The Cinematheque

“In its modest and unassuming way, Museum Hours is a total experience, composed of people, sights, sounds, history, travel, argument, speculation, fantastic beauty, and ordinary life, woven together and maintained in aerodynamic tension. It is no more reducible than a day in spring.”

Lucy Sante, writer and critic

“What is it about some people that makes one curious?” Johann worked in the Viennese music scene, but swapped it for a quiet job in the Historisches Museum, fading into his surroundings to watch over the collection and its visitors. Adrift in an unknown city and unknown language, Anne is summoned from Montreal in midwinter to keep vigil over a distant cousin in a coma at a hospital in Vienna. Finding refuge in the grand museum, she forms an easy bond with Johann, exploring the city, art, and each other’s lives. An art historian tours a group through the Bruegel Room—Johann’s favourite station—describing the paintings as ​“some of the first documentaries,” capturing details of peasant life within their large frames without a single focal point to tell us where to look.

In English and German with English subtitles

“The film is modestly trying to make the argument that art is something for everybody and not just for an elite.”

Jem Cohen

“The film is so successful that one ends up not just sympathetically attuned to Cohen’s own ​‘hallucinations of the real,’ but ready to venture out into life—and indeed, into museums—with a newfound hunger, sensitivity and curiosity.”

David Balzer, Canadian Art