Frederick Wiseman’s work is unique. Between 1967 and 2023, he directed fifty films. He looked at social institutions like welfare or police departments; he made films about places, such as Belfast, Maine and Monrovia, Indiana. He made a film about a horse race track and one about the Paris Opera Ballet.
Most of Wiseman’s films are very long and look at subjects with a level of depth, and patience that most filmmakers don’t have the nerve to approach.
Wiseman’s work is often labelled cinema verité, meaning that he didn’t interfere with the scenes he filmed or set up events; he did no interviews; he just watched.
But he knew that the very presence of the camera changed things. He chose what to film, where to put the camera, and he edited the films. So he called them “reality fictions,” admitting that while the films were taken from actuality, they represented his understanding of the world.
In 2017, Wiseman made Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. It’s three hours and 17 minutes long, and it’s soon clear that it’s not about The New York Public Library; it’s an immersion into one of the great repositories of human knowledge and experience in the world, with the mission to make all that knowledge and experience available to as many people as possible. A speaker at the Lincoln Center branch says:
We share the library’s mission of being a warm and welcoming place that’s committed to education and committed to everyone’s individual passions and curiosity.
The range of what the library offers makes your jaw drop: historical manuscripts, great novels, a speaker on the early history of slavery. A blind woman teaches another blind woman to read Braille; a fire fighter in the Bronx talks about his work; people read microfilm materials on colorectal cancer, Black soldiers and newspapers from a hundred fifty years ago. In a Chinatown branch, readers concentrate on Chinese language newspapers. A speaker talks about the importance to Jewish culture in New York of delicatessens, and the sexual implications of salami and baloney. The head of the picture collection reminds librarians that the New York Public Library contains the largest free circulating picture collection in the world.
Ex Libris does not show these things as quick hits about the many delights of the New York Public Library; Wiseman shows things in depth and at length – long stretches of the talks on salami, or slavery, or an onstage interview with famed writer Joyce Carol Oates, although in keeping with his documentary approach, he identifies no one. If you recognize someone, good for you; otherwise you’re left with the direct experience of hearing and seeing interesting people.
Most of the time, the film shows people in a context – speaking to a large audience in an auditorium, in meetings, in one of the many reading rooms,
People are surrounded by books, which suggests that there are thousands of things to read about in addition to whatever any one person is reading.
And over and over the film shows the grand entrance to the main library and long marble hallways -- the essence of the library is monumental.
And the range of human beings using the library and its branches is remarkable – people in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, genders, and just about all of them focused on reading and learning.
Ex Libris is a wonderful tribute not just to reading and knowledge, but to the marvelous thrill of a great public institution.
