36 The Nation. October 9, 2017I
f you think of great libraries as archives
of the human condition, maintained to
preserve everything we’ve thought and
done, then you’d figure Frederick Wise-
man would eventually make a film about
the New York Public Library. He, too, car-
ries the totalizing virus.
Over the course of a 50-year career, Wise-
man has sought to capture the living essence of
an entire world’s worth of institutions—from
madhouses and wards for the terminally ill
to great theater companies, universities, and
ballet schools; from welfare offices, zoos, and
meatpacking plants to nuclear-weapons train-
ing facilities, art museums, state legislatures,
and Central Park. At his most optimistic, he
turns his attention to towns or neighborhoods
where he sees multiple forces interacting for
the common good: in Belfast, Maine, or the
Jackson Heights section of Queens, New
York. At his most scathing—in Public Hous-
ing, for example—the institutions he studies
seem almost deliberately constructed to make
people fall apart.
Look at libraries differently, though—as
providers of services to the urban masses—
and it will seem just as inevitable that Wise-
man would get around to them. He, too,
is an agent of social change. The title of
“muckraker” is, of course, too simple for
him, despite the scandal of his first films:
Titicut Follies (1967), which the State of Mas-
sachusetts tried to ban from public view, and
High School (1968), which, in the words of one
reviewer, showed the systematic conversionof “warm, breathing teenagers” into “forty-
year-old mental eunuchs.”
Still, just as an activist streak runs through
the branches of the New York Public Library,
so too does it animate all but Wiseman’s most
contemplative works. He is, famously, an ob-
servational filmmaker, who refuses to conduct
interviews, add explanatory texts or voice-
overs to the image, layer extraneous music onto
his scenes, or even provide a caption to tell you
who’s talking. You get nothing except what you
would have seen and heard if you’d been pres-
ent with him when the action was happening.
And yet, through his choice of what material
to show and how to sequence it, he often con-
structs implicit arguments that address not so
much the arrogance of power as its mindless,
grinding indifference. These implied polem-
ics are all the more persuasive for seeming to
emerge from the evidence before you.
In his 42nd film, Ex Libris: The New York
Public Library, which receives its theatrical
premiere in September at Film Forum in New
York, Wiseman looks at his subject from both
his Olympian and activist perspectives, and
with attention to both major aspects of the
NYPL’s mission: a center for scholarship and
a resource for the city’s poor, ill-schooled, and
homeless. Following an organizing scheme
he’s used before, Wiseman bounces back and
forth in his scenes between the marble palace
on Fifth Avenue and a scattering of humble
branch libraries in the Bronx and Harlem;
public events and back-of-the-house labor;
executives planning the system’s future andBOOK RATS
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library and Rat Film
by STUART KLAWANS
ordinary people using what the NYPL offers.
Pay attention to context and do a little In-
ternet research, and you can find out that the
uncaptioned decision makers overheard in
their deliberations are NYPL president Tony
Marx, chief library officer Mary Lee Ken-
nedy (who has moved on since the film was
shot), chief operating officer Iris Weinshall,
and vice president for government and com-
munity affairs George Mihaltses. I identify
them here to make the point that Wiseman
had access to serious people talking about
critical issues. He also had access to many
anonymous members of the rank and file to
whom these leaders are responsible, includ-
ing toddlers singing “Old MacDonald” at
story time, kids doing homework and build-
ing robots after school, a researcher combing
through Timothy Leary’s correspondence
in the manuscript room, career-seekers at a
jobs fair, and an elderly woman in Chinatown
learning to use a computer.
Negotiating between these two groups, and
sparking the movie to emotional life, are the
heroes of Ex Libris: librarians. Some of them
come before you as marvels of patience and
dry humor. A reference librarian on the phone
desk calmly informs a caller that unicorns are
actually imaginary; an after-school-program
librarian in the Bronx advises a kid, “If you’re
holding onto the robot to make it stop moving,
then that means you need to change some-
thing on the computer.” Others are bearers of
infectious enthusiasm. They boast to visiting
students that in the picture collection, you can
look up subjects such as “dogs in action”; they
proudly show off an Albrecht Dürer print of a
rhinoceros, while explaining that in the early
16th century, this treasured item was a kind of
newspaper. Most crucially for the tone of Ex
Libris, the librarians offer care and warmth,
whether they’re doling out picture books to the
schoolkids who squirm around them or distrib-
uting Wi-Fi boxes, with a sincere “Congratula-
tions,” to a line of West Harlem residents who
have qualified for the free rental.
I pause to note that Wiseman could have
put other librarians on the screen had he
wanted to—the ones, for example, who have
kept me waiting 40 minutes for a book that
turned out to have gone missing, and then
tossed back the call slip as if they were flip-
ping the bird. But they wouldn’t have suited
the theme he has in mind for Ex Libris.M
ore a collage artist than an investi-
gative reporter, more a phenome-
nologist than a historian, Wiseman
has given a much different treat-
ment of the NYPL than you would
find, say, in Scott Sherman’s book PatienceThe Milstein Reading Room, New York Public Library.COURTESY OF ZIPPORAH FILMS