Alas, our favorite museums are closed for the near future, but we can still visit them in the movies. Even though museums are mostly places for the contemplation of motionless objects and works of art, they are visually compelling and filled with things to spark our imaginations. Until we can go back into the galleries I am going to suggest some movies to take their place.

I taught a course on the History of Museums for ten years at the Harvard Extension School and during that time developed a “Film-clip Festival” to amuse students at the end of each term, and to explore pop-culture images of museums. Are museums in movies all that different from the institutions we love in the real world, I wondered? Indeed they are! About half of the museums depicted on film have a monster on the loose, and a significant number of others are being robbed!

In 125 movies made between 1911 and 2019 that includes a scene set in a real or fictional museum, eight themes can be identified that are most commonly explored.

In order of popularity they are:

1.     Monsters are on the loose.
2.     Criminal activity is taking place, usually a robbery of gemstones or paintings.
3.     Museums are a good place to bring a date or to meet potential dates or sex partners.
4.     Art and/or cultural objects are inspiring, educational, or objectionable in some way.
5.     Museums are where snobbish society hangs out, usually at gala events (consequently it is a good place for them to be embarrassed, robbed or eaten by 
monsters from number one above).
6.     A famous museum can help to establish the identity of a specific local setting.
7.     Information is hidden in the collection (or old technology is only available there).
8.     The actual subject content of a museum is used to move the plot forward.

There are some perennial sub-themes as well:

1. Association with a museum can quickly define a character (as rich and connected if they are a trustee or donor), and as smart (but frequently goofy) if they work there.
2. School children in groups are either totally bored, or out of control and being yelled at.
3. Museum directors are snobbish idiots and usually British, even in U.S. museums.

Here are some recommendations for films in the first four categories:

1. Monster on the Loose

The Relic, released in 1997, covers two bases here, as there is both a monster on the loose—an Amazonian Kathoga that eats human brains—and a society gala to launch the new “Superstition” exhibit. Watch out fancy people!

Directed by Peter Hyams and starring Penelope Ann Miller, there are a lot of brains to grapple with in this endeavor. Linda Hunt plays the museum director, who cannot stop the gala because the mayor is coming!

Available on Amazon and included with a Prime membership.

2. Gemstone Robbery

The Hot Rock (1972) features Robert Redford as one of a hapless gang of thieves who rob the Brooklyn Museum of a famous African diamond. There are too-brief references to the colonialism that has long underpinned the diamond business, but this is a comedy with Redford’s character, recently released from prison, convinced to participate in a caper he would rather avoid. Directed by Peter Yates; George Segal, Ron Leibman, and Paul Sand make up the rest of the criminal crew.

Available on HDFY at https://hdfy.to/movies/action/the-hot-rock-1972-watch-online

3. The Museum Date

Angie (1994). Geena Davis plays the title character: a pregnant, partnerless woman with a world of woes, in this film set in New York City. Twenty minutes into the film she aimlessly follows a group of school children into the Metropolitan Museum and meets the love of her life played by Stephen Rea. It isn’t exactly love at first site (not for her anyway), but they have an interesting discussion about the painting “In a Café (Absinthe)” by Edgar Degas. This painting (which is actually at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and not at the Met) depicts a boozy old couple and looks to Angie “like a lot of marriages I’ve seen.” They proceed to get kicked out of the museum because she is eating crackers for nausea.  (As a note here, I’m going to talk at some point in the future about the Thomas Crown Affair, in which Pierce Brosnan’s rich guy eats a flaky pastry in the French Impressionist gallery at the Met, while casually chatting with the guard. Yikes!)

Rent for $2.99 on Amazon Prime.

4. Art as Inspiration

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). No film captures an individual’s moving encounter with a work of art better than this charmer, directed by John Hughes and starring Matthew Broderick. Taking two friends with him around Chicago while playing hooky from school, Ferris goes into the Art Institute. His friend Cameron, played by Alan Ruck, is immobilized in front of the pointillist painter Georges Seurat’s large painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” from 1884. The camera goes back and forth between Cameron’s face and the child at the center of the painting, until his big blue eyes shimmer with tears and the little girl dissolves into dots of paint. Lovely!

Available on Netflix, or rent for $2.99 on Amazon Prime.

The Quiet Land

The title of this book was inspired by a poem that I quote at the end of the novel.

In a quiet water’d land, a land of roses,

Stands Saint Ciarán’s city fair;

And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations

Slumber there.

