French film-maker Cédric Labourdette

The word museum refers to a place where a work of art is displayed. Not surprisingly it is derived from the Greek word mouseion, the shrine of the Muses. In classical myth the Muses were the daughters of Zeus who presided over the arts and sciences. The museum today is a strange place, the majority of people within one at anytime are more than likely to be tourists rather than locals. In NY they come from Mexico, Canada, India, Japan, France, and everywhere else. In Paris, Rome, London, and Prague too museum visitors belong to elsewhere. In the diverse nationalities of tourists that populate it at any hour a museum is not very different from an airport.

"In museums," as filmmaker Cédric Labourdette says, "even the tourists are not without beauty." Labourdette has made two films in India and it was in Delhi that I met him for the first time. We were both part of that grand displacement of people that takes place from continent to continent on a casual basis in the modern world. In Paris I get the chance to see the films he shot in India and also a film called See in this Issue. Located in the un-cartographable territory between essay, documentary, film, and painting See in this Issue is filmed in museums and gardens in Paris: primarily the Louvre and Rodin museums and the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens.

The camera innocuously observes women looking at art, strolling, and connecting with each other. The images are played back to us in slow motion. The observer of the art is herself unaware that she is being observed. Moving in and out of public spaces with hundreds of tourists, Labourdette captures extraordinary events that could never have been contrived like a scene where a young boy and girl in the Louvre stand back to back to measure their relative heights. Labourdette says that he shot for several months and then used five minutes of footage out of three hours of rush for the final film. In slow speed the five-minute film is forty-five minutes long. I should call it an experience rather than a film. One observes the museum observer and the art that she is observing. We are observers like her, she is like the art she is observing. We slow down to the pace of the images and to the music. The music flows like a river within the film, it is organic, it is original, and it is, like the film, also a work of art. Frédéric Ligier who composed the original score has also spent time in India, most recently when he conducted musicians for the opera Fakir of Benares.

There are some particularly beautiful moments in the Galerie Michel-Ange at the Louvre when I notice that the camera has gone straight to my own favorite statue by Bartolini: Dircé. Cédric says that he uses slow motion partly to hold beauty and slow it down. For me the film itself is an object of beauty, a work of art no less than the art it is filming. The women it is filming are beautiful and are almost art too. The genius of this film is that it succeeds in being both a record of art and art itself. Later, when I leave the room I find that I have been slowed down to the pace of the film, hypnotized. I take the métro in the wrong direction and am an hour late for my next rendez-vous.

Time. Time regained, time lost, time slowed, time speeded up. These are experiences common to us all. And yet when a work of art is able to create one of these effects consciously I am startled. The memories of Paris that I carry in my head now include images from See in this Issue. To the catalog of my own favorite marble and bronze sculptures has now been added Cédric’s regard (a French word that can only be translated poorly in English as glance) toward these things, his particular vision.