Page - 70 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

70 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 A medium shot, a man on the left, a woman on the right, seated at a table in a room in the National Gallery in London. The woman says, “And I don’t mean this to be a criticism.” The man replies, “It’s quite clearly not a criticism.”1 The woman speaks in paragraphs about the need to advertise to the broader public what the gallery has to offer. The man says very little. This conversation early in the film National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman, US 2014) gives the woman’s sense of what art might be for (a variety of intellectual, emotional, spiritual goods), while the man objects that he doesn’t want to “play to the lowest com- mon denominator of public taste” (NG 7), along with non-verbal resistance to her words. In a Wiseman film, what is not said is as important as what is said, if not more so. The woman gestures widely in movements that sweep the ta- ble toward the man; making bowing motions, she avoids eye contact for the most part, while he sits, face impassive, arms crossed, leaning away from her, scratching his arm, looking up and away from her, at one point shifting ever so slightly farther away (fig. 1).2 When he begins to respond with more than “Yes” or “Yeah”, he leans forward slightly, there is more eye contact between them, the woman’s face relaxes; she smiles. The animality of enigmatic and clear bod- ily, tonal and facial cues, the subtle play of dominance and submission in this 1 Transcript of National Gallery, Wiseman 2014, 2. Further page references from this transcript will be cited in the text, the title abbreviated to NG. I gratefully acknowledge Zipporah Films for providing me with transcripts. Thank you to M. Gail Hamner, David Heckerl, Jon LeBlanc, S. Brent Plate, and two anonymous reviewers who commented on earlier drafts of this essay. 2 Images are provided courtesy of Zipporah Films. More information on Frederick Wiseman and his films can be found at Zipporah Films, www.zipporah.com. Fig. 1: Film still, National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman, US 2014), 00:08:15.