Written in the fourteenth century, about a hundred years after the novel is set, it captures a sense of the peace that you feel today at Clonmacnoise: “A quiet water’d land, a land of roses.” But beneath that quiet, literally beneath your feet, lie the bones of the great and ferocious warriors of Irish history and legend: “Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran’s plain of crosses / Now their final hosting keep.” It struck me that this had actually been a most UNquiet Land.

The original poem was written in Irish by Angus O’Gillan (also called Aongus Ó Giolláin, Enoch O’Gillain, and Enoch o’Gillan), but it is best known from a brilliant late-19^th century translation by T.W. (Thomas William Hazen) Rolleston (1857-1920).

Rolleston’s translation first appeared in William Butler Yeats compilation A Book of Irish Verse, published in London in 1895, where Yeats said the poem was “so purely emotional that it must stand an example of the Gaelic lyric come close to perfection.” (Rolleston and Yeats had a complicated relationship; in his memoirs, Yeats called Rolleston his “intimate enemy.” The two would meet at gatherings of Yeats’s London-based “Rhymer’s Club,” at “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” pub in the 1890s.)

The poem, in the translation by Rolleston, first became widely known when it was included in the 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch. This important anthology sold almost a half-million copies in its first edition and was extremely influential in introducing poetry to a new audience at the turn of the twentieth century.

Rolleston’s source was almost certainly a 19-stanza version of the poem, in Irish and English, which was included in the 1897 Christian Inscriptions in the Irish Language, “Chiefly Collected and Drawn by George Petrie, and Edited by M. Stokes.” (There is a link below where you can read the complete poem in this version.)

The antiquarian Petrie found the poem in “the Rev. Dr. Todd’s list of Irish manuscripts preserved in the Bodleian Library (Rawlinson, B. 486. fol. 29),” which describes the “tribes and persons interred at Clonmacnoise, written by Enoch O’Gillan, who lived on the borders of the River Suck, in the county of Galway.” (The author identifies himself in the last stanza.)*

Petrie thanked “Mr. Wm. M. Hennessy for the translation and notes with which he has enriched it.” I am including an illustration of the first six stanzas with Hennessy’s notes.

My favorite stanza here, which Rolleston didn’t incorporate into his version is the last one shown on this page:

Numerous in the secret stronghold

Are men of the race of Niall of the Nine Hostages;

Men whose fame deserved a bed like the Brugh,

Sleeping under the flags of Cluain.

In his note “g” Hennessy tells us that “men of the race of Niall of the Nine Hostages” (the famous ancestor of the O’Neil clan), were important enough to have been buried in the great Paleolithic tombs like New Grange, but still chose Clonmacnoise, for the nearness to the relics of St. Ciarán. (The word “Cluain” is used here as an abbreviation for Clonmacnoise, which is spelled Cluain Mhic Nóis in Irish.)

I’ll let Prof. Gregory A. Schirmer have the last word before I conclude this blog with the complete text of Rolleston’s translation. In his excellent book Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English, Schirmer gives us a perfect context for the Celtic/Romantic poetry which appeared in the world of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde.

“What is most striking about this poem, especially in the context of the literary revival’s construction of an Irish past, is the way in which it reads this landscape generally associated with Ireland’s Christian past—Clonmacnoise was once one of the centers of European Christianity—in almost exclusively pagan terms, nearly displacing the monastic community founded by St. Kiernan in the sixth century with the pagan culture that lies buried beneath it. The Dead of Clonmacnoise exemplifies the general tendency of the revival to celebrate Ireland’s pagan past at the expense of its Christian one, a strategy of obvious political advantage to a movement directed for the most part by a class alienated from contemporary Irish Catholicism.”

This is the O’Gillan/Rolleston poem as it appears in the Oxford Book of English Verse:

T. W. Rolleston. b. 1857

849. The Dead at Clonmacnoise

FROM THE IRISH OF ANGUS O’GILLAN

IN a quiet water’d land, a land of roses,
Stands Saint Kieran’s city fair;
And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations
Slumber there.

There beneath the dewy hillside sleep the noblest
Of the clan of Conn,
Each below his stone with name in branching Ogham
And the sacred knot thereon.

There they laid to rest the seven Kings of Tara,
There the sons of Cairbrè sleep—
Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran’s plain of crosses
Now their final hosting keep.

And in Clonmacnois they laid the men of Teffia,
And right many a lord of Breagh;
Deep the sod above Clan Creidè and Clan Conaill,
Kind in hall and fierce in fray.

Many and many a son of Conn the Hundred-Fighter
In the red earth lies at rest;
Many a blue eye of Clan Colman the turf covers,
Many a swan-white breast.

