How does Hollywood portray the museum?

Caro Fowler and Will Schmenner investigate the museum as a recurring cinematic space. Moving from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Vertigo to Ghostbusters and Dressed to Kill, the conversation explores how films use museums as sites of attention, transgression, desire, and institutional critique. Fowler and Schmenner consider the relationship between cinema and painting, the politics of conservation and display, and the enduring tension between popular culture and “high” art, asking what happens when museums become spaces not only for education, but also for fantasy, memory, and social encounter.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Welcome to Iconoclast Art Histories with Caro. So I was recently walking through the galleries of Dutch painting, and I found myself experience a growing sense of claustrophobia as I looked at the mannered landscapes, evoking wilderness, the post-portraits of aging Dutch patricians, and the still lives locked in their temporal moment of decay. In the midst of the sense of drowning under the weight of 17th century Dutch painting, I found myself face to face with Adrian Piper's Everything Will Be Taken Away. It's a mirror that has those words etched on it, and so one sees one's face within the mirror and also the gallery. And in some ways, I wanted to find within it a certain dissolution of all of this weight of history and consumption and the structure of the museum and the history of Dutch painting and its role and kind of early histories of global capital. But the mirror couldn't quite dissolve the suffocating sense of history and its ongoing presence in the present. This is an unusual experience for me in a museum and one that I've never really had before. But I've also thought a lot about the role of museums in film and the way in which film often plays with museums as unexpected sites, as sites that are more about educating the public in varying degrees. But instead, often in films, museums become an institutional body that offers a space for transgression, whether it's picking up a sexual dalliance with a stranger to playing hooky from school in the suburbs of Chicago. In the role of film, museums are often used as sites where societal transgressions are either underway or about to occur. And so I'm not really a film scholar, but my friend Will Schminner is, and I always love talking about movies with him. And so thanks for joining us and listening to our conversation on what happens to museums and movies and how movies might sometimes allow museums to be a little bit more than sites for beauty and education. So thank you so much for joining me today, Will.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Carol.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

So we're here to talk about the site of the museum and films. And as we already discussed, there's multiple ways into this question. And so we set several parameters. So one, we're not discussing any heist films because that's really its own episode. So there's no Thomas Crown affair. We're not discussing documentaries because that's also its own genre. And I suggested we sideline Russian Ark because I also feel like that's its own episode. And also I noticed that the Guggenheim could have its own episode, but it really seems to be more about the architectural structure of the Guggenheim than the Guggenheim is an art collecting institution.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Exactly, right? Like even some of the examples we might talk about today could fall into the idea of the museum as backdrop.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Or the museum as out of as architectural setting.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Indeed. So for the most part today, we're just going to talk about movies where characters go to museums to look at art.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Which is, I think, a really exciting way because there's a whole approach to thinking about cinema and to thinking about technology and the evolution of technology as something that always subsumes or even takes on and digests old technologies. It's a Marshall McLuhan sort of approach that's been developed further by a lot of different people. But I think there's something for me, there's something really exciting about thinking about this through the lens of attention, which is one of the things that you've proposed. It's completely allowed me to see Ferris Buellish Day off in a new way, which is really exciting.

SPEAKER_02 4:00

My personal favorite. So I'm going to stop you there. So hopefully we're going to get there. We have to get there because it's one of the most iconic scenes in this genre. And maybe that's actually the answer to my first question for you, which is what is the film that takes place in a museum that has impacted how you think about going to museums?

SPEAKER_00 4:18

To me, I'm going to flip it on you a little bit too. I think I've my whole career has been about bringing film into the museum.

SPEAKER_06 4:30

Yeah. So you are a programmer of film.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, I started as of now I do programming of many different types of performing arts, but I started my career at Northwestern University as the film programmer and curator for the Block Museum of Art, which is the University Museum in Northwestern. And they had just they had been a kunsthal, they just built they had just built a new museum and they had 160-seat cinema in there. So I've always been the margins of museum work, pushing on the boundary between popular culture or mass culture and the museum space. And that's changed a lot. So part of the reason that I think there is room for all sorts of different films from Ferris Bueller to much more serious art films thinking about the museum is because that that I think that question what how do we live in a world flooded with images?

