National Gallery

Frederick Wiseman has been making films about institutions since Titicut Follies in 1967 — hospitals, high schools, welfare offices, a boxing gym, the Paris Opera Ballet. National Gallery, which premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2014, applies the same method to the building on Trafalgar Square: no narration, no interviews, no music, no captions, and three hours in which you are expected to work out who everybody is.

What emerges is a portrait of an institution arguing with itself. Conservators discuss whether a varnish removal has gone too far. A curator explains why the attribution of a painting matters more to the market than to the picture. Management debates whether hosting a marathon start line would cheapen the brand. A guide talks a group through a Holbein; a life-drawing class works from a nude model in a gallery after hours; a framer gilds. Wiseman shoots the paintings themselves at length, so the film keeps stopping to let you look.

Made when the gallery was in dispute with its own staff over outsourcing — a strike followed shortly after the film's release — it captures a public institution negotiating what it owes to scholarship, to audiences and to its funders. Wiseman was eighty-four when he made it. It is among the best things he has done, and one of the few films about art that respects both the art and the labour around it.