A film by Jem Cohen

About movies, what I said the other day is wrong: movies can be memorable, only they're memorable to a different part of the mind than writing is memorable to.

If this makes any sense, feel free to continue reading.

Each of us who are readers are allowed one movie in which we remember every scene, just as clearly as we may remember a passage, some dialog, or a whole chapter from a book, word for word.

There is so much beautiful art around us all the time, there's never been so much beautiful art. I'm not talking about masterpieces, though masterpieces are included in my thinking. I'm talking about the little, unexpected scenes we see or hear and then carry around with us from room to room in our daily lives.

There's a scene in the movie by Jem Cohen, "Museum Hours," I'll never forget. A museum guide at the great Kunsthistoriches, is patiently explaining some paintings by Brueghel to a group of visitors, some of whom appear to be quite uninformed. At one point, her patience near its breaking point, she invokes Auden's poem, 'To the Old Masters', the one that begins, 'About suffering they were never wrong', like the poem is the most natural thing in the world and explains everything, which of course it does and doesn't.

Remembering this one scene in Jem Cohen's movie, I remember one other scene and then another and another until the whole film comes back to me scene by scene.