The Exhibition on Screen series fully comes into its own with this guided tour of the Vermeer show currently taking place at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; all the physical tickets for its four-month run are sold out, and so this film represents the only realistic chance for most people to take a turn around the gallery. While being in the presence of the real thing would clearly be a transcendent experience, there’s something to be said for this elegantly produced walking-tour in a needs-must situation.
The resulting film plays to the series’ strengths – glowing, leisurely closeups of the art, accompanied by a continual stream of learned comment from curators and critics. (In some ways, heretically, a film like this might actually be an improvement on the in-person experience: no fighting through crowds, or craning to see over a coach-party’s heads.) What we get is a brisk run-through of Vermeer’s back story, such as it is known; various Rijksmuseum eminences talk thematically through their exhibition, along with the likes of super-voluble former Times art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston – though, perhaps forgivably, everybody mentions the actual show a bit too much to not remind the audience they’ll never actually get to see it.