SPEAKER_05 5:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

And how do we see the long history of being overwhelmed by images as a culture? How do we see and use those images themselves to think through what that means is a really interesting question. And I don't think the answer is always to treat everything as equal. Right? To treat every medium as equal. And Ferris Bueller's Day Off is really up there for me because it is such a great work of popular culture. I think it is incredibly enjoyable. I think it stands up to multiple watchings. But I also think that it is very self-aware. And it when you go into the museum, it's one of the few films that is really interested in what people look like when they look at art.

SPEAKER_05 6:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

And so the camera focuses on the characters as they look at art. It doesn't it'll give you a shot of what they're looking at. But it spends more time attending to their faces, letting the actors work. On the flip side, and I'm not sure it's on our list of films to talk about, but I love Jack Nicholson as the Joker going in going into the museum and just vandalizing it. And I have to be really careful about this. I want to say that I love museums. I'm proud to work in a museum. I do not condone the vandalism of art, but I do think, right, the the conversation that this imagining of vandalism creates about the relationship between popular culture, between street culture and high art, between activism and high art and the way that high art is institutionalized and does represent certain aspects of the status quo is an incredibly worthwhile and interesting conversation to have.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

So I love that we're picking up on the difference between high culture, I guess, the art museum and the popular culture of film. I want to go back to Ferris Bueller's for a second. Because one thing that I was struck in re-watching the scene for this is on the one hand, you're like, okay, this is like a privileged white guy from the suburbs who's playing hooky from school. And as someone who now works a nine to five, I wouldn't say have more sympathy for the principal, but you understand the profound frustration of the principal and chasing Ferris Bueller to adhere to the system of labor that he's refusing to adhere to. But I was also struck that they have a scene of museum education, which I also feel like you never see, right? It's that stream of school children walking through the museum and you see them holding their hands as they walk through the museum. So there is this sense of kind of the museum as a site of education that it likes to imagine itself still today and still does. Obviously, the education department of any museum is key. And I love what you're pointing to about people looking at the paintings and the ways in which Cameron has this kind of central moment with the Seurat painting before he he ultimately realizes he's gonna face his dad.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Confronting your father.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Confronting your father, confronting the kind of trauma of his childhood through looking at the little girl. Anyway, but let's move back to this question of high art versus low art, and that might help us move forward, which is what for you is one of the music of the films, and it sounds like it might be the Jack Nicholson, a film by which that really interrogates the space of the museum and really uses the particularity of film to challenge or think about the particularity of painting and sculpture within the space of the museum. Because it's almost always painting and sculpture in these films, it's never kind of time-based media or video work.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

One of the things that's really great about quote-unquote high art, and one of the things that's really great about painting and sculpture, is that it can is that it reaches out to be touched in ways that film isn't. And I think some of the films that are on our list have examples of that. And vandalism is a touch, it's a type of touch.

SPEAKER_06 9:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

And but it's not the only approach to this that's really interesting. I think Estendal syndrome, we've in our notes, we've chatted about how that has an example of Jarvento reaching out to touch a botticelli and the alarm going off.

SPEAKER_06 10:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Right? And the the fear of touch is always that it's going to destroy or the work.

SPEAKER_06 10:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

But sculpture in particular is what was thought of as a haptic medium from the beginning.

SPEAKER_06 10:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

There's something really sensuous about it that that the film will never approach.

SPEAKER_06 10:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

And the same is true for painting, which is the layering on of material of material pigments, of pigments that you touch, that you pick up on your brush, that you touch with your fingers. And that's just such great stuff. And it like film becomes this place that allows them that reminds us that artwork is meant to be touched.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

Although obviously it's not meant to be touched. I think about my kids went to the Clark with their class and I said, Oh, how was it? And Theo said to me, I didn't touch any of the art.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Oh all the parents who say museum hands.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Museum hands, museum hands. You're you're so right, Carol. We live in a world where because art, because high art is trying to be for the masses, it can no longer be touched.

SPEAKER_06 11:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

But when it wasn't for the masses, but when it wasn't for the masses, it was touched.

