The Movie:

The Great Museum is a documentary where long stretches of nothing much happens - in this case, that's not such a bad thing. Full of meticulously composed, quietly observant takes, the 2014 film offers an insider's view of the inner workings of a world-class art museum - Vienna, Austria's Kunsthistorisches. It's an elegantly made film that's both revealing and respectful of its subject, befitting a place that holds the crown jewels of Europe, canonical paintings from the Renaissance up through the 19th century, and antiquities from ancient Rome and Egypt.

The Great Museum offers a side of the art museum world that visitors rarely, if ever, see - in fact, visitors are only seen briefly near the film's conclusion, streaming into a newly refurbished area of the museum. Director Johannes Holzhausen filmed this at a time when the Kunsthistorisches Museum was closed to visitors for an extended structural and technical renovation, shuttered since 2002 for a complete overhaul. In addition to making over the galleries to match the splendor of when they originally opened in 1891, staffers needed to catalogue and restore each of the museum's 2,200 pieces. In the meantime, the museum does its usual function of budgeting, marketing, planning shows, courting those who donate to the collection and visiting dignitaries - Holzhausen meticulously captures all of that.

With a straightforward, observant style that does away with interviews, narration, montages and the other usual tricks, The Great Museum shares the same fly-on-the-wall approach as another recent documentary, Ballet 422. While that film followed the planning process on a ballet piece by shadowing one person, The Great Museum takes on a wider scope, following a large group of employees. While it lacks some of Ballet 422's casual intimacy, the apparent ease that the museum staffers had with Holzhausen and his crew allows for some great insights. The director mostly keeps his camera still and observant, resulting in a film which may appear icy. He refrains from identifying the employees until the final credits reel, resulting in what looks like a completely self-contained, insular world of worker bees (the one incongruous scene comes with an auction attended by two Kunsthistorisches Museum buyers - the only part not shot on the museum grounds).

The Great Museum is at its best when Holzhausen's cameras get in close on the conservation process, showing something like the process of inspecting an old painting for bug holes with a fascinating amount of detail. With this movie, mostly what stays in the memory are the amusingly odd contrasts - a burly workman smashing apart the floor in an immaculate room with a pick-axe, workers gingerly transporting a mangy-looking polar bear-skin rug as if it were a precious gem, another employee gliding through several cluttered back offices on his own scooter. While a lot of the film conveys the business-as-usual activities of any big organization (budget meetings, etc.), in the end the documentary makes the Kunsthistorisches Museum appear like a strange, wondrous place to work.