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Museum Hours

Mary Margaret O'Hara (Actor), Bobby Sommer (Actor), Jem Cohen (Director) Rated:
NR
Format: Blu-ray
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 55 ratings
$22.99 with 34 percent savings
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December 10, 2013 		—
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Product Description

Product Description

When a Vienna museum guard befriends an enigmatic visitor, the grand Kunsthistorisches Art Museum becomes a mysterious crossroads which sparks explorations of their lives, the city, and the ways artworks reflect and shape the world.

Review

"Four Stars! An exhilarating journey through art and life." --Washington Post

"Rapturous. A film of such intelligence and originality that radical seems the only accurate word." --Village Voice

"Exquisitely photographed." --LA Times

Product details

  • MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)
  • Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 5.92 ounces
  • Director ‏ : ‎ Jem Cohen
  • Media Format ‏ : ‎ Blu-ray, NTSC, Multiple Formats, DTS Surround Sound, Widescreen, Anamorphic
  • Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 47 minutes
  • Release date ‏ : ‎ December 10, 2013
  • Actors ‏ : ‎ Mary Margaret O'Hara, Bobby Sommer
  • Studio ‏ : ‎ Cinema Guild
  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00EPFMS6K
  • Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
  • Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 55 ratings

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
55 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Green Wave
5.0 out of 5 stars Hours well Spent
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2022
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An extraordinary and fascinating film. I streamed it back in 2014 and was so taken with it I bought the DVD, which I’ve watched several times and it has always been a rewarding experience. This time (April, 2022), I particularly picked up on how, or so I believe, the film was created. Essentially, it is a collage, three disparate parts, or pieces, put together.

My guess is that writer/director/cinematographer Jem Cohen spent a great amount of time—weeks probably—with his camera filming whatever caught his eye in the area around Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum. No grand plan, just whatever struck him, the filmic equivalent of street photography. That was the first part.

The second part, he did the same thing inside the museum, focusing on the room with Pieter Breugel the Elder paintings, which included filming the paintings themselves as well as individuals and pairs and teenagers on a school field trip who happened to come into the room to view the works when Cohen was present. Whatever/whoever rang Cohen’s bell, as it were, during these times, he filmed it/them. Two exceptions to this spontaneity: a planned, ten-minute guided tour—the guide played by the actress Ela Piplits—explaining and advocating for Breugel’s artistic approach and merits; and an episode where, unexplained, three museum visitors disrobe (a surrealistic element that proved to be distractingly out of place in the otherwise realistic film).

I speculate that Cohen had these two parts set to go before he filmed the touching, very human, story of museum guard Johann and visitor-from-Montreal Anne, both no longer young--Bobby Sommer and Mary Margaret O’Hara superbly cast---which is partly scripted and partly ad-libbed. This encounter provides the narrative line of the film. In the editing process, Cohen inserted material from parts one and two. (Watch closely: it is made to appear that Johann was present during the tour; not so, that was filmed at another time.) Hundreds of insertions, hundreds of choices. Why does, say, some street scene go here? Well, it just does. Cohen experienced that in a gross, organic way, with all of his being, not just his intellect.

What does the whole of parts one, two, and three brought together as they are add up to? There are as many valid interpretations of Museum Hours as there are interpreters—you, me, Cohen himself. This last time, I picked up on themes around seeing, really seeing, and gentility and aging and isolation and death. Given who you are and your circumstance, including your stage of life, you will legitimately pick up on something else. Fine art is sensitizing and it is evocative, and it is about fundamentally important matters, and this film is indeed fine art. My congratulations and gratitude go to Jem Cohen.
2 people found this helpful
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Russell E. Scott
5.0 out of 5 stars museum of life vs. the art of living
Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2014
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Jem Cohen solicits Mary Margaret O'Hara to narrate, walk through the city of Vienna, the bombastic Kunsthistorisches Museum as a grand gesture of art as a process, a history of man, all whom have gone before, reintrepreted endlessly, wonderfully. Befriending a museum guard as solace to her lonely heart journey we get an insiderers peek beyond imagination. Uniquely conceived format for his second ever feature film has so much substance/sustenance to take in I can't conceive time of possible saturation. Our odd couple, drawn together by chemistry, need come from the "we are over 50 club". They frequent numerous cafes, clubs, haunts as diverse as the art collections inside, the hallows halls of the wide circle of every imigrant imaginable landed, rooted, each its own museum of particulars, peculiars, and proclivities.

A reputable film maker, our autuer has a broard range of subjects material of which we get three films ranging in length 8 to 45 minutes as bonus bucks bonanza. This may be to quiet and drab for some but if you are the art history type you will love this approach. Perhaps like my embrace it is something much more than a story of lovely, lonely lady gone to foreign shores to comfort the last days of a cousin in coma, her only real kin. Countless moments held in time of a city and museum with a endless, breath taking views. My god I love this film.
12 people found this helpful
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jon eric nelson
4.0 out of 5 stars A great museum and and a great deal more
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2014
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Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours is another hybrid fiction/documentary film. A middle age American woman, Anne, has been summoned to Vienna because her name was found in the address book of a cousin who lies comatose in a hospital there. She has never been to Vienna before, doesn’t speak the language, and has little money. She meets Johan, a middle age museum guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and he becomes her interpreter, tour guide and friend. On one level the movie is the fairly simple but touching story of their evolving relationship. Will romance blossom? Alas, no. Johan is gay and Anne, though single, must return to America. Their relationship, with its thoughtful conversations, is the fictional part of the movie.