SPEAKER_02 11:27

And it has a we I love what you're saying, is that it has this physical presence that film really can't have. I mean, we can take pictures of film wheels or we can or celluloid or we can think about the materiality of film, but there's just a physical presence of a painting or a sculpture in a museum that film cannot have.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

And not to the in the museum part is really key. Because you've you've already you caught me out in a great way already. So what I would say is if we were in the home of the Medici, or if we were in the home of or the guild of an amazing group of Dutch industrialists, you could touch it. You could touch the artwork. One of my favorite stories from living in Philadelphia is that the Gross Clinic, the famous, amazing work by Thomas Aikens of this incredible pioneer of surgery named Dr. Gross, was for decades and decades in Jefferson Hospital. And so it wasn't in a museum, it was in Jefferson Hospital, and it was for the people of Jefferson Hospital, especially for the doctors and the medical students. And it was in a stairwell. And you may have already heard this, but the surgical students, when they would walk by it, would poke it with their razor blade. So they would poke the bottom of the painting for good luck. And so the painting had more power because it's a painting of a surgery. It's a painting of Dr. Gross teaching surgery. And the painting had more power because it what could be touched. And so for hundreds and hundreds of years, these works of high art were touched. And they were touched often, and we'll get I think we'll build up to this more, but they were touched often because of the magic of representation and of materiality could be inspiring and could move people to be, to hope to be, to want to be better surgeons, and the case of the Gross Clinic and Jefferson Hospital, but also to remember your ancestors, the remember those that have passed, or to build the bonds of loyalty that a Dutch guild might need. So if we go to Batman, there's a moment where they're painting this Greek sculpture with garish black colors. But that's actually often how those Greek sculptures were. So there's this return in breaking down the rules of the museum. We sometimes return art to its very powerful but dangerous, in the sense dangerous for the artwork. Because it it degrades the artwork, it makes it less available, it makes its life shorter. But it does make its powerful impact on our life greater. And that's the bargain that we made with the with the museums. In the Gilded Age, in the United States, with these museums. And with these with going over to Europe and buying whole towns and bringing them over and putting them into rooms and these uh encyclopedic museums. The bargain we made is that we're deracinating the art. We're and we're taking some of its power away and doing that so that w we can give an arts education to the people.

SPEAKER_05 15:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

The way that film that's aware of this deals with that is by either by the engaging in the spectacular scandalous vandalism that is one end of touch, or with Ferris Bueller's Day Off, thinking about attention, thinking about what ways that we can use our attention to and our imagination to bring these pieces of artwork back into the power that they once had.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Yeah. Or in the case of a Surat, might still have, because they were intended for the And I feel like this interpretation helps to understand the role of Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters 2, because you could see it as like a revenge of the European aristocracy on the New World, New York, robber-buried wealth that Vigo comes to life through the act of conservation to wreak havoc in New York City. One could see it as a revenge story of this process of accumulation.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

It is.

SPEAKER_02 17:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

In this case.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Which suggests also then the danger of conservation, the danger of this fixation we have with conserving and restoring. I recognize your wife is a conservation specialist.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Yes, she is a painting conservator. And I think you could juxtapose Ghostbusters with Ghostbusters 2 really well here, right? So Ghostbusters, the first Ghostbusters, has sculptures coming alive. A big part of the climactic showdown at the end of the film is about architectural sculptures of hellhounds coming alive. But the other part of the art that comes alive is the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man. It's a is a advertising Madison Avenue artistic, sure, but not art.

SPEAKER_05 18:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Artistic creation. And that's part of popular culture. And so there's a way that Ghostbusters really interested in art coming alive, but gives the nod and the evil to popular culture.

SPEAKER_06 18:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

As both the that thing which couldn't hurt anybody, right? The Staypuff Marshmallow Man comes out of Dan Aykroyd's character's mind, Ray's mind, because he believes they try to avoid their minds, but he believes that this is the one creation that could never hurt anyone. And it doesn't look like it could. It's so cute. But it then becomes enormous. And it and in Ghostbusters 2, it's the art museum, is at all the evil slime is flowing to the art museum. We want to be careful here. Again, we love art museums. But there's something really interesting and telling about sort of the evil slime flowing towards and then encapsulating the art museum.

