What Are Libraries For?

It’s true that an institution as large and storied as the NYPL could furnish a half-dozen documentaries about everything from its identity as a vanguard public-private partnership to the architecture of its buildings before even reaching the topic of its holdings—some 8.7 million items in circulation, if you count ebooks, music, and movies along with physical tomes. This particular movie’s relative booklessness is noteworthy precisely because, at three-and-a-quarter hours, Ex Libris practically runs as long as a half-dozen shorter documentaries. If a movie of such great length isn’t asking us to think so much about the holdings of the library, then what is the point it’s trying to make? Par for the course with Fred Wiseman.

For 50 years, Wiseman has been making documentaries on shoestring budgets with small crews, focusing on institutions—everything from a Massachusetts insane asylum, in the famously censored Titicut Follies, to, more recently, New York City’s Jackson Heights neighborhood and Britain’s National Gallery. His movies range in duration from an hour long to six, with the majority falling somewhere around the three-and-a-half-hour mark. Whatever any of his movies might promise in trailers or synopses is usually a far cry from what Wiseman is actually invested in exploring. “What is this place and what happens here?” is only answered indirectly by the movies he sculpts around the questions that really guide his enterprise: What are the mechanics of this institution? Who uses it? To whose benefit? How is it changing? Who wants it to change? Who here thinks they have power? Who actually does?

The answers to these questions, as Wiseman’s movies universally demonstrate, are complicated and unpredictable, so it’s especially ironic that Ex Libris opens on Richard Dawkins of all people. Dawkins is giving a talk in the lobby of the NYPL’s iconic Beaux-Arts Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, or rather he’s giving his usual spiel on science and religion to an audience that fills the foyer. He insists that the real problem with religion isn’t stupidity (though plenty of religious people, he assures his listeners, are stupid without a doubt) but ignorance. Education is the road out of ignorance toward truth, to which Dawkins pledges his fealty (“I think I’d call myself a lover of truth”). The woman moderating this talk presses Dawkins to define what truth means to him; the bromide he offers in breathless and confident reply is swallowed up by the three hours of filmmaking that follow.

Not a moment is wasted in Ex Libris: Every scene is in conversation with every other scene. From that Dawkinsian preamble, Wiseman cuts around to a dozen or so of the NYPL’s 88 libraries and 4 research centers, with recurring visits to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at Lincoln Center and the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library; he features speakers both known (Elvis Costello, Ta-Nehisi Coates) and unknown (a dyspeptic young man presenting his research on the delicatessen as the hub of Jewish life in old New York, an audiobook recorder whose voice was obviously made for his profession); he peers in on roundtable discussions both public and private. In that last is a series of eight or so conversations between NYPL board members and librarians about digitization and funding for the library, paced gradually throughout the film and culminating in an end-of-fiscal-year meeting to denote the passage of time in the labyrinth into which Wiseman lures us.

At one turn in the maze we’re watching behind-the-scenes footage of archivists at the Library Services Center as they photograph old manuscripts for the digital collections. At another we’re joining in a dance class for senior citizens. Wherever Wiseman takes us, we see the ideas that motivate him—the relationship between language and politics and technology, the limits of education and what does and doesn’t further its reach, the need for innovation and imagination to repackage old stories and truths for new audiences—and we’re gently invited to play along. If all of this sounds grueling or overbearingly moralistic, you would need to be familiar with Wiseman’s homebrew of magic to understand why Ex Libris is anything but.

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My first exposure to Wiseman’s work came only a few years ago when I caught his 2013 documentary At Berkeley on television. Because Wiseman finances his documentaries largely independently and distributes them through his own company, Zipporah Films, viewing any of his 40-odd projects can be difficult. (Individuals can purchase DVDs of any of his films through the Zipporah website, though that assumes a level of trust in what you’re plunking down $20 for.) Occasionally one of them will show up on PBS’s Independent Lens (PBS has provided funding for many of Wiseman’s films).

Clocking in at four hours and four minutes, At Berkeley has a runtime that in other contexts could fairly be described as punishing. A certain kind of viewer will know almost immediately—from the long takes of philosophy instructors leading class discussions that jump-cut to exterior shots of janitors cleaning pedestrian walkways—if he has the mettle for this kind of stuff. Give Wiseman even 15 minutes of your attention, though, and you can quickly find yourself giving him hours. So it went with me as I sat, transfixed, through At Berkeley for two-and-a-half hours before noticing where the time had gone, and so it was with the couple seated next to me for Ex Libris. They came on a whim to see At Berkeley when its tour brought it to D.C. four years ago; planning on staying for only half of the film, they found themselves sitting rapt through the end and came back this year to reprise the experience with Wiseman’s latest.

