Vermeer Movie Proves People Really Want to See Art in Movies

“We certainly didn’t plan for this,” says award-winning filmmaker Phil Grabsky. “Obviously we’ve delivered something that people are very excited about. The stars have all aligned.

Grabsky – who a decade ago created Exhibition on Screen, a series of documentaries about art and artists around exhibitions – talks about his recent film Vermeer: ​​the largest exhibition, which broke the company’s box office record since its UK cinema release on April 18. At the time of writing the film has taken in just over £818,000, from screenings in around 300 cinemas, an excellent result for a film that is essentially a supercharged guided tour of an art gallery .

It helps, of course, that the art gallery in question is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and that the subject of the film – the universally acclaimed assemblage of 28 of the 17th-century Dutch painter’s 37 known works – has almost exhaust. immediately. Like the touring “event films” shown by the National Theater in London or the Metropolitan Opera in New York, it allows those who cannot attend a major cultural event – the vast majority of potential audiences – to experience it. Grabsky is aware that there will always be suggestions that films somehow devalue art. “We’re not saying, ‘You don’t have to go to shows anymore.’ The idea is to do both.

Films from the on-screen exhibition offer added value, with curators, scholars and critics speaking on camera and interpolating contextual details, including biographical information on the artists, letter readings and more. Grabsky – who shared the majority of directing duties with artist and filmmaker David Bickerstaff – oversaw a simple and elegant style, strong on clarity and the possibility of viewing, involving persistent close-ups of the work and critical intelligent, but not opaque, work. work.

The series now has 34 films, with titles ranging from blockbuster (Leonardo: the works And I, Claude Monet) at least obvious (The Danish collector: Delacroix to Gauguin, about the pioneering Impressionist collector Wilhelm Hansen). With a “season” of four to five screenings per year, not all films do as well as Vermeer, and Grabsky is outspoken on the business side. “I worked at the cutting edge of cinema for 40 years, and making a film about art is really difficult. There are films on which you take risks, there are films that felt like they were going to do a little better than them. The great thing about Vermeer is that it allows us to take more risks with future productions.

Grabsky says the series is “largely self-funded”, with each film costing around £250,000 to make. In the UK, television broadcasting has largely abandoned art programming, he says. But he hopes that, now that the catalog of movies is big enough, he can strike a deal with a streaming company. “I hope someone like Netflix comes along and says, ‘we want to speak to an older, more cultured audience’.”

A beautiful disc

As for the actual subjects, Grabsky is keen to point out that he doesn’t work as a marketing arm for the galleries – they don’t pay to be included, and they don’t get the final edit – but, he says, they are enthusiastic to participate. because, on top of everything else, they get a nice recording of their exposure. He also points out that many of their films are not journeys of a specific exhibition. The recent release Stories from Tokyo is a good example: “It was triggered by the Ashmolean show in Tokyo [Tokyo: Art & Photography, 2021] but it’s also an opportunity to make a film about 400 years of Tokyo artists looking at their city.

Grabsky says he is currently working on a film about Klimt’s painting The kiss (1907-08). “It won’t work as well, but we want it in the catalog because we never did anything in the whole Secession period,” he says. “I always come back to this: it’s all about storytelling. We are guided by our own interests, by what we think the public is interested in and what may be of interest to them.