It is good to be in the land of my ancestors, Germany. It’d be even better if I could speak a single word in German. I’m staying with relatives here (Jochin is in advertising and Angela is in web design, so we we are all media people – Angela designed the picture logo on my blog), and they’re English is superb, but I wish I could help them relax a bit.

I emailed some friends who learned German in school, but one emailed back with phrases like Wo sind mein hosen? (Where are my pants?) which is really unhelpful since I have been wearing saris the whole time.

My relatives met me at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam – the city where there are more canals than Venice, where killing tourists with your bicycle is a national sport, and where the green stuff in the bowl next to your ciabatta roll is not pesto.

Here I had the rare opportunity to see the Van Gogh museum and the Rijksmuseum – the largest gallery of original Rembrandt works. Here I saw the famous mural Nightwatching.

Before we could see the three by five metre painting (it looked that large), we had to enter a room where the walls were dotted with television screens. Across each screen segments of the painting were shown, intersperesed with pictures of models dressed as characters in the painting, while a narrator told the Nightwatching story. The entire room and the television montage were designed and created by British director, Paul Greenaway.

Whe it was over another door was opened and we walked into a small theatre/auditorium where we could only view the mural from our seats. Then the lights went out, a soundtrack of thunder, rain, gunshots and screaming followed a lightshow that was superimposed on to the painting itself. Rembrandts us of light and shadow created a perfect 3D effect on the items in the picture, and the lightshow enhanced that. Spotlights drew characters in the background to the foreground, so teh narration in the soundtrack could focus on them. Other images were superimposed onto the painting to show the story that preceded the depicted event. Animation brought some charcters to life. The whole lightshow and soundtrack offered a vision of the event that was meant to “make some sense” of the world Rembrandt was trying to convey.

After the show was done we were allowed to view the mural from a little closer as it stood, but only for a minute or so before we were herded out to make room for the next audience.

I felt cheated. I had come all this way to see the mural only to get a few seconds with it so someone could give me a song-&-dance event about it that I could have bought on DVD somewhere.

Are modern audiences so consumed by film and television that we need such a display to appreciate a picture?

Once we had trou guides, trained by art critics, historians and curators with university degrees in art history to tell us about the visual art we see? Do we now reject those discourses? Do we look to film makers and other creatives to tell us what we need to know, in the language they have learned and have taught us?