Museum Hours | |
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Directed by | Jem Cohen |
Written by | Jem Cohen |
Produced by | Jem Cohen Paolo Calamita Gabriele Kranzelninder Guy Picciotto Patti Smith |
Starring | Mary Margaret O'Hara Bobby Sommer |
Cinematography | Jem Cohen Peter Roehsler |
Edited by | Jem Cohen Marc Vives |
Music by | Mary Margaret O'Hara |
Production companies | Gravity Hill Films Little Magnet Films KGP Kranzelbinder Gabriele Production |
Distributed by | The Cinema Guild (US) Soda Pictures (UK) |
Release dates |
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Running time | 106 minutes [1] |
Countries | Austria United States |
Languages | German English |
Box office | $554,361 [2] |
Museum Hours is a 2012 Austrian-American drama film written and directed by Jem Cohen. The film is set in and around Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.
When a Vienna museum guard befriends an enigmatic visitor, the grand Kunsthistorisches Museum becomes a crossroads that sparks explorations of their lives, the city, and the ways art reflects and shapes the world.
One Vienna winter, Johann, a guard at the grand Kunsthistorisches Museum encounters Anne, a visitor called to Austria for a family 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 meeting sparks an unexpected series of explorations – of their own lives and the life of the city, and of the way artwork can reflect and shape daily experience.
While standing guard at the Bruegel exhibit at the museum, the security guard views a tour guide leading a discussion of whether Bruegel could be assessed as a religious man on the basis of his rendering of various religious subjects in his paintings. One museum visitor states that he must have been 'devoutly religious' to paint with such passion. The tour guide points out that, in her opinion, Bruegel was consistent in understating the main religious subjects in his paintings by giving equal if not greater pictorial space to seemingly trivial subjects matter in comparison to seemingly 'main' religious subjects studied in particular oil paintings.
The museum is seen not as an archaic institution of historical artifacts, but as an enigmatic crossroads in which, through the art, a discussion takes place across time with vital implications in the contemporary world. The "conversations" embodied in the museum's collection revolve around the matters that most concern us: 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 down to earth and made manifest. Near the film's end, Johann and Anne are exploring on the fringe of the city when her ill cousin's condition reaches a crisis point. While standing by the car with Johann, Johann takes a call from the doctor on his mobile and after the call relates to her the news that he is very sorry to inform her of the demise of her loved one.
Museum Hours premiered at the 2012 Locarno International Film Festival, had its North American premiere within the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and screened within such U.S. film festivals as South by Southwest and Maryland Film Festival.
The film was acquired for U.S. distribution by The Cinema Guild.
Year | Award | Category | Result |
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2014 | Independent Spirit Awards [3] | John Cassavetes Award | Nominated |
2014 | Independent Spirit Awards [4] | Best Editing | Nominated |
Pieter Bruegelthe Elder was among the most significant artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes ; he was a pioneer in presenting both types of subject as large paintings.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien is an art museum in Vienna, Austria. Housed in its festive palatial building on the Vienna Ring Road, it is crowned with an octagonal dome. The term Kunsthistorisches Museum applies to both the institution and the main building. It is the largest art museum in the country and one of the most important museums worldwide.
The Natural History Museum Vienna is a large natural history museum located in Vienna, Austria.
The Harvesters is an oil painting on wood completed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1565. It depicts the harvest time set in a landscape, in the months of July and August or late summer. Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a merchant banker and art collector from Antwerp, commissioned this painting as part of a cycle of six paintings depicting various seasonal transitions during the year.
Maria-Theresien-Platz is a large public square in Vienna, Austria, that joins the Ringstraße with the Museumsquartier, a museum of modern arts located in the former Imperial Stables. Facing each other from the sides of the square are two near identical buildings, the Naturhistorisches Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The buildings are near identical, except for the statuary on their façades. The Naturhistorisches' façade has statues depicting personifications of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Kunsthistorisches façade features famous European artists, such as the Dutch Bruegel, among others.
Laura, sometimes known as Portrait of a Young Bride, is a 1506 oil on canvas painting by the Italian Renaissance master Giorgione. It is the only known painting of the author that was signed and dated by him. This work marked Giorgione's abandonment of Giovanni Bellini's models to embrace a Leonardesque style. It hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.
The Tower of Babel was the subject of three paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The first, a miniature painted on ivory, was painted while Bruegel was in Rome and is now lost. The two surviving paintings, often distinguished by the prefix "Great" and "Little", are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam respectively. Both are oil paintings on wood panels.
The Peasant Wedding is a 1567 genre painting by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel the Elder, one of his many depicting peasant life. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Pieter Bruegel the Elder enjoyed painting peasants and different aspects of their lives in so many of his paintings that he has been called Peasant-Bruegel, but he was an intellectual, and many of his paintings have a symbolic meaning as well as a moral aspect.
Events from the year 1566 in art.
The Hunters in the Snow, also known as The Return of the Hunters, is a 1565 oil-on-wood painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Northern Renaissance work is one of a series of works, five of which still survive, that depict different times of the year. The painting is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. This scene is set in the depths of winter during December/January.
Marten van Cleve the Elder was a Flemish painter and draftsman active in Antwerp between 1551 and 1581. Van Cleve is mainly known for his genre scenes with peasants and landscapes, which show a certain resemblance with the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Marten van Cleve was one of the leading Flemish artists of his generation. His subjects and compositions were an important influence on the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and other genre painters of his generation.
The Wine of Saint Martin's Day is the largest painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is currently held in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, where it was identified as a Bruegel original in 2010. Like much of Bruegel's work it depicts peasant life, in this case a festival known as St. Martin's Day, which involves drinking the first wine of the season.
Lucretia and her Husband Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus or Tarquin and Lucretia is an oil painting attributed to Titian, dated to around 1515 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The attribution to this artist is traditional but uncertain - the brightened palette suggests it could instead be by Palma Vecchio. However, others identify the painting as part of Titian's series of half-length female figures from 1514 to 1515, which also includes the Flora at the Uffizi, the Woman with a Mirror at the Louvre, the Violante and the Young woman in a black dress in Vienna, Vanity in Munich and the Salome at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj. There is an early copy in the Royal Collection.
The Peasant Dance is an oil-on-panel by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in circa 1567. It was looted by Napoleon Bonaparte and brought to Paris in 1808, being returned in 1815. In is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Conversion of Paul is an oil-on-panel by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1567. It is currently held and exhibited at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The Procession to Calvary is an oil-on-panel by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder of Christ carrying the Cross set in a large landscape, painted in 1564. It is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The Suicide of Saul is an oil-on-panel by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1562. It is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The Bravo is an oil painting usually attributed to Titian, dated to around 1516-17 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The painting can be seen as one of a number of Venetian paintings of the 1510s showing two or three half-length figures with heads close together, often with their expressions and interactions enigmatic. Most of these are "Giorgionesque" genre or tronie subjects where the subjects are anonymous, though the group includes Titian's The Tribute Money, with Christ as the main figure, which in terms of style is similar to this painting, and his Lucretia and her Husband, also in Vienna, where at least the woman's identity is clear, if not that of the man.
Nicolaes Jonghelinck (1517–1570) was a merchant banker and art collector from Antwerp. He is best known for his collection of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Frans Floris. His brother was the sculptor Jacques Jonghelinck.
Winter Landscape with Ice skaters and Bird trap is a 1565 painting attributed to the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, located in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It shows a village scene where people skate on a frozen river, while on the right among trees and bushes, birds gather around a bird trap. It has become known as the original or oldest exemplar of the most successful painting of the Brueghel family dynasty, since the art historian Klaus Ertz documented 127 copies in his comprehensive monograph on the artist's son in 2000.