SPEAKER_05 19:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

And then a gift of public art being the way that that encapsulation of evil slime is broken.

SPEAKER_02 19:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

It's the Statue of Liberty reanimated by the positively charged slime.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

And the song, what's the song that reanimates it? My Love Can't Stop Lifting You Higher? Is that it?

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Higher and higher, yeah. Well done.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

Thank you. But yeah, it's the atmosphere of kind of pop culture, black music that then uplifts the Statue of Liberty to come and defeat Vigo the Carpathian.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Exactly. Right? And it's collective singing together, right? So without the crowds outside singing together, which is an ancient artistic practice.

SPEAKER_05 20:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

And I would argue one of the oldest forms of popular culture.

SPEAKER_05 20:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Like collective singing is popular culture before industrialization.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

Trevor Burrus And so, in some ways, in that reading, then it's also popular culture defeating the high art museum.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Exactly. Which is the opposite of Ghostbusters.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

The first version, although I think that's the better movie, loves Ghostbusters 2, and we don't have to fight. We don't have to fight. But Ghostbusters Fair enough. I love Ghostbusters 2, but I think there's something about the way that the film is against itself in Ghostbusters that makes it more interesting for me. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Well it's also interesting because the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, is the criminal, is the bad guy.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Is the villain. And yeah, and that's one, I think, a through line that both the movies share, right? That at certain level, some sort of institution is the problem. Yeah. Right? It's the art museum, potentially, in Ghostbusters 2, it's the EPA and one. The mayor's office in both cases tries to stop them before it eventually sets them free. Yeah. And this is like the stories that lots of films want to tell. They want to tell this story about how film is caught up in these institutional structures, but can also be a place where corrections and reforms are made.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

Moving forward into thinking about the ways in which film is a medium, one of the things it seems to love to do within the space of the museum is to move through the museum. To think about how bodies move in space and behave within the architecture of the museum and it's works of art that they're not supposed to touch. And so maybe we could also, maybe we could start moving through kind of some of those itineraries through the museum and think about how the medium of film is playing with what it means to see works of art in a montage, which obviously film itself is famously theorized under that category. You made me watch Dress to Kill, which I'd never seen in the film.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

You made you watch Drust to Kill.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

The scene in the PMA, also the Met, Pinot Met as Met, Philadelphia Museum of Art, is it is. It's an amazing scene. It's a fascinating scene. And what I love about that scene is that it does get to both that and Vertigo and Stenthal syndrome get to the weirdness of the museum as a place by which to interact with people in art and the ways in which it can be a little creepy.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Yes. Yeah. And it can be more than a little creepy, right? It could be haunting. Yeah. And I think that leans into the more traditional view of film and new technologies as echoes of old technologies. Right. So f like a film is always really interested in the ways that it can bring back the dead.

SPEAKER_04 23:43

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Either through the fact that it's capturing these ghostly apparitions of real people or in its ability to capture these ghostly apparitions of objects from the past. And then when if you add the extra layer of previous technologies that are still obviously still being practiced, but previously invented technologies that are also capturing images from the past, you have layers of echoes of people long dead. And that plays right into Brian De Palma's, right into the different thoughts about obsession and different thoughts about the emotions that go into a cinematic thriller.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Maybe we should start with obviously one of the origin sites for Brian De Palma, which is Vertigo. And how do you think Hitchcock is using film to think about these questions that you're talking about vis-a-vis the relationship between film and painting and Carlotta?

SPEAKER_00 24:52

So I would say that I don't know if Hitchcock cares very much about painting.

SPEAKER_05 24:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Um, and that's one of the things that can be more freeing about this question.

SPEAKER_03 25:05

Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

I actually think like Ferris Bueller's Dayoff cares more about painting than Alfred Hitchcock ever did. I think that's absolutely right.

SPEAKER_03 25:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

But but what Hitchcock cares about is obsession.

SPEAKER_06 25:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

In this case, right? Oh, or the appearance of obsession. I also think he cares deeply about ideas. Last night I was actually giving a presentation about Hitchcock, and he has a quote from 1937 where I'm gonna get it wrong and paraphrase it, where he says something along the lines of, we don't need stories, we need ideas. You give us an idea, we can kick out a story. He doesn't say kick out, but we can turn out a really good story every time. But a film like Vertigo is it errs on the side of being more about ideas than about entertainment. Although I'd say there's there are moments that are profoundly entertaining. It's really much more and more interested in ideas, and it's and I think the idea that it's really interested in is a type of dark obsession that leads into horrible depression.

