Film Info
Museum Hours

Film Information

Exhibition Title	Museum Hours
Director	Jem Cohen
Countrys
Year	2012
Format	DCP
Colour	Color
Duration	106'

Cast:

Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits

Credits:

G: Jem Cohen
F: Jem Cohen, Peter Roehsler
E: Jem Cohen, Marc Vives
S: Bruno Pisek
P: Paolo Calamita, Jem Cohen, Gabriele Kranzelbinder
PE: Guy Picciotto, Patti Smith
CP: Little Magnet Films, Gravity Hill, KGP

dates & times ticket

tickets

Synopsis

Much as Godard’s special brand of cultural tourism quickly became a dominant influence at international film festivals half a century ago, the literal tourism of the late Chris Marker became a major reference point in many of the edgiest offerings at the 50th Viennale. Marker’s more benign influence was especially evident in the magisterial Museum Hours, a luminous mix of fiction and essay set in Vienna itself, where it takes the form of a casual friendship developing between a guard at the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum and a Canadian tourist who arrives to visit a dying cousin. Delicately exploring the multiple relations between art and everyday life –what a visiting lecturer in the museum’s Bruegel room aptly calls “hallucinations of the real”–, Cohen even acknowledges Marker via his pseudonym “Krasna Sandor” in his closing credits. He has described Museum Hours (and film in general) as “a conversation with the world” in which everything became important: “there was no foreground or background or if there were, they might shift places at any time”. JR