I think a trilogy of recent Wiseman films has been formed, that we could call in Transition. The three would be At Berkeley, In Jackson Heights, and Ex Libris, where each of the films devote considerable attention to responses to some substantial alteration in how their work is conducted. In At Berkeley, it is the effect of severe budget cuts - how a public university responds to reductions in public funding. In Jackson Heights has large concerns about local businesses being driven out by changing economics. And Ex Libris clearly pays a lot of attention to what technology is doing to reading and learning, as the physical book gives way to the computer screen. Each of the films is clearly about quite a lot more (and I’m done saying that because it’s so obvious by now), but transition means we’re catching places at a particular point in time - seeing how change is being responded to, what might need preserving, and what the future could be looking like. The films may be a record of things about to be gone or of struggles for survival or of progressive change - the churn can be complex. It gets trickier with Ex Libris because this also clearly belongs with Wiseman’s Culture films about dance and theater and art, where the past is venerated and upheld and stored. How transition and preservation can be dually respected is quite the challenge, and we see Ex Libris confront the collision of the past and the future in lots of ways. That title, by the way, is maybe one of the multiple meaning titles like Meat and Primate and others we’ve noted. Ex Libris, those bookplates that we’ve stuck in books to identify ownership, also suggests in this context the death of the physical book. Just as we might ask what is the book, certainly we’re also asking what now is the library.
Like the Berkeley campus, the New York Public Library is one of the great ones and is a chance to see possibilities to aspire to. There is virtually nothing in the film to shake our heads at or bemoan the loss of. We’ll get passing references to homeless problems or to the institution wanting a little more money, but we get few references to anything going wrong. No underpaid workers or dissatisfied patrons or underserved communities. About the worst we hear is that readers of popular novels in e-book form have long waits for their turn and that textbooks in Texas and elsewhere are in drastic need of revision. It’s our turn here instead mainly to focus on inspiration - to hear great talents express their admiration for other great talents and to appreciate the ways authors learn from past authors and create their own work, and the role of libraries in facilitating that process. The film celebrates the world of ideas as few films do, in a truly inspiring manner. It feels like a summary Wiseman film as well, encompassing previous concerns and commenting upon itself quite regularly.
One smart structuring device is his use of library talks to bring out big subjects and to present diverse views. He’s never been inclined toward celebrities, as we’ve seen, but he gets close here with Elvis Costello and Patti Smith, although as with the appearance of Pavarotti and Battle in Central Park, just about everyone has done these talks, so he could have gone for even bigger names if that’s all he was after. But Costello is mainly a chance for a film clip of his musician father which Wiseman characteristically shows in its entirety (no abbreviated songs for him, if he can help it), which is like a little genealogical dip into the archive, and he’s also got a few things to add about being free to say what he wants in a democracy. Smith is of course an author too, and she’s full of great ideas, from a tribute to Jean Genet’s “A Thief’s Journal” on to sounding very Wisemanesque in her speaking about how she prefers fiction even though she writes nonfiction, and with her range of subjects, she “was very interested in finding a way to braid all these things together”, which becomes her Abrupt End of Scene Line, as Wiseman keeps his own braiding going. Wiseman is weaving together kindred spirits right from the beginning, when the first speaker is the British evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins who gets our quest for knowledge off to a start with the film’s opening lines: “Ignorance is no crime. We're all ignorant of lots of things." He then goes on to talk about links between science and art, and we know quickly we’re in a Wiseman film. We might as well get to the other bookend on this, the final wonderful talk by Edmund de Waal, a British artist, writer, and porcelain maker, who sounds deeply Wisemanesque too as he talks about his own work, quoting Primo Levi along the way about “reflecting yourself in your work, on the pleasure of seeing your creature grow” and is spot on again saying “process is not to be skated over, the manner of what we make defines us” which sounds even more appropriate for a film-maker so regularly depicting process in considerable detail. While we’re there, it’s an amazing ending for a film ostensibly about a library for an interviewer to say he wants to talk about de Waal’s relation to music and then starts playing a recording of an unidentified musical piece which goes directly into the final credits and which we continue hearing through until the credits are over (shades of In Jackson Heights there too). So we’ve gone from porcelain to artistic method to hearing music and out. This time no final library shot or city scene or last words - instead a melding of thoughts about the creative process and the influences an artist may feel. Those are ambitions well beyond looking at physical books becoming digital.
As this is something like film number nine set in New York, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Wiseman is attracted to the many branches in the library system, I think the library system covers Queens and the Bronx as well as Manhattan, and we wind up visiting something like eight or so of those branches in addition to our considerable time in the main famous twin lion building. We make a couple of visits at different points in the film to the Bronx Library Center, one for a short no dialog scene of a woodwind quartet performance, one of several musical performances in the film, and this another where we seem to spend a lot of time looking at close-ups of faces in the somewhat sparse audience, shades of that portrait tendency I was tracing back to National Gallery. The bigger scene here is a Job Expo, one that a sign tells us they’ve been doing for five years running. Wiseman clearly enjoys the variety of jobs being discussed, all somewhere in the public sector, from fire inspector to U.S. Border Patrol to the Army to a local health center. The different delivery styles of those pitching job opportunities are also enjoyable to see, from pride in their work to fairly rote deliveries of written comments. The Border Patrol guy makes grand claims that their job entails "Safeguarding the American people from terrorism, drug smuggling, and illegal entry into our country”, maybe a strange message to bring to the Bronx, and the Army guy is rather more direct "You know what we do, we do defend the country”. This may sound like odd stuff for a library, but it’s a combination of Wiseman going for things he likes when he finds them and the clear picture we get that libraries are very much involved in serving their communities in a whole bunch of different ways that go well beyond checking out books. The branch visits are full too of things done in tandem with schools, like after school tutoring programs and how even parents might have problems with the New Math high school curriculum, so they’re responsive to that too. The partnerships between schools and libraries to help kids are a regular subject.
The Internet and digital issues are another major subject, the major part of that transitional time libraries are facing. A significant partner of the library is the City government (half their budget comes from there), and one joint program is the distribution of wifi hotspots to provide internet access. We get a real “process” sequence of hearing all the rules in place for handing them out, on to seeing the line of patrons finally receiving them. At one of the library staff meetings, we also find out that much more funding is needed for this program to have greater impact. At another meeting, someone smartly links up three subjects of great concern to this film, from libraries to education to inequality, in one of those excellent Wiseman Abrupt End of Scene Lines: "Education, the access to information, is the fundamental solution over time to inequality. And I think its power cannot be underestimated." It’s an expansive view that this film’s breadth of interests greatly supports. That same intention also brings up the other half of this access equation, libraries needing to digitize their books and extensive other materials and putting them online. One person calls this “The Holy Grail of the 21st Century”, and Ex Libris is sounding like it belongs in that time capsule again to mark the growing awareness of this goal. Looking backward, we do see people looking at microfilm spools of old newspapers, one of the recognitions that libraries have long made attempts at preserving the past through whatever available technologies they could muster. It’s also nice to get a quick view at high quality scanners of books, still needing to be done a page turn at a time, and a fellow scanning large maps by piecing together several scans. (There is also a brilliant little Processing sequence here, showing the conveyor belts, barcode scanners, and workers required to sort out books going back to different branches.) These efforts are a little like the preservation scenes in National Gallery in this case watching how we can get from the analog to the digital. Someday this will look like stagecoaches heading out past the frontier back in the early days.
Major attention in Ex Libris is devoted to African-American culture, and even though the film is only a few years old, it already feels ahead of its time, showing both local communities and the New York Public Library as very aware of Black Lives Matter issues. It’s amazing that the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research center of the library, was founded in 1925, so a scene we get is one of those fancy celebrations with lots of candlelit tables, this time for the 90th Anniversary of the Center. Its director, Khalil Gibran Muhammad (he’s since moved on to Harvard), gives a really impressive speech about their public work (“We do mind building, soul affirming”) that places diversity issues well within the library’s objectives. Ta-Nehisi Coates is another of the NYPL Talks author-celebrity speakers, who first talks about violence in black communities and in a typical Wiseman inflection, discusses the Barbara Tuchman book “A Distant Mirror” about the history of the 14th Century, one of those times one distinguished author reflects upon the impact of another author upon their own work. He explores a connection between the treatments of serfs then and the conditions of African-Americans in this country, and this leads to another excellent Abrupt End of Scene Line; “There’s actually a statement about the human condition in the African-American experience.” Probably the longest scene in the movie is a nearly ten-minute talk to a small group that looks more like one of those “At Berkeley” seminars. The unidentified speaker discusses slavery and capitalism in the 1840’s, and goes on to talk about a letter Marx wrote to Lincoln in support of anti-slavery and its relation to worker struggles throughout the world. It’s another of those Wiseman not talking down to his audience scenes, a thorough discussion of what was to me at least a pretty complex argument, and him further connecting the library to both diversity issues and an educational mission.
