Last Friday, I asked mom, “Do you want to see a three hour seventeen minute documentary about the New York Public Library?” She assented, and with the opening scene of Richard Dawkins speaking in the lobby of the flagship, the whole evening nearly got derailed because my mom raised me Christian fundamentalist, but you don’t have to be fundamentalist to find him controversial, particularly with his possible Islamophobic comments. If you expect a long documentary about libraries to not have provocative albeit academic moments, then this film isn’t for you, but as a long, seemingly unstructured documentary about an institution that I consider home, I still found Ex Libris: The New York Public Library challenging to watch though worth the effort. I’m sure that if I had the capacity for a second viewing, I would get more out of it, but that is a young person’s game, and I’m running out of time.
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library is my first Frederick Wiseman film so I have no idea if it is characteristic of his work. Unlike most filmmakers, Wiseman can’t be criticized for showing and not telling. It is an observational documentary, which means that Wiseman shows us people and places, but we must watch the scene closely to figure out where we are, who is being featured and what is happening in this scene. The majority of the film unfolds in various locations within the main branch, but the camera often ventures outside to give a broader context of the surrounding city and ventures down the street to smaller branches throughout the city to see what is happening there.
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library challenges the viewer’s preconceptions of what a library is. It is not simply a static place with books, but a focal point of every community providing a variety of essential services: job fairs, internet access, teaching blind people to read and old people how to use a computer. The people who work within this institution are the unofficial stars of the film as they eagerly anticipate how knowledge will be transmitted in the future so they are prepared to meet that need. The institution’s board is clearly eager to evolve, and the employees are living, breathing encyclopedias.
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library also shows how the library, unlike some institutions of learning, enthusiastically explores topics that make others feel uncomfortable: politics, slavery, immigration, Islam. They are concerned about the educational trend signaled in Texas textbooks to revise history because people don’t have to burn books if you fill them with lies. While knowledge should be neutral because the truth is simply a fact, telling the truth can still be seen as a political act depending on if the truth detracts from the image of those in power, which explains why some people hate libraries and prefer propaganda.
We are conscious that we are in an era in which we “feed the wolves, starve the shepherds.” The library as an institution is the good shepherd, and the New York Public Library is one of the rare revered institutions that is supported by private and public interests so it is able to feed all of its sheep’s needs, practical and intellectual. At a time when the wolves are gutting education to create a population unable to defend itself because they are not taught what a wolf looks like and do not realize that when they look in the mirror, they are actually a part of the herd, Ex Libris: The New York Public Library is a beacon of hope that will preserve this knowledge and find a way to distribute the truth as broadly as possible.