National Gallery

Frederick Wiseman’s NATIONAL GALLERY takes the audience behind the scenes of a London institution, on a journey to the heart of a museum inhabited by masterpieces of Western art from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century. NATIONAL GALLERY is the portrait of a place, its way of working and relations with the world, its staff and public, and its paintings. In a perpetual and dizzying game of mirrors, film watches painting watches film.

“Wiseman’s film is all about the studious reverence for the brush-wielding geniuses, and the shepherding of their reputations through the vagaries of restoration and exhibition. . .it’s neither propaganda nor melodrama, but a clear-sighted attempt to establish, with honesty, what working at the National Gallery is like – and that is its principal value.” (Andrew Pulver, The Guardian)

This film is part of FREDERICK WISEMAN: LOOKING FOR CONNECTION, in which ten films by the American master of documentary form the backbone of a programme about communities and third spaces.