You probably haven’t been thinking about libraries a lot recently, what with all the politics and genocide and hurricanes. But then, you may not have been thinking about the University of California, Berkeley, or London’s National Gallery or the northwestern Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights much either, unless you’re one of the small but growing number of devoted fans of documentarian Frederick Wiseman. His run of late-period docu-epics “At Berkeley,” “National Gallery” and “In Jackson Heights” continued in Venice last week with the premiere of his latest, “Ex Libris: New York Public Library,” which is already out in limited release. It’s nearly 200 minutes of talks, classes, administrative meetings, policy discussions, concerts, book searches, readings, and shots of people, expressly against the wishes of the NYPL authorities, copping a snooze among the stacks. And if this world has you in need of a little healing time, go, go, go and see it: it’s a lovely, gracious, soul-satisfying thing.
It feels like every new Wiseman film is some sort of culmination of a lifelong Wiseman obsession — so much so that one hesitates to trot out that same conclusion here again. But even on the deeply embedded, fascinated scale of his recent milestones, ‘Ex Libris’ feels like a peculiarly vivid elision of subject matter and filmmaker. Wiseman’s meticulous, cerebral, engaged yet dispassionate perspective has always felt a little like that of a librarian, like he’s curating, condensing and collating volumes of valuable information and making them available for the public good. And so having him explore the halls and corridors of the hallowed institution that is the New York Public Library (and by that he means the whole NYPL system and not just its flagship location, rearing up under the watchful eyes of those big stone lions on 5th Avenue) feels like perfect symbiosis.
But it’s not just the grand overarching conceptual architecture of this massive film that is impressive. In fact, its moment-to-moment enjoyability makes its daunting length fly by, and I can say from experience that if you’re thinking you might just pop in for a bit and leave, you’ll have a hard time finding a juncture at which to do so. Here’s Elvis Costello talking with typical verve and intelligence about the way emphasis can change the meaning of a song as angry as “Tramp the Dirt Down”; there’s Ta-Nehisi Coates talking about the taboo surrounding “black-on-black” violence; here’s a board meeting of impassioned but mutually respectful trustees discussing the allocation of funds between the library’s online and physical collections; there’s a blind lady learning braille, a celebration of poet Phillis Wheatley and Patti Smith talking about Jean Genet.
There are classes (including a particularly electrifying one at which the young instructor thrillingly scuds through history, incisively relating Marx to Lincoln); there’s a book group at which one participant is visibly illuminated from within while discussing Gabriel Garcia Marquez; there’s a manager at an outer borough branch giving a pep talk to the staff and volunteers; and there are candlelit sponsors’ dinners, which make the courtyard look like a Hogwarts Christmas, and work the even more magical spell of making us think well of some very rich white people, since this place benefits from their philanthropy.
This is the essence of Wiseman’s filmmaking, double-distilled in this particular case: he examines institutions — boxing gyms, mental hospitals, state legislatures, high schools etc. — not for their brick-and-mortar manifestations, but for the communities they house and social principles they embody. And so ‘Ex Libris’ is, on the one hand, entirely of its place — it is an extensively detailed, postscripted and footnoted love letter to New York, and to the New Yorkers of all social classes who find something of value in their local branch. From the seniors learning how to use a computer, to the Upper East Side culture vultures sitting in on classical concerts, to the beneficiaries of an outreach program to provide low-income homes with free internet, to the blow-in tourist gawkers who trundle through the Schwarzman building’s echoey high-ceilinged atrium, to the actual students and researchers working in its cool, hushed halls.
Indeed, it unavoidably reminded me of my first pilgrimage to Manhattan, where I happened upon my first-ever open-air film, a screening of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” which took place in Bryant Park. The film has a scene set in the Library building, which abuts the eastern end of that very park, meaning I could turn my head from Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard onscreen and look at the place where they go hunting through the card catalogs. It felt, to the visitor I was, like some casual cinematic alchemy of which only New York City could be capable.
Of course, there is selectivity going on here. There must be a fair amount of petty politicking, rivalry and friction gumming up the works of so unwieldy and sprawling an organization, but Wiseman elects not to show us any of that. Perhaps he’s putting blinders on, but the choice to focus instead on the endless parade of tirelessly good, dedicated people working harmoniously toward an unselfish end, is also where the film transcends its subject, to become less about a specific establishment, less even about a specific city, than about a grand, extravagantly humane concept.
‘Ex Libris’ is a lively, jostling monument to an idea that represents the very best of civilized society, and as such it is something we need desperately right now when so much evidence abounds of the worst of us. Because we cannot, as a species, be so very terrible after all, if we can conceive of and execute any idea as unapologetically intellectual, purposefully decent, and improbably democratic as that which is described by the simple word: library. [A]
Check out all our coverage of the 2017 Venice Film Festival here.
