For this is a film that shouts quietly.
About the way that we all too easily jump to conclusions about people based on what they look like and what they do; indeed how in a gallery we ignore or look down on the watchers without reflecting that they may be rather more acute in their observation of us. Our attendant relatively early lets slip that he spent much of his former life on the road with rock groups and in one particularly droll moment slightly hesitantly announces to an amused Mary Margaret O'Hara that he does still like heavy metal whilst looking as though he would be considerably more likely to put on a CD of Mantovani.
About the way that we fail to appreciate the context within which the art before which we now genuflect was made. In one rather fantastic passage Dutch still lives are compared to bling-tastic rap videos: expensive tat plied high to impress the onlooker. Now we see the genius of the painting. Then the man who paid for the work simply wanted it known what he could afford.
About how we want to see art as timeless and high minded but ignore the inconvenient details which suggest that those who created it had other things on their mind, as indeed do many of the younger visitors who in the rather splendid summary of Horrible Histories more often than not are on the lookout for poo, vomit, death [and sex]. Of which there is rather a lot, including in paintings now often on the proverbial chocolate box.
Indeed, there is a bravura sequence in the middle of the film in which a guest lecturer spends quarter of an hour talking about several pictures in the stunning collection of paintings by Pieter Bruegel in the gallery gently correcting the rather comfortable view of the painter held by her listeners as producing timeless and charming vignettes of peasant and town life. The degree to which some of them find this to be not what they had paid their money to hear is illustrated tellingly by mobile phones being removed from pockets, the modern sign par excellence which screams 'bored now'.
Instead, as she observes and as Michael Frayn rather wonderfully developed in his novel Headlong, he was a painter very much of his time. If one looks closely it is clear that Bruegel is describing a world which is very far from comfortably quotidienne. In fact it is governed in a manner which we would now probably describe as a police state. Bruegel was living through a reign of terror in the Dutch states in the 1560s. A telling, lingering shot of some of the tiny detail hidden in the paintings of gibbets and bodies left tied to the upturned wheels on which they were broken speaks volumes.
About price and value. How we often have little appreciation of the circumstances in which the art which is now hanging on the wall was produced. All of it now has a high price but it was often acquired for very little in the past. It is time and scarcity that has now increased its positional value.
About the nature of chance in what is treated as art. There are some passages which are reminiscent of Agnes Varda's The Gleaners And I as people wander through knick knacks and discarded objects and photographs are left lying on the ground, disintegrating the rain. What ends up on the wall and what ends up in the gutter are perhaps separated by less than we might wish.
About how we are indulgent and amused by a heritage industry which often has roots in some deeply unsavoury aspects of our past. The red and white striped poles with pointed ends propped up outside houses in Vienna have their origins in the wars with the Ottoman Turks and the Great Seige in the 1680s. However, as the attendant remarks, modern Austrians (and by no means only Austrians) don't react very differently to Turks and other foreigners now.
But it also observes how curiosity about culture can bring us together when we are open to difference and intrigued enough to want to understand better. There is a sequence at the end of the two main protagonists in a tiny bar at an increasingly rowdy but good humoured music night for one immigrant community. I was charmed. An affirmation of multi-culturalism. A recognition of how music and beer can bring us together.
But isn't that what we call world music ....
