Ex-Lib­ris: The New York Pub­lic Library

This is not a film about books. Nor is it about build­ings con­tain­ing books. Both fea­ture promi­nent­ly, but one gets the impres­sion that doc­u­men­tary mae­stro Fred­er­ick Wise­man isn’t all that inter­est­ed in either. If you find the prospect of an eye-water­ing 197-minute tour through the New York Pub­lic Library off-putting, be pre­pared to hear him out. It is unde­ni­ably a mag­num opus, but one that has been refined to the brisk­ness of a novella.

What is Ex-Lib­ris about then? Wiseman’s propo­si­tion seems sim­i­lar to Gilbert Ryle’s con­cept of ​“the ghost in the machine” – that if you were to take away the halls, shelves and archival mate­r­i­al, you would be left with the very essence of a library: its peo­ple. To prove his the­sis, Wise­man has raced, cam­era in hand, between the branch­es of the NYPL, observ­ing the extent of its inclusivity.

His film­mak­ing style is essen­tial to this task – watch­ing from a dis­tance, then intri­cate­ly weav­ing the threads togeth­er in the cut­ting room to sub­tly probe you to think. These paths rarely play out as expect­ed: what appears to be a gov­ern­ing board con­cerned with access sud­den­ly won­ders if the ​“prob­lem” of home­less peo­ple falling asleep in their build­ings could be solved by bar­ring them from the premis­es – please find me a stu­dent that hasn’t dozed off dur­ing an all-nighter.

Ex-Lib­ris opens with Richard Dawkins out-Dawkins­ing him­self with a par­tic­u­lar­ly bom­bas­tic tirade against fun­da­men­tal­ist ​“stu­pid­i­ty” – cut to a librar­i­an explain­ing to a caller that the Guten­berg Bible is cur­rent­ly unavail­able for view­ing. Wiseman’s bit­ing humour shines through with­out utter­ing a direct word, bury­ing pol­i­tics beneath the sur­face. How­ev­er, the lat­ter scene is more deter­mined to derive respect for peo­ple whose jobs require astound­ing patience – the calm­ness of a man inform­ing some­one that uni­corns don’t exist is almost as inspir­ing as his abil­i­ty to prove this by trans­lat­ing its ear­li­est record­ed use from Mid­dle English.

Judge­ment is not being passed, at least not explic­it­ly, reveal­ing the uni­ver­sal poten­tial of the library’s resources. A mem­ber of a geri­atric book group is enrap­tured by Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s per­cep­tion of human love (dis­missed by anoth­er as ​“Love­mak­ing in the Time of Cholera”), while oth­ers expe­ri­ence sim­i­lar eupho­ria dur­ing a dance class. Else­where, an elder­ly gen­tle­man requests an L Frank Baum book about Glin­da from The Wiz­ard of Oz – there are no bound­aries between high and low cul­tures, and push-pin is most assertive­ly as good as poetry.

Wise­man applies this log­ic to his selec­tion of sub­jects, rang­ing from Jew­ish delis to the music of Elvis Costel­lo and Pat­ti Smith. Each has been cho­sen for their emer­gent themes, some­times only for a word like ​‘slav­ery’. Inten­tion­al sem­blance blurs with coin­ci­dence, such as Costel­lo mock­ing Mar­garet Thatch­er before see­ing a bust of her head in a lat­er shot. With Wise­man, it is best to assume pur­pose and metic­u­lous method­ol­o­gy, demand­ing you check out his urban epic more than once.