A Wiseman film works on you slowly and imperceptibly. He never stages interviews, interposes B-roll that he hasn’t filmed himself, or identifies speakers with onscreen titles. Music is used sparingly and almost exclusively diegetically. Sometimes he edits scenes as though they were narrative material and not living documents, cutting up and splicing speech to achieve rhythmic interest or to draw out the most salient points of a conversation. At other times, he lets a scene run for five full minutes (or longer) without any edits at all, directing us to find interest in what we’re watching simply because Wiseman’s camera has bothered recording it. He films speakers from the same focal length, with the same audio quality, with the same kinds of camera angles. In a Wiseman film, it doesn’t matter if you’re Richard Dawkins or a circulation-desk librarian in the Bronx: Everyone is on an equal footing, as deserving of our attention as anyone else.

Ex Libris uses a poetic structure similar to that Wiseman employs in both At Berkeley and 2015’s In Jackson Heights. The repeating pattern—(1) exterior establishing shot of a new branch of the library, (2) interior establishing shot, (3) speaker, and (4) cutaway to interlocutor or related inanimate object—helps to structure the film and to hold our attention the way that a dexterous rhyme scheme does. In Ex Libris, Wiseman returns most frequently to the Schwarzman Building in mid-Manhattan and uses his footage of the staff and board meetings that happen there as refrains to mark the passage of seasons. For punctuation, Wiseman intersperses musical performances, still shots of the library’s holdings—mostly art and periodicals, though the Gutenberg Bible’s appearance some two hours into the movie is prominent as one of the only times a physical book is the subject of a scene—and interludes of library technicians and staff performing the roles that make the whole system run.

In another scene from ‘Ex Libris,’ a worker at the NYPL’s library services center files old photographs. (Zipporah Films)

The formula doesn’t grow stale because it leaves plenty of room for surprise, both in terms of what Wiseman might cut to at any given moment (a Day of the Dead parade, a hands-on lesson in how to read Braille) or what personalities might wander on camera. The surge of recognition we have whenever someone famous turns up (hello, Patti Smith!) is second to the lightning that strikes when we meet the anonymous characters who are more central to the day-to-day life of the library. A job fair at one of the NYPL’s Bronx branches gives a momentary soapbox to an enthusiastic career coach whose power of rhetoric rivals any of the more celebrated public speakers who show up onscreen; the patrons who participate in a town hall at the Macomb’s Bridge branch in Harlem are as passionate and articulate in explaining the obstacles to improving education in an underprivileged minority community as any of the scholars lecturing about educational disparities and systemic racism to better-off patrons in mid-Manhattan.

A documentary filmmaker doesn’t just fall upon all these gems without putting real effort into finding them. Wiseman and his cameraman film on location for 8 to 12 weeks, capturing several hundred hours of footage, which Wiseman then spends the ensuing months editing by himself down to a three- or four-hour-long movie. The editing room is where Wiseman finds the movie—or rather where the movie finds itself. Amusingly, Wiseman describes his process as “highly rational and perhaps nonrational. Part of it is deductive, part of it is associative, and part of it is mysterious. I don’t know that I’m aware of all aspects of it, and I’m not sure I want to be aware of all aspects of it.”

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An existential question underlies Ex Libris: What are libraries for? Librarians and library patrons alike have been asking this at least since the rise of the Internet and the promise (and peril) it brings of digitization and rapid access to all the world’s knowledge. An hour into the film, architect Francine Houben takes the floor at a master-planning forum for the Schwarzman Building and presents a pertinent thesis: “For me, libraries are not just about books. That’s what a lot of people think, that it’s a storage space for books. No, libraries are about people who want knowledge delivered to them.”

If we accept this definition, then we’re left with a corollary question: Which people are most deserving of the knowledge a library has on offer? One philosophy might hold that a library’s principal duty is to serve the work of serious scholars. In this view, the library’s resources ought to be allocated toward building up the institution as a physical repository of civilizational wisdom, a hub for transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. A competing camp will maintain that the library’s primary function is decidedly more democratic. Libraries exist to further the enlightenment and well-being of the public; it’s less important that a library’s stacks be comprehensive than that its spaces extend equality of access to everyone, regardless of class or profession. For many libraries, this problem resolves itself. The Library of Congress and many university libraries fit almost purely into the first category; most local public libraries are comfortable fitting into the second.

In a scene depicted in ‘Ex Libris,’ Children build and program Lego robots in an after-school program in the NYPL’s Westchester Square branch. (Zipporah Films)

The NYPL is in a much more difficult situation, and its attempts to reconcile the differing needs of its users—from researchers working with the special collections at its Bryant Park branch to families with young children in the Bronx—have sometimes been controversial. The Central Library Plan, a 2012 proposal that would have, among other things, closed two branches and relocated millions of books from the NYPL’s flagship Manhattan edifice to a storage facility in New Jersey was met with such vehement opposition, especially from scholars, that the plan was abandoned in 2014. These days, as we learn from the board meetings throughout Ex Libris, the NYPL administration has turned its attention to expanding the library’s digital collections and capabilities to better serve its patrons and address larger problems of access to technology while leaving its physical stacks more or less unchanged.

A still more urgent question emerges from the scenes that Wiseman fills in around these administrative meetings. Insofar as a library is a repository of knowledge, whether it exists in a physical book or in the cloud, it’s also an arbiter of knowledge—and, for that matter, truth. Context is especially important for determining whether a library is fulfilling its duties responsibly. A research library with the complete works of Marx in circulation isn’t doing as great a service to truth-seekers as it might think it is if it doesn’t also carry volumes of homilies by the early church fathers on wealth and poverty. Likewise, a seminary library stocked with all of the latest New Atheist literature but not a single book by Nietzsche is poorly equipped to teach anyone about belief and unbelief.

For the NYPL, context is often a question of socioeconomic status and racial inequality. The frequent trips Ex Libris takes to NYPL branches in Harlem and the Bronx show us how librarians and volunteers there micromanage and advocate on behalf of their neighborhoods, to ensure that even the most underprivileged New Yorkers have as much access to truth- and soul-affirming resources as any of the wealthier patrons we see in the lower Manhattan libraries. The truth, as former Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture director Khalil Gibran Muhammad offhandedly tells an audience at the Macomb’s Bridge branch, is complicated. They don’t need to be reminded, but perhaps some of Wiseman’s viewers do.

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The problem with many documentaries these days is that filmmaker and viewer alike treat them like vaccinations. You watch the new movie about the injustice du jour (police brutality, animal cruelty, inequality of opportunity in education) and you’re effectively inoculated against having to think any more about the subject or do anything about it. You saw the movie so now you’re educated, end of story. The results-oriented moviemaker, meanwhile, tosses in a URL at the end of the film or flashes a hashtag to help spread the word on social media and counts himself blessed if even 5 percent of all viewers follow through on the call to activism.

This is never the case with Wiseman’s films. If their absurd-seeming runtimes are good for one thing in particular, it’s for instilling humility in the face of the inherent complexity of human beings and their institutions. Three hours with the NYPL is barely enough to scratch the surface of all that goes on in and around its stacks, meeting rooms, lecture halls, phone centers, and trash rooms. One might fear that this kind of filmmaking would produce a depressing epistemological pessimism, paralyzing us in the face of more knowledge and context than we could ever hope fully to understand. Instead, we are galvanized by the joy of discovery, of truths previously unknown to us and of our own limitations—which, it turns out, might not be so bad after all.

A more didactic documentary could not provide the effective education a Wiseman movie offers. He surprises us by showing us things we never knew we didn’t know, whether as perceptible as the day-to-day interactions of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds with their libraries or as secretive as the system of conveyor belts that returns library books to circulation. By inviting us to spend so much time with a single subject, he helps us see the larger picture of the systems we normally experience unthinkingly.

In the final scene of Ex Libris, porcelain artist Edmund de Waal references a line of Primo Levi’s that’s germane to the movie as a whole. In de Waal’s paraphrase: “The manner of what we make defines us.” In the case of the NYPL, the technologies and habits the institution has embraced speak to a mission of offering access to human knowledge across neighborhoods and generations. Whether the system works as best as it could isn’t for Wiseman to say. Wiseman observes, he curates, and he juxtaposes, but he never forces a conclusion on his viewer. Applying Levi’s words to Wiseman himself, the curiosity, humanism, and democratizing spirit he brings to his films mark him as not just a great filmmaker, of which we have plenty, but a much rarer and more valuable thing: a great teacher.

Tim Markatos is a writer living in Washington, D.C.