And carefully situated near the end of the film (just before that Edmund de Waal talk I mentioned earlier) is a lengthy excellent scene located at the Macomb’s Bridge Branch of the library in Harlem. (I should mention that Wiseman again is big on street signs, as he was for In Jackson Heights too. Wherever we go, intersectional signs announce our location before another sign on the front of a building guides us further.) A staff person announces this branch as “the jewel of the New York Public Library”, and the discussion here with a group of black parents feels like it’s bringing together both subjects of this film and some regular Wiseman concerns, particularly joining to In Jackson Heights. The parents are asked what they’ve learned from the library, which leads to some lengthy confessionals that are similar to some in the last film. The first part has little to do with the library, but we should be used to that by now in Wiseman films, and the talk is both about the need to stick together and spend money in the community and about store owners being driven out by distributors charging higher prices than in white areas. “Every single aspect of our lives is hit in some way”, one says, as he uses mayonnaise prices as an example. We do then get to book talk, but this was a useful introduction, as I think the clear argument is that social awareness is directly linked to education and concern for books, one of the film’s major arguments. This is where that discussion of Texas textbooks comes in, part of an indictment of McGraw Hill that gets persuasively raised, about how in a geography textbook slaves were falsely described as “immigrant workers” and that indentured workers were written about more sympathetically, and that there were no avenues available to correct these distortions of history. There is a visiting author talking with this group, and when he suggests that a difference here from Texas is that “you do have the Schomburg Center” and that “You can draw upon the collective wisdom of people who have thought deeply and paid very close attention to the historical record” it sounds close to a ringing endorsement. It would be unlike Wiseman to end here, which likely meant going to that final talk which returns us to issues of art, but this Macomb’s Bridge scene is an important summary too, one of the ways that Patti Smith’s reference to braiding all these things together seems especially appropriate.
I think to attempt to do justice to Ex Libris we also have to notice how consistent some of Wiseman’s concerns have been over these forty-something films, and that there is considerable art in recognizing and presenting situations which have appeared earlier in different forms. One noticeable part of that here is the interest in activities serving the blind and deaf and other disabilities, as obviously we’ve seen whole films of his around these subjects. The library holds public meetings to assist with disability housing issues, as we’re told at one of these that 11% of New Yorkers have disabilities. Beyond meetings, and closer to books and education, we get two visits to the Braille and Talking Book Library. The first is very Braille centered, as we see Braille reading being taught - “this is how a Braille reading hand moves” we see a student told and of course we get to watch how it’s done too. We also see someone learning to use a Braille typewriter called a Perkins Brailler, which if memory serves we saw in Talladega too, and the library also has mobile Braille devices called Varioultras, which a google search shows costing about $4,000. In a return here later in the film we see a good bit of Nabokov’s excellent “Laughter in the Dark” being recorded for a talking book, a nice opportunity for a Wiseman performance in service of a worthwhile activity. Performance also plays a large role in another great Wiseman scene (sorry to keep saying that, but it’s so true how many there are) regarding signing for the deaf, that I think connects as well to a general idea of multiple readings. As a demonstration, a woman asks two volunteers to read the start of the Declaration of Independence with two different emotions: “one angry, one pleading”. The woman signs to show the difference, so we get multiple performances, two readers and two simultaneously by the signer, where she’s making the point that signing expresses emotion as well as the literal words. So of course it takes Wiseman to see these resonances with subjects of long interest.
The role of language is also discussed in a Wiseman way in one of the Books at Noon talks, where a large group stands in the library lobby to hear the poet Yusef Konunyakaa, who very smartly tells the standing audience “Language says things that are direct but also insinuation”, and I don’t think you can get much more Wiseman-specific than that. Insinuation doesn’t have to suggest a sneaky motive. With Wiseman it’s more that you can take what people say within one context and consider that some might be in the film because they can easily have additional possible meanings. I think that’s why it’s great he’s now got a film with some poets and fiction authors getting into these areas, and how he somehow manages to combine concerns of National Gallery and In Jackson Heights into one film, but it’s probably more correct to say he’s still making the one grand film which is his life’s work, and especially these later ones each have a sense of both being more personal and more summary-like. We’ve come a ways from feeling like they’re just about the institution or place in question, although they’re certainly that too. I know I’ve said versions of that several times, but it needs saying because it’s a remarkable accomplishment, to hang around a place and make a film about it, but in the process create a work that has strong poetic-literary resonances as well as a unique personal style. As a way of going out on this one, I’d just emphasize again that this film is an important extension to the views of the arts that films like his dance and theater films were already exploring - how closely the arts are tied to each other - music, painting, photography, literature, poetry, porcelain, and you name it - and connected as well to science, education, history, and social issues. All are part of this film in a very deliberate, structured manner. It’s a little like the print and photo collections we see presented a couple of times in the film. In one collection alone we’re told there are half a million photographs, and whenever we see a photo or print, we get the sense that there’s a story and a bunch of important ideas attached to it. Wiseman seems to connect to that, as his films do something of the same - while recording that history, they become part of both a record and an artistic work at the same time. Just as the New York Public Library is so good at recognizing and celebrating artists, it has now played a role in the creation of an important work of art itself, one that’s a close reflection of its own mission.