The Louvre Museum is the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and, much more recently, Pei's Pyramid. It is also 1,200 employees from the curator to the guards, encompassing picture restorers, locksmiths, tapestry weavers, acousticians, physicians and chemists, cooks and even twenty firemen. Philibert guides us through a tour of this 'hidden face' of the Louvre, showing the work and the life behind the scenes. In this inner sanctum, giant marble heads swing through the air and curators fiddle with the placement of priceless paintings as we would hang prints on our lounge walls. There is no commentary. Rather Philibert, with his attentive, humorous gaze, captures gestures, looks and conversations, uncovering the hidden mysteries of the place. This mm reveals the life of a great museum, captured in its daily rituals and its burlesque, while nevertheless retaining its secrets and its mystery.

La Louve Internet Movie Database listing

Un animal, des animaux aka Animals

Director: Nicolas Philibert, France, 1995, 57 minutes, 16mm

For 30 years, the Zoology Hall of the Museum of Natural History in Paris was closed to the public, while thousands of stuffed animals - mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects, crustaceans - were abandoned inside. This film wittily documents the Hall's renovation. Philibert records the three years of intense, detail-driven preparation to bring the various inhabitants back to life. The animals take on an odd symbolic life of their own, their vacant overstuffed faces providing a wry commentary on the various processes that revolve around them. Animals is an incisive testimony of the human desire, or compulsion, to preserve and document.