers. The scene is particularly effective in its execution, partly because of the original way the painting is described and broken down, in a manner suitable for the audience in the room that Wiseman is filming, but also because it works as one of the best examples of the gallery fulfilling the high-end outreach ethos that the Gallery’s executives are seen fretting over at the start of the documentary.

There is the potential for a clash of cultures with both the high art/low art tribe, and the visitor attraction versus art gallery crowd, for both the National Gallery as a gallery and as a documentary. Wiseman strikes a cool balance between the two, offering plenty of humour in its snappy editing, alongside a fairly hefty dollop of education around the business of operating an art gallery in Central London in the twenty-first century. Initially seen in the buyer’s market at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s a pleasure to find that NATIONAL GALLERY has been picked up by the lovely folk at Soda Pictures and is screening on UK shores at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. It will surely hit just the right documentary and art-loving market upon its release here in a month or so.

httpvh://youtu.be/GoE1NA_zi1M