Museum Hours by Jem Cohen – Art, Life & Mystery & Iris Murdoch
Rembrant Born: July 15, 1606
Museum Hours 
(click to see large)
Museum Hours trailer on youtube.
Old masters, sweet mystery – A.O Scott
“Museum Hours,” Jem Cohen’s quietly amazing, sneakily sublime new film, is partly a reflection on such aesthetic puzzles. Shot on high-definition digital video and super-16-millimeter film in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the film lingers over great paintings by Rembrandt, Bruegel and other European masters, inviting us to contemplate the complex, half-obscured tales they might tell. In one scene, an art historian (Ela Piplits) tries to initiate a crowd of skeptical tourists into the mysteries of Bruegel’s “Conversion of St. Paul” (1567), and Mr. Cohen’s camera supports her arguments by finding details in the picture that might be easy to overlook.
Jem Cohen directed the museum hours.
Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July 1919
Walter Benjamin, Iris and Derrida (previous post)
“Until the escape into art, then nature,
the stories are dark, dark, dark.
Parsifal with no Grail.
Isolde with no Death.
Papageno with no flute.”
Summer Interlude – Iris and Derrida
“Murdoch’s implicit philosophical position is austere, classical, rigorous: unromantic, and pessimistic. Not that pessimism precludes comedy: on the contrary, it is probably the basis of the comic spirit.
See Ingrid 
Bergman at the museum, looking at the sculpture.
Viaggio In Italia