Note: O’Gillan and Rolleston each lived for a time within a relatively short distance of Clonmacnoise. O’Gillan identifies himself as originating “by the stream of the Suck,” the river that forms the border between Rosscommon and Galway counties today, and runs into the Shannon just below Clonmacnoise. Rolleston was born in Shinrone, County Offaly, about 25 miles southeast of the monastic ruins.

Sources:

Christian Inscriptions in the Irish Language, “Chiefly Collected and Drawn by George Petrie, and Edited by M. Stokes” (Dublin: The University Press for the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association, 1872). This book is now available online at: https://archive.org/details/ChristianInscriptionsInIrishV1/page/n9/mode/2up

Information on Clonmacnoise and this poem are discussed in the very first pages.

Alfred Hitchcock made four movies with museum scenes between 1929 and 1966. For the famous director, there was clearly a value not only in the compelling visuals of a museum, but in the curious juxtaposition of high culture and criminal activity that a museum could provide

In Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock actually made the transition from silent to sound films right in the middle of making the picture, and he left the first several minutes quiet. The plot: Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating a detective from Scotland Yard but gets frustrated with him on a date and leaves with another man, who attempts to rape her. She kills him and runs away, not knowing that a local thief, Tracy (Donald Calthrop) has seen her. When Tracy tries to blackmail her, Alice finally (!) tells her boyfriend what’s happening. The police chase Tracy to the British Museum. He races up the stairs and through the Egyptian galleries, at one point lowering himself on a chain in front of the giant carved head of Ramses II. He is chased into the famous reading room and up to the top of the dome, where he falls to his death through the skylight.

Hitchcock described the making of Blackmail to Peter Bogdonavich in 1963.[1] The actors, he said, weren’t actually filmed in the British Museum. “There was never enough light,” Hitchcock explained, “so we used what is known as the Schufftan process.”

You have a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees and in it you reflect a full picture of the British Museum. I had some pictures taken with half-hour exposures. I had nine photographs taken in various rooms in the museum and we made then into transparencies so that we could back-light them. That is more luminous than a flat photograph. It was like a big lantern slide, about 12 by 14. And then I scraped the silvering away in the mirror only in the portions where I wanted the man to be seen running, and those portions we built on the stage. For example, one room was the Egyptian room, there were glass cases in there. All we built were the door frames from one room to another. We even had a man looking into a case, and he wasn’t looking into anything on the stage. I did nine shots like this, but there was barely any set that could be seen on the stage. … The chase on the roof was a miniature. We just built a skeleton ramp for him to run on.

For Strangers on a Train (1951), actors Farley Granger, Ruth Roman and Robert Walker were filmed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  Granger’s and Roman’s characters are discussing how blissful the museum makes them feel when they are approached by Walker’s disturbed character Bruno, and the mood changes instantly. The art museum, with its sense of serenity and culture, was the perfect place to set the scene, which Hitchcock brilliantly exploits. That public confrontations should not take place in this setting is perfectly understood by the sane characters (and the audience).

When Hitchcock made Vertigo (1958), he used an actual gallery in the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a San Francisco art museum that was just one of the local landmarks used for the film. The museum added a painting to an existing exhibit—made for the movie and pertinent to the plot. James “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is a detective following the wife of an acquaintance. Kim Novak plays the twin roles of the wife, Madeleine, and Judy, who has been hired to impersonate Madeleine to convince Scottie that she is mentally unstable. At the museum, Judy/Madeleine stares at a painting of a supposed ancestor, Carlotta, who died by suicide many years earlier. Judy has a bouquet of flowers identical to the one held by the woman in the painting, and wears a similar hairstyle. Scottie has been told that Madeleine identifies with Carlotta in a dangerously compulsive way and this is the proof.

Jimmy Stuart observes Kim Novak observing a painting.

In Torn Curtain (1966), Hitchcock again set an important sequence in several museum galleries, but this time there was no actual museum used. In the scenes where the American physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is being chased through a museum in East Berlin, all of the complex backgrounds, with paintings, sculptures and architectural details, were matte paintings on glass by the artist Albert Whitlock. Newman was filmed in a mostly empty studio. The scene begins thirty-nine minutes into the movie: Newman’s character looks up from a guidebook picture of the “Muzeen Zu Berlin,” to see the actual building (well, actually the painting of the building by Whitlock!). It’s too bad the movie is boring, because this scene is remarkable for Whitlock’s artistic achievement.

Torn Curtain (1966) Museum exterior, painted by Albert Whitlock.

Note: As of 2 April 2020, all four of these movies are available to be rented on Amazon Prime Video for $2.98 each. Full versions for free can be found through a YouTube search.

[1] Peter Bogdanovich. The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, excerpted at:

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock_and_Peter_Bogdanovich_(1963)