Jem Cohen’s new feature film, Museum Hours, unfolds like a series of postcards from a lonely traveler, fresh with the pressure of on-site writing while calculating that the memory will be received miles and days away. Shooting primarily in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cohen’s foreign camera seeks the familiar: the stony wrinkles around ancient Roman eyes, a clean white egg inside a still life, a child’s ill-fitting hat in one of Bruegel’s noisy marketplaces. Art, Cohen seems to say, is a refuge for the outsider.
Sarah Cowan
Sarah Cowan is a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she works on projects based on the collection and exhibitions, and edits two web series featuring Met staff, Connections and 82nd & Fifth. She studied art history at Tufts University, currently lives in Brooklyn, and is on Twitter.
