Posted inArt

The Inner Life of a Museum

Jem Cohen’s new feature film, Museum Hours, unfolds like a series of postcards from a lonely traveler, fresh with the pressure of on-site writing while calculating that the memory will be received miles and days away. Shooting primarily in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cohen’s foreign camera seeks the familiar: the stony wrinkles around ancient Roman eyes, a clean white egg inside a still life, a child’s ill-fitting hat in one of Bruegel’s noisy marketplaces. Art, Cohen seems to say, is a refuge for the outsider.

Sign up for newsletters

Get the best of Hyperallergic directly in your email inbox.

Sending to: