Ideas Of Order

Systems at work and play in Frederick Wiseman's 2017 documentary Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

To Audrey Lam

Look at the range of pictures there are, and the different styles.

—An instructor at the New York Public Library, displaying a collection of images of “dogs in action”

Documentary filmmakers sometimes refer to their real-life subjects as their “characters”. Supposing Frederick Wiseman made a documentary about your workplace, imagine the suspense of showing up at the premiere, waiting to find out what kind of character you were going to be. Wiseman’s films are typically studies of large institutions, meaning that he tends not to shoot in any one location for long, and that individuals rarely appear in more than a single scene. Factoring all that in, you might be able to predict what you would be saying and doing if you made the cut. But there would be no way to guess what significance Wiseman had seen in your words and actions, and what place he might find for them in his mosaic.

Of course, writers also do this sort of thing, including critics when they write about artists. Elvis Costello, of all people, speaks eloquently about this from the artist’s perspective in the 2017 Wiseman documentary Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, where we see him interviewed on stage after publishing a memoir of his own (his only scene in the film). Costello, who up to this point has been talking mainly about his father, is asked for his views on a highly rhetorical passage by the critic Greil Marcus, who sees Costello as driven by “revenge and guilt”. His response is a model of diplomacy, rebutting Marcus as much through his genial manner as his words: he doesn’t believe his life’s work can be summed up so neatly, but he’s not going to begrudge a fellow creator the chance to shape something in turn. “It’s his job to create a thesis like that. That’s what he does.”

The ironies here are complex—and considering Wiseman’s somewhat dry reputation, surprisingly playful. First, even as he asserts his autonomy Costello is functioning as a character in Wiseman’s film, most probably unwittingly (as a rock star used to having cameras pointed at him, it’s unlikely he’s given special thought to where his image might wind up in this case). Second, the statement could be taken not just as Costello pre-empting any thesis Wiseman might be advancing, but as Wiseman more self-consciously pre-empting any critical bid to sum up the film’s purposes in turn. Third, watching a Wiseman documentary isn’t meant to entail stepping into a hall of mirrors: isn’t he the last vérité filmmaker still standing, his working method largely unchanged since the 1960s, steering clear of voiceover and all fourth-wall-breaking tricks?

In fact, a form of reflexivity is implicit in the whole approach to filmmaking exemplified by Ex Libris, which begins as usual for Wiseman from the goal of giving a selective yet reasonably comprehensive picture of a broad subject. Thus we’re introduced to a huge cast that includes authors, musicians, and their audiences; librarians fielding inquiries by phone and in person; researchers sorting through archival collections, or using microfilm scanners or the Internet; security guards, cleaners and other ancillary staff; teachers and participants in the wide range of classes, workshops and other events that take place in the dozens of branches across the city (or rather, in three of the five boroughs: the libraries of Brooklyn and Long Island are managed separately).

All straightforward enough, but immediately complexities arise: the New York Public Library is not in all senses fully public, is physically many libraries rather than one, and oversees many activities scarcely connected with books. More significantly, as always in Wiseman we’re dealing not with a single system but with two systems that mirror each other: the system of the institution, and the formal system unique to the filmmaker.

One element in Ex Libris that brings this home is the constant talk of the Internet, understood as becoming ever more central to the library’s role, to the point where the upbeat CEO Tony Marx dreams of putting the whole collection online. While the 95-year-old Wiseman is no digital native—he kept shooting on film well into the 2000s, and still doesn’t appear to have a website—in hindsight he himself might recognise the prescience of his long-held preference for weblike structures that expand in space rather than progressing in time (a striking early example is his 1981 Model, which like Ex Libris starts from the centre of New York and moves outward). As in the online realm, the effect is to put all information on an equal level, while rendering any stopping-place arbitrary; it’s no wonder Wiseman’s films often run for three or four hours or longer, with only occasional stirrings of what would typically be referred to as “drama” or even “incident”.

This doesn’t mean they should be understood as sociology by other means, still less as instances of what film critics now dubiously call “slow cinema”. Eschewing all claims to scholarship on the one hand or transcendence on the other, Wiseman really is interested in the everyday. Most of all he’s interested in work, and the range of forms it can take: it can mean making movies, it can mean canning sardines, and equally it can mean sitting at a table with a pen in your hand and a takeaway coffee in front of you, saying things like “Where is sustainability key?” The varieties of work Wiseman has filmed over the years have little in common, not even the promise of financial reward; what mainly defines them as work is that those engaged in them might on occasion yearn for them to be over.

So it is with Wiseman’s films. But as a rule he skirts the edge of boredom, his editing often evoking the games played by the tethered mind to keep itