Page - 79 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 79www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 art you can be right in lots of different ways, but in maths, you can only be right once, otherwise you’re wrong” (NG 31). There are images and sounds where the “unknown remains unknown” in National Gallery (2014), both in terms of being human and elusive, but also in Wiseman’s reticent style. Unlike videos about the National Gallery on YouTube, Wiseman doesn’t include titles to inform viewers about the identity of speak- ers; he doesn’t explain controversies about acquiring a painting for 80 million dollars, and so on. Challenges that the gallery faces are intimated in a trustee meeting about the annual budget and cutbacks, at a discussion about appro- priate sponsorships for the gallery and through a cutaway of the hanging (at night) of a Greenpeace banner on the gallery façade (“IT’S NO OIL PAINTING #save the arctic” [with the Shell logo in the “o” of “oil”]). A montage of single, double or group portraits frames the beginning and ending of the film (and as cutaways throughout the film): silent faces on canvases, gallery visitors looking at paintings, people lined up outside the gallery or watching the Greenpeace banner being hoisted up, accompanied by mostly unintelligible speech (except for the swearing). A sense of speechlessness, of the limits of explanation, car- ries the film’s final sequences, amplifying similar sequences throughout the film: murmuring blended voices in the gallery, footfalls of shoes on floors, sounds of hoists, floor cleaners and other equipment used in the gallery. Rather than at- tempting to explain Titian’s Diana and Callisto, a poet reads her ekphrastic poem created in response to the painting. Between the words, she imagines “white noise star crunching, crackling noises” (NG 99). She thinks of language’s limits as fortuitous: “we’re always in a way hampered by language, and that’s what’s wonderful… And [words] never quite do. But the gap is, the meaning is all in the gaps” (NG 101). This sequence is followed by dancers performing in front of Titian paintings, their flowing movement contrasting the arrested movement of figures in the paintings, followed by the montage of portraits that ends the film, among them Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard and several Rembrandt self-portraits. DEMOCRATIC NOISE A very different Wiseman film, but also resonant with meaning in the gaps, Near Death (1989), was filmed in Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. The hospital func- tions according to Quaker principles, complicating the usual hierarchy of com- mand in medicine. Within the Pulmonary Intensive Care Unit, house staff, the attending physician, the patient’s personal physician, the patient’s family and the patient (if he or she is competent) are involved in decisions about patient care. In practice, however, it is often physicians, who, believing a patient is near death, persuade his or her family to modify their wishes that “everything” be