Frederick Wiseman's "National Gallery"

In a sense Frederick Wiseman was the wrong person to make National Gallery, which is currently completing a run at Film Forum. His signature reticence, characterized by a total lack of narration, becomes the work of art itself. In other films about schools, hospitals, the welfare system, an insane asylum (Titicut Follies), La Comedie-Francaise, and even the Crazy Horse in Paris, Wiseman's almost diaphanous docu-novel style with its omniscient seemingly absent author, lets the content breathe. Th...