The film, however, is about much more than these two people, endearing though they are. We also get to know the museum in which they spend much of their time. We inhabit for a while a richly photographed world and ponder, as Anne and Johan do, a range of subjects: cities, art, time, sight, museums, property, collective memory, the flux of objects, transience, maturity….Have I left out anything? Oh, yes. Brueghel and the room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum that contains many of his masterpieces: Peasant Wedding, Children’s Games, The Conversion of Paul, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Because Johan is our guide as well as Anne’s our introduction to Brueghel and the museum and the imperial city that contains them is relaxed and intimate, much more personal than a conventional documentary would be. Jem Cohen’s camera eye – probing, playful, wise – becomes our eye.
7 people found this helpful
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EGR
1.0 out of 5 stars Vienna's Dark Side
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2014
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If the intent of this film was to immerse the viewer in a painful journey of the mundane life of an exasperated and unfortunate Canadian woman's happenstance Vienna and the equally disenchanting existence of a museum guard – well then maybe I should be giving this film the magnanimous stars that other reviewers have. I fear, however, my opinion of this film differs greatly from those reviews. I found this picture to be extremely dark, uninspiring, and downright depressing. With all that Vienna and the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum have to offer the accidental tourist –it is bewildering that someone would consciously elect to use one of the world’s most beautiful cities and culturally majestic landmarks as the backdrop for this ominous interpretation of two common stranger’s chance and most assuredly lackluster encounter.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Chris
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful film
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2021
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Captures the rhythms of normal life. The importance of companionship and the atmosphere of the darker months of the year.
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MARY E GREENLAND
2.0 out of 5 stars Boring & non-sensical
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2016
Verified Purchase
Much more exciting to see paint dry or grass grow...what is that all about? There could have been a lovely, interesting plot: all the actors have a story to tell, but a story is what is missing here.
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Entartete Musik
4.0 out of 5 stars Hallucinations of the Real
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 8, 2014
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Jem Cohen's Museum Hours is a quiet film. At times it's almost silent. The 'hours' to which its title refers – as well as the days and weeks – unfold in the spacious calm of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. One of its guards narrates the advent of a friendship with a visitor from Canada. She is in Vienna to comfort an ill friend, whom she hasn't seen for years. Lonely, stranded by language and inexperience, she finds solace in the guard, the gallery and its extraordinary collection of artworks. It is within these simple parameters that Cohen unfolds a world of connections and reflections.

Midway through this hushed tribute to life in a major gallery space, a member of the Kunsthistorisches Museum's staff guides a group of visitors through its famous Brueghel room. Vienna has a particularly enviable collection of Breughels – The Massacre of the Innocents, The Procession to Calvary, The Conversion of Paul and several others. They provide a tantalisingly dramatic backdrop to what is a deliberately and impressively passive film. 'They are not sentimental, nor do they judge', says the guide, in a metacinematic moment.

She also cites Auden's poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts' and the displacement of suffering he describes, just out of view, just out of a window. Her 'speech', a consciously staged moment in a seemingly aleatoric film, makes us ponder where the heart of Cohen's drama lies, whether it is in the paintings of Vienna's KHM, in a suburban hospital or between Bobby Sommer and the Toronto-based artist and singer Mary Margaret O'Hara.

In a series of quietly touching moments, the sharing of coffee, a folk song at the invalid's bedside, Cohen summons a whole series of suggestions and places the narrative in our hands. 'One is reminded of the transience of things', it is said in the film. Yet one is also reminded of the magic, both in the extraordinary art featured on the walls of the gallery and in the cold, grey days we see unfolding in a small capital city in a landlocked republic. When the narration, which has previously accompanied images of the Breughels, the Michelangelos and the Rembrandts turns to sections of Cohen's own film, another boundary magically disappears between art and the everyday.
3 people found this helpful
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Eunice Sampayo
5.0 out of 5 stars Art and life
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 18, 2014
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I read a review from a portuguese critic and decided to see the movie. It's a wonderful sensitive film that teaches us to appreciate the beauty in everyday life. Highly recommendable for those who are already motivated to think about art and life, but also for those who are a little more distracted!
2 people found this helpful
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AnakinSW
1.0 out of 5 stars Pseudo intellectual wate of time.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 28, 2014
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I like art, I like intellectual films and Vienna is one of my favourite cities in the world. So when the reviews of ‘Museum Hours’ came out I couldn't wait to see it. What a disappointment! The film is a collection of short scenes loosely interconnected by an irrelevant story desperately pretending to convey something sophisticated with 'deep' meaning. The director is self absorbed and far too generously self indulgent. The result is a long, boring film that gives nothing in return. If the director did accomplish anything, he succeeded to portray one of the most beautiful, joyful cities in the world as drub, dirty, tired place. If this is director's real impression of Vienna, he is in dire need of anti-depressants.
6 people found this helpful
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