Returning to the Scene of Art and Crime: Museums in the Movies

From Hitchcock’s Blackmail to Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s ‘Apeshit’ music video, Sammi Gale weighs up how museums are used by directors to unleash otherworldly behaviours. 

Criminal activity. Fatal encounters. Doom. Death. I never experience any of those things in museums, and yet suppressed passions and dark dealings are emblematic of the ways that art galleries and other cultural institutions are depicted in cinema.

Take Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, a 1929 thriller that is often credited as Britain’s first ‘talkie’. At the film’s climax, Tracy (Donald Calthrop) is fleeing from the police. He dashes into the British Museum, skittering past the exotic stare of a Sphinx, making his way up through the Reading Room. Climbing up onto the roof, he crashes through a skylight and falls to his death inside.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood – which, in the 1920s is only just being solidified as “Hollywood” in the cultural imagination – we have Jacques Feyder’s silent drama The Kiss (1929). It was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s (MGM’s) last major silent film release. On the cusp of silence and sound, during a transitory time for cinema, it also borrows the in-between-ness of a museum space for a crucial scene.

Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Blackmail’ (1929)

We open in a fictional museum in Lyons, where a group of tourists are being hurried past master works by a tour guide, who fails to point out the most libidinous artefact in the museum: Irene (Greta Garbo) and André (Conrad Nagel), who couldn’t be less interested in the art surrounding them. The dullness of the museum setting is juxtaposed with the impassioned advance-retreat of the lovers’ illicit affair.

Whether providing refuge from the law, or a space outside the confines of unhappy marriages, films have encoded the museum as a disconcerting place of transgression, since at least the time the former started being housed in the latter. ‘In films, apparently,’ says the critic Steven Jacobs, ‘museums provide a kind of harbour to people who are haunted, hiding or in transit’.

ON SHORE LEAVE

From a harbour to a harbour: On the Town (1949) opens with a montage of three sailors on 24-hour leave, visiting all the major sites in New York. The Museum of Anthropological History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Surrealist Art – the list goes on. They see an improbable amount of culture, surely a week’s worth, all in the space of a song: ‘New York, New York, a visitor’s place / Where no one lives on account of the pace / But seven million are screaming for space’.

With the sailors ambling through landmarks as staid and still as postcards, the montage not only announces a touristic triumph over ‘space’ – singing rather than screaming it into being – but a triumph of the sailors’ liveliness over those not really living. Museums, which would seem to demand slow and involved reflection, are conquered with jubilant, breakneck pace.

AND THEY’RE OFF

Jean-Luc Godard’s Band à part (1964) (a.k.a. Band of Outsiders) features another iconic scene of three renegades killing time, and at speed. The protagonists decide they will break American tourist Jimmie Johnson’s record of seeing every artwork in the Louvre: 9 minutes, 46 seconds.

The characters’ sprint past canonical paintings is a display of disrespect and apathy for what they represent. The poet Paul Valéry famously said of the Louvre that ‘neither a hedonistic nor a rationalistic civilization could have constructed a house of such disparities. Dead visions are entombed here’.

Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003)

Breathing a little hedonistic vitality back into the museum, Godard means to suggest that beating Jimmie Johnson’s record is a rational response to what Theodor Adorno would call the ‘family sepulchres of works of art’.

The idea of the museum as a deathly place, whose institutional authority requires challenging, lives on. No more so than in the work of Godard’s copycats: for his 2003 film The Dreamers, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci had his protagonists beat Johnson’s record. 2017’s Faces Places saw Agnès Varda, friend and contemporary of Godard’s, ambushing the Louvre with joie de vivre: poignantly, during her parody, she is in a wheelchair, which fellow filmmaker JR pushes at top speed.

Artists have taken up Godard’s baton, too. Mario Garcia Torres 2007 video-essay A Brief History of Jimmie Johnson’s Legacy (2007) restages the scene to interrogate the effects that museums and art histories have on our behaviour. Swiss artist Beat Lippert currently holds the world record for running the Louvre, which he achieved during his 2010 art piece La Sprezzatura.

‘STACK MY MONEY FAST AND GO / FAST LIKE A LAMBO’

Running past art has endured as a rebellious act, as the crime of blasphemy in the temple of culture. But what to make of the paradoxical mixture of reverence and irreverence in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s music video for ‘Apeshit’?

Shot in the Louvre, some critics see the video inserting Blackness into the white canon. Others as the as an audacious display of the Carters’ wealth. Certainly, as Black dancers in skin-coloured suits body-roll in front of Jacques Louis David’s ‘The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine’ (1804), there is a nuanced and complex attention to tableaux: this painting itself depicts a disruption, with Napoleon side-lining the Pope to crown Joséphine himself. The scene is disrupted all the more when Beyoncé takes on Joséphine’s role, as if she is the one being crowned.

