Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, 2012)

8/10
I don't know much about Jem Cohen, writer/director of Museum Hours, but I understand he was/is primarily a visual artist. I'm not sure if this is his first feature film, but I think it is. Museum Hours obviously owes a lot to Cohen's art background, being mostly set in a museum, featuring long takes of the art within and the landscape outside, and even including a lengthy diatribe centering around the museum's Breughel paintings. You would expect such a film, especially from an inexperienced feature film maker, to be exceedingly dry. Museum Hours is slow, but not dry at all. It feels very alive, treating not only its subjects (museum guard Johann and fish-out-of-water Anne) very humanely but the art as well. It manages to be mature, philosophical and slow, but it's never boring. Cohen engages the audience instead of lecturing them. I found a quote on his Wikipedia page where he says "art is something people do like breathing" and his movie represents that philosophy very well, free from pretension. I found it inspiring and enjoyed it very much.