Ex-Libris – The New York Public Library review: A complex but surprisingly coherent picture of an institution that is more than a library and its occupants.
Ex-Libris – The New York Public Library review by Steve Palace.
Ex Libris Review
If you wanted a straightforward way of documenting the New York Public Library on film, you’d probably start by interviewing the staff. Then you’d take your cameras out into this colossal structure for a “day in the life” style chronicle of a great multicultural institution.
The place is so vast, surely it would be pointless trying to capture the whole thing in one go? To a filmmaker like Frederick Wiseman that obviously sounds like a challenge rather than a question. Ex Libris takes the form of a series of little sequences, which knitted together create a complex but also surprisingly coherent picture of the library and its occupants.
It opens with an onstage talk starring that bastion of elitist knowledge Prof. Richard Dawkins. Quite a gambit to open the film on if Wiseman was hoping to hook the casual viewer. There’s an interesting quote from Dawkins here: “Ignorance is no crime, you just shouldn’t be so loudmouthed about it.” That in a nutshell sums up centuries of intellectual endeavour. A little later on a library employee says something which counters this: “Education is the… solution to inequality.” And he works at what amounts to the ultimate teachers’ resource.
Ex Libris Review
You’ll either be intrigued or put off but the one thing I bet you won’t do is stop watching. From the get go Wiseman’s ‘chapters’ cover a wide area. We see the call centre where trained staff tackle questions about everything from borrowing limits to unicorns. There are music recitals, kids doing art, wrangles over funding and a fascinating glimpse at the world’s biggest free resource of pictures. Staff boast about how Andy Warhol made off with their stock.
Put simply, the director is taking us on a wander through the NYPL, capturing what it’s like to eavesdrop on conversations, poke your head in rooms and above all see or hear about stuff you never saw or knew before. Ex Libris is ambitious and demanding yet playful and engaging at the same time.
A major part of the “fun” is the way it purposefully slows you down and adjusts you to the tempo of the establishment. This can drag if you find a particular section dull, but the prospect of another chapter around the corner holds your attention. Arguably the film gets distracted at times, as if it’s trying to break off into a separate documentary, but overall the flow is good.
Ex Libris Review
What it boils down to is whether you want to sit there for over 3 hours taking it all in. Personally I found the running time excessive, despite the presumed intention of getting you to throttle back as a viewer. Of course I’m sure the production could have wound up ten times longer, and that Wiseman edited as well as he could, but even so I found it frustrating. Parts are static enough to have worked on radio and personally a 2 hour Ex Libris with 80-odd mins of deleted scenes would’ve been preferable for this knowledge-seeker.
I definitely want to go and see the library for myself, so it’s done a great job in that respect. I also genuinely believe it would interest a wide audience. But if you don’t mind a film that makes you work for a change then Ex Libris is a minor triumph.
Ex Libris – The New York Public Library review by Steve Palace, June 2018.
Ex Libris – The New York Public Library is currently playing at the Sydney Film Festival.
