Jem Cohen on Museum Hours

Filmmaker Jem Cohen’s latest film, Museum Hours, is an aria containing almost no music. This is remarkable, because in his long career Cohen has frequently collaborated with musicians from R.E.M. to Fugazi to Patti Smith (who executive produced Museum Hours) and his lead actress in the film is the cult Canadian singer Mary Margaret O’Hara. But this 106-minute portrait of life on the margins in wintertime Vienna is as hushed as the museum that shelters its protagonists. O’Hara plays Anne, an impecunious Canadian who has come to Vienna to care for an estranged cousin in a coma. In-between visits to the hospital, she wanders aimlessly around the Kunsthistorisches Museum, home to monumental works of western art, and strikes up a poignant and tender friendship with museum guard Johann. What follows is a meditation on art’s universality and its ability to impart meaning in times of distress. Cohen dedicated the film to his friend, the musician Vic Chesnutt, who died in 2009, and themes of loss and limbo pervade the piece, intercut with images of ageless works by Bruegel and Cranach among others. The film is aptly premiering at the National Gallery on the 6th of September. AnOther spoke to Cohen about his striking film, which lingers in the mind long after it’s ended.

I’m curious if the film began with the city of Vienna or with the museum, or whether the two were always connected for you?
Well, the two were always connected for me. I had a wonderful relationship with the city in part because they have a very fine film festival, the Viennale, which I’ve supported over the years. So whenever I would go to Vienna I would end up in the museum, in the Bruegel room, which is very particular because it’s the finest collection of that painter’s work in the world, so that really was the genesis. But I think that the film is a culmination of pretty much all my life and work, and thinking about why art is relevant.

Do you remember the first time you went to Vienna?
I don’t really remember the first time; I was just passing through some nether regions of Europe on a night train and stopped off there for a few hours in the morning. There are many cities that I love and I like to think I could make something out of most of them but there is something special about the place.

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

It’s a raw, shabby, wintry Vienna that you show, and beyond the central characters, the film also highlights the forgotten people in the city, the street cleaners, the rag and bone men and the homeless. Mid-way through the film, Johann starts to wonder about art’s worth, and a discourse about political economy enters the film. You shot the Occupy protests in New York, and I was wondering if Museum Hours could also be described as a political film?
I consider all my work political in some regard. Even if the subject isn’t explicitly political, there is a kind of political angle. In this case it’s not a film about indigent people, but there are a lot of people in the world today who are having a hard time with multiple jobs, and in a way that’s the new normal. I think that the film is really in a modest sense trying to make the argument that art is something for everybody and not just for an elite. It’s important we can see how it connects with people who are not necessarily primed for it by their class status. Vienna is one of those cities that people tend to associate with the opera and grand buildings and those are wonderful things too but there is another side to it.

The casting is incredible. I was wondering how you went about that; were the characters foremost in your mind before your decided on the actors or was it a kind of dialogue between the two?
It was kind of between the two. I saw Mary Margaret perform almost 25 years ago and I was just completely bowled over by her. Somebody had heard from somebody who had heard from Morrissey that she was playing in New York at a tiny venue, completely off the radar in I think ’89, and after that I kept in touch with her. In the back of my mind I thought she would be wonderful in a film, and she had done some acting, including a very fine performance in the Robert Frank film Candy Mountain. She’s continued to work on and off but she’s somewhat… reclusive. It was just great that she decided she wanted to do this and I had rough ideas for characters beforehand by then, but her decision transformed the character. Bobby, who plays Johann, I knew because he had worked at the Viennale.

It’s a very quiet film and the music only comes in towards the end, when Mary Margaret sings. I was wondering about this kind of absent presence of music in the film, and how you approached it.
I didn’t even plan for that to happen. I felt like her presence as a person and performer was quite remarkable and that would be enough for the character, I didn’t want her to feel like she had to sing. But then quite spontaneously, we were talking about what somebody would do if they were sitting next to someone in the hospital and had hours and hours to kill and the person was unresponsive, and then it seemed really kind of a beautiful and natural thing. I generally feel that there’s way too much music in movies, which is an odd thing for me to say, as I’ve made a lot of films about music and involving music. I think that score music is a very easy way to tell people how to feel and I tire of that, and so I thought from the start that the movie would have no normal score but it could have incidental music that related to the action onscreen.

"I think that score music is a very easy way to tell people how to feel and I tire of that"

Bruegel is almost a character in the film, and his paintings have this quasi-filmic, narrative quality. I was wondering if that was something you had thought about as well?
Absolutely, I just felt this incredible kinship with his work in terms of what I had done with documentary. I just felt that he was mining that same terrain in the 16th century and it was quite astonishing, the combination of details that he noticed and so carefully captured, and the many things going on in the frame that you’re sort of free to follow wherever you want. It kind of goes both ways – it’s like, is he cinematic or are we somehow Bruegel-esque? Either way, it’s fine by me, and I just think it’s great that different ways of working kind of connect over hundreds of years. It very much indicates to me that an ancient sculpture or a very old painting can be very fluid. It can talk very directly to you.

In terms of the filming itself, what was the process like? I know you tend to work outside of the typical studio system. 
Well, I tend to shoot quite a bit on my own or with a very small crew, and with the actors really only over a couple of weeks. I was teaching at a university at the time so I had to do it in-between semesters. That was tough but I do need to kind of roam around freely rather than have everything locked into a normal production schedule. So I managed to do it over a couple of years, here and there and brought it all together in the final piece. I don’t really work in a way that traditional filmmakers tend to on narrative films. That’s a personal preference and there are times when you kind of have to have a bigger machine. I have to work in a very stripped down way out of necessity, and I try to make that a boon rather than a handicap.

What are you working on right now?
Right now I’m working on a big music adventure – it’s actually a portrait of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. It’s a projected film with a lot of interesting musicians involved, people from Fugazi and Godspeed You! Black Emperor to Jim White from Dirty Three and a band called White Magic. So it’s quite a concoction and we're doing that at the BAM Academy of Music as part of their Next Wave Festival coming up at the end of September. But I’m always at work, always making shorts and working towards the next feature.

Text by Laura Allsop