Yet, seen within the context of the couple’s oeuvre, ‘Apeshit’ marks a return to the outlaw motif they embraced years before – ‘I’m an outlaw, got an outlaw chick’ Jay-Z raps on ‘On the Run (Part II)’. The Carters here are a two-strong bande à part: after the possible loss of their relationship, introspectively muddled through on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Jay-Z’s 4:44, respectively, ‘Apeshit’ announces the triumph of their relationship over a blip that belongs just as to history as the works on the walls.

MADELEINES

The critic Susan Bennett suggests that the museum ‘is an archive of things that have been permanently lost’, which offers visitors ‘nothing more than a Proustian taste of what once was’, while at the same time trusting the ‘same viewer for the active production of memory and meaning’. You can see this idea play out in Ghostbusters 2 (1989) – though Dr. Janosz Poha experiences far more of a jolt than a ‘Madeleine moment’ when restoring a portrait of ‘Vigo the Carpathian’. The sixteenth-century tyrant-cum-magician uses the portrait of his likeness as a portal to possess the poor restoration expert, backfeeding the relationship between active and passive, living and dead.

A similar ghostly exchange (minus the ectoplasmic lightning bolts) occurs in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), where Madeleine (Kim Novak) sits on a bench at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, facing ‘The Portrait of Carlotta’, a doe-eyed woman with hair tied up in an identical bun wearing a knowing expression, leaning against a column, also holding a bouquet of flowers. Novak’s character is supposedly possessed by the ghost of Carlotta, who killed herself in the 1800s.

Lynn Hersmann Leeson’s interpretation of Hitchcock’s masterpiece in ‘VertiGhost’ (2017)

When Scottie (James Stewart) enters the gallery, there is an unsettling way that gazes triangulate – Scottie’s, Carlotta’s, Madeleine’s – and Hitchcock’s camera identifies Madeleine as another object of art. No doubt these gendered gazes were on artist Lynn Hersmann Leeson’s mind when she interpreted Hitchcock’s scene in VertiGhost (2017), an installation featuring a blurred version of the Carlotta Valdes portrait, and a faux version of Madeleine and her bouquet of flowers that visitors could sit down next to in the Legion of Honor. Complicating the intersecting gazes still further, Leeson hid a GoPro behind Carlotta’s eyes which was triggered by a motion sensor in the flowers.

From Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954) to Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) to Jon Jost’s All the Vermeers in New York (1990), there are countless films that exploit the museum setting to amplify doomed and repressed sexuality. As a woman complains in Don DeLillo’s novel The Names: ‘I don’t like museums. Men always follow me in museums. What is it about places like that? Every time I turn there’s a figure watching me’.

ART HEIST

Beyond the intersection of eroticised and potentially violent gazes, beyond Godard’s iconoclasm (or for a more clear-cut example of this, see the Joker and his cronies smashing up a museum in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989)) there is one trope of museums in film that captures our imagination like no other: the art heist.

In Dr. No, James Bond (Sean Connery) is amazed to see Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington hanging in the titular villain’s lair. The painting had – for real – been stolen from the National Gallery by an amateur thief in 1961 the year before filming began.

But while films such as Dr. No might have cemented the idea of a thriving black market for stolen works of art, in reality they are notoriously difficult to sell. What is the art thief’s motive, then? There is something Robin-Hood-like about robbing institutions who in a lot of cases have pilfered objects from around the world themselves.

While there are endless examples of art thefts in film (Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Ocean’s Eight (2018), How to Steal a Million (1966), etc.) I want to leave you with the real-life story of one Vjeran Tomic, whose criminal life is crying out for a film adaptation.

Dubbed France’s ‘Spiderman’, Tomic described robbery as an act of imagination. Like art, there are certain constraints that need to be worked through, obstacles to overcome. In 2010, Tomic broke into the Musée d’Art Moderne and started taking paintings off the wall: a Picasso here, a Braque there… The sixth painting he took down was Modgliani’s Woman with Blue Eyes (1918). Tomic has described the moment he took it off the wall, suddenly struck by the woman’s gaze. The painting seemed to tell him, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life’. He says a fear came over him ‘like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.’

THE TEMPLE OF THE MUSES

The word museum comes from the idea of a shrine for the Muses. It’s clear that as much as museums might inspire us, it is not always the more virtuous impulses that are ignited within us. At least, not where film is concerned.

Yet what is clear is that, for better or for worse, museums can be powerful spaces that alter the ways in which we behave. Ever since The Kiss, cinema has been nurturing a clandestine affair with our cultural institutions. But the darkest, the most effervescent cabinet of curiosities exist within us all.