SPEAKER_05 26:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Jimmy Stewart's character is has experienced vertigo. Yeah. But vertigo in this case is very much a metaphor for paralyzing, ruinous depression. The film was actually one of the titles that was bantied about for the film was Fear and Trembling. Oh. And Hitchcock was raised very religious. He went to religious schools in his entire life. And I have a whole argument that the film is much more interested in this I Soren Kierkegaard's idea of the sickness unto death, which is described in the sickness unto death as a type of vertigo.

SPEAKER_06 26:50

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

And what he's allowed to represent is these so Vertigo is this I in Kierkegaard is this idea of falling forever without hitting the bottom. And that is for Kierkegaard, this feeling of of hell on earth, of true un inescapable depression. And it's represented throughout the movie as the spiral, visually as this unending spiral. And Carlotta's obsession with reincarnation and with and in that sort of a spiral of living without ever dying is it's one of its best manifestations is the museum where they can focus on the spiral in her hair and in her desire to physically emulate her ancestor.

SPEAKER_06 27:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

But also in that and what it means to never be at peace.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

Which is interesting because that is one of the many critiques of the museum today, that the museum is particularly in its care for the indigenous works, is that it keeps them on constant display and doesn't allow the ancestors to be properly cared for or put at rest. So museums create this syndrome for indigenous ancestors, some might argue.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

And that's all that Vigo wanted to do in Ghostbusters 2. He wanted to take back his art so it could be at rest.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

It all comes down to Vigo.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

But joking aside, one of the great challenges that we have as museum workers is the push and pull between keeping these objects in good nick so that they can be passed down to the next generation and reminding people that these are not mummifications of past things. These are actual objects that were meant to be used. So, like how do you balance those two things out is one of the great debates within museum studies, and one of the reasons I think that movies have a place in the museum.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

Yeah. So moving forward to Brian De Palma, who it seems like does care about the space of the museum as a site by which to think about film and encounter, and frankly, sex and transgression. Take me through it. Why is Drasticale important as a site by which to think about the space of the museum?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

I think it's really important. Art has, especially high art, is at this does or it has the possibility exist at the boundary between pleasure and happiness. We've been spending a lot of time talking about utility so far. Right? Art can make us happy because it has a use. Yeah. Right. And it can help us remember the past. It can help us be at peace with our ancestors. It can help us work through really important rituals that make life make help make life make sense in our bodies. Right? And that's the materiality of art matters because it has this beautiful effect on our bodies, not just on our minds, but art, especially high art that's being collected by the wealthy, it can become about possession. It can become about visual pleasure to a degree that gets perverted.

SPEAKER_05 30:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

And that's Brian Palma's really interested in that. And he's not necessarily interested in that in a way that critiques it. Always. Like part of what made him so interesting as like if I think it's worth talking about Brian De Palma as a creature of the 1980s. Yeah. He give his work gives us an insight into first uh just to use a shorthand, an era when greed was good.

SPEAKER_06 30:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

And one of the results of that is you get really hot sexual transgressions that are also pretty hollow and empty. Yeah. And De Palma depicts that really well. It's mirrored by, I think, one of the great mistakes that museums can make. They can become a place of pleasure for the wealthy who are obsessed with the ownership of objects. It's certainly not as much fun to watch as Jurassic Hill, a museum like the British Museum, just accumulating and accumulating.

SPEAKER_06 31:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

There's a sickness there.

SPEAKER_06 31:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Right? That Brian De Palma isn't necessarily critiquing, but he's pointing that towards. And so I would say like that that would be if we're thinking about the usefulness that Jurassic Hill might have for the museum, it it's offering a very sexy, cautionary tale.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Yeah, yeah. More of the same stuff isn't always the right thing.

SPEAKER_02 32:01

Fair enough. I like that. I like that reading. Is there any film we haven't gotten to that was on our list that you feel deserves a little bit of time by which to think about it for the space of the museum? We didn't get to Band of Outsiders.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

Band of Outsiders, all these movies that are about like moving really quickly through these spaces, museum spaces, I think are really interesting. They I think they make a point that we've already made in our conversation, which is that film isn't as interesting to contemplate as sculpture and painting and these older arts that are more material and that are in the space with you.

SPEAKER_05 32:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:46

And one of the ways to admit that is to have use the museum as a place of rapid movement and montage like motion, right? Because the only way that film becomes interesting is through juxtaposition and editing.

SPEAKER_05 33:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Or if we were to if we do an episode on Russian arc or through very careful misnelson and staging.

SPEAKER_03 33:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Right? Because it's all that's Russian arc is all one shot. But it's only with these techniques, these cinematic techniques, that that don't involve materiality in the same way. A film is still material, right? But it's a materiality that isn't in front of you, right? It the materiality is behind you. So that's the only way that you can build images that are interesting. Like a photograph of Michelangelo's David is not anywhere nearly as interesting as being there.

SPEAKER_05 33:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

I went, I I'm a cinem studies person, but I went to Ghent to see the Ghent altarpiece. I took a trip from London where I was living just to Ghent to see the altarpiece, and it was worth it.

SPEAKER_02 33:49

It's worth it. It's worth it.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

It was so profoundly worth it.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

What's also worth it is the Issenheim altarpiece, should you ever find yourself in Colmar. That is a worth separate trip.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

I should if I'm close enough, I should just it's worth it to take a trip. But I won't, I don't travel to see movies because movies will come to see you.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

There's a really and without losing very much.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

I might go pretty far out of my way to see Napoleon, the abel Gaunt's Napoleon with live orchestral accompaniment. Right? That'll be a special event.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

But it's not the same quite as the Ghent or the Eisenheim altar piece.

SPEAKER_02 34:31

Yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

And the only way you get to that is by running through these spaces or acknowledging both that cinema needs montage and also that something horrible is has happened to our attention spans.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

There is one scene that I feel is worth touching on because I think it's partially why I went to NYU, is I pictured myself as Sally walking with Harry in the Temple of Denver as like part of my New York life. And I would just hang out in the Temple of Denver with my best male friend who would become my husband. And in some ways that actually did happen because I did marry someone who I hung out in museums with.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

But he does he have a funny voice about the company.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

You know my husband's voice.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

He's a very respectable voice. It's a very beautiful and respectable voice.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

But what you're saying, I love because it's I think what that scene points to, even though they don't really look at art and they're just in the Temple of Jandur, is it points to the museum as a specific site of sociality that film can't by nature have. You can't go to a movie theater really and sit and talk to your companion. You can, but you'll annoy everyone and you'll be an asshole. And it reminds me of my two sons. One of them likes to talk during movies and the other doesn't, and they just end up like wrestling on the ground because they're so angry about this different take of how to watch a movie.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

But uh it's it's been a lifelong problem with the movies from the very beginning. But to me, what's I think what makes films so great about that what makes film so great in that moment with when when Harry met Sally is that it film is really good at capturing the everyday. Yeah. Right? Film is really and is naturally pretty banal. Yeah. Right? Like just watching if you're just watching people, which is what early film was. Like early, like pre-narrative film was often just images of people leaving work or images of people at home.

SPEAKER_06 36:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

There's a banality to that's also really beautiful and that makes film part of popular culture because it's just capturing everyday life.

SPEAKER_06 36:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

But that takes that really takes this careful elevation of the everyday. And when Harry Matsali is juxtaposing that, right? Going to the Met and walking through this the Temple of Dendor is both like part of the attraction of New York City, that you that could be part of your weekly routine, but also this lovely juxtaposition of sacred spaces with um banal everyday conversation that still has this magic of friendship and potential attraction.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

Yeah, I love that. As two people who work in a museum, I think maybe we should end there with that holding that space for museums to continue to enact that in the world. Thank you so much for listening to Iconoclast Art Histories. The music today was brought by Diego Mong. Uh, sound editing was done by C.J. De Gennaro, and additional support was provided by Noelle Jurkson and Shauna Smalls.