October 9, 2017 The Nation.^37
and Fortitude (written in part for The Nation,
and published in 2015 just before Ex Libris
went into production). Wiseman is inter-
ested in librarians as wonderful people—as
comfortable making an impromptu transla-
tion from Middle English (while denying
that they’re good at it) as they are teaching
a blind person to read Braille, or directing a
woman to copies of steamship manifests so
she can trace her family’s arrival in America.
He has edited Ex Libris to suggest two broad
questions about these multitalented public
servants: How does the NYPL keep the
librarians working? And what is the broader
meaning of what they do?
The answer to the first question comes
in the scenes of library president Marx and
his executive crew and can be summed up in
one word: money. Ex Libris is in some ways
an essay on fund-raising, or (to be more
precise) the interplay between public allo-
cations and private philanthropy. The first
time you see Marx, he’s giving a talk on this
subject to library supporters, using the ex-
ample of the NYPL’s digital-access initiative
to illustrate how donations pouring in from
one source can uncork funds from the other.
The last time you see him—some three
hours later in the film’s running time—he’s
in his conference room, planning how to
keep the money flowing toward the NYPL
in the city government’s next budget. The
challenge, he says, is to match the language
of solicitations to the NYPL’s goals. The big,
simple message for donors must somehow
reflect the priorities the library has set for
meeting the public’s needs.
You hear a lot in the conference room
about those needs in their immediate and
practical form. The agenda includes provid-
ing a reasonable degree of daytime shelter
for people who live on the streets (“The
library is a place where we don’t keep our
distance from the homeless,” Marx tells
his colleagues), making up for deferred
maintenance in the branches, and balanc-
ing the money spent on books that the
general public wants today with the cost of
books that will be useful in the future. But
the larger meaning of the institution’s role
emerges elsewhere: in scenes of the library’s
public programs of interviews, lectures, and
discussions. Here again Wiseman had a wide
choice of moments to include. He selected
those that suggest the most radical agenda.
Ex Libris begins with a long excerpt from
a book talk with the scientist and secularist
Richard Dawkins. (All excerpts from the pub-
lic programs are long. Wiseman, as usual, is
in no hurry in this film; he believes ideas need
time to develop.) Calling for nonreligious
people to make themselves heard, Dawkins
insists that some ideas are simply not true—
the theories of young-earth believers, for
example—and must be labeled as such. As
for the supposed absence of awe and wonder
from atheists’ lives, he says that nothing
could be more moving than to contemplate
the reality of a living cell, in all its stupefying
complexity.
And so, by borrowing Dawkins’s words,
Wiseman suggests the terms that will de-
scribe the NYPL through the rest of the
movie. The institution is thrilling in its com-
plexity and resolute in its service to the truth.
The complexity of the library’s operations is,
of course, seen everywhere in Ex Libris. But
when it comes to the issue of propagating
the truth, Wiseman has decided to focus on
one fact among all the others that the library
addresses: the continuing legacy of slavery.
By the time Ex Libris is over, you’ve heard
about opposition to the slave trade by 17th-
century Muslim clerics in Africa and the de-
fense of slavery by writers in the antebellum
South. You’ve listened to Ta-Nehisi Coates
talk about his family’s reverence for Malcolm
X, and have sat in on a discussion held in a tiny
branch library between Khalil Gibran Mu-
hammad (at the time director of the NYPL’s
Schomburg Center, and a current member of
The Nation’s editorial board) and people out-
raged over McGraw-Hill’s whitewashing of
slavery in recent textbooks. When you see a
performing-arts workshop on sign-language
interpretation for the deaf, the text being
used for illustration is the Declaration of
Independence. When you peek into a meet-
ing of the board of trustees, Kwame Anthony
Appiah is giving a presentation about the
works of Phillis Wheatley.
For Wiseman, this is where the scholarly
and social missions of the library intersect:
in speaking the truth about slavery and its
aftermath, while providing services in many
neighborhoods where people still bear the
marks of slavery’s more obvious burdens.
He gives a very fine-grained picture of the
library in this dual role, neither ignoring the
day-to-day operations of the NYPL system
nor neglecting the beauty and delight of its
collections and magnificent main building.
There is so much beauty and delight in Ex
Libris, in fact, and so much vivid personality
in all the people, that a lackadaisical viewer
could be excused for summing up the film
as a loving tribute. So it is, I suppose. But
even at age 87, there is nothing lackadaisical
about Wiseman. The sly old wizard con-
structs a top hat right before your eyes—and
then, while you’re admiring its sheen, pulls
out a 500-year-old rabbit.T
heo Anthony was born in 1989, about
60 years after Frederick Wiseman
came into the world, and until re-
cently had made only a few short
documentaries. You wouldn’t want
to curse him with high expectations for his
first feature-length documentary, especially
when he’s given it the sure-to-please title
Rat Film. But the deliberately strange essay
he’s composed—on what you might call the
natural history of racism—is so inventive
and, appropriately, so biting that he’ll have
to get used to being praised.
Unlike Wiseman, Anthony revels in voice-
overs, soundtrack music, informative text
overlays, and on-camera interviews, especially
when they come at you from unexpected
angles. Before you can get your bearings in
Rat Film, a voice has recited a series of mock-
academic titles (“Presentation of a Video
Game,” “Explanation of an Experiment”);
the exhaust-pipe flames of a drag racer have
erupted in slow motion; a string quartet has
played something inappropriately meditative;
and the head of a snake has briefly ventured
across a corner of the screen. Meanwhile, the
ostensible subject of this documentary—rats
in Baltimore—has not yet come into focus.
Fuzzy video, shot in an alley at night, looks
down at a rat trapped in a garbage can. The
average Norway rat, the mock-academic voice
informs you, can jump 32 inches, whereas the
regulation height of a Baltimore garbage can
is 34. (Is this true? I don’t know.) At last the
picture sharpens, and you see the rat clearly,
its eyes shining furiously in the dark.
Having unbalanced you, Anthony proceeds
to go backward in time and simultaneous-
ly outward into Baltimore’s neighborhoods.
Backward: to a history of city ordinances,
housing covenants, and bank-loan policies
that confined African Americans to wretched
slums; to the declaration, during World War II,
of a war on rats, conducted with poison in these
same slums; and to the writings of a prominent
Johns Hopkins scientist who didn’t draw much
of a distinction between the rats and the slum
dwellers. Outward: to the backyards and al-
leyways today where some Baltimore residents
hunt rats for sport (with tools including blow-
guns and a rod-and-reel), and where a chatty,
philosophical pest-control officer makes his
rounds. Baltimore has never had a rat problem,
he declares; it has always been a people prob-
lem. He likes rats—they put food on his table.
Rat Film is a movie for people who feel
that the world we’ve made is so unbelievably
outrageous that it can best be conveyed in a
scramble. Viewers who demand a point-by-
point exposition will not be happy. The rest of
us can hang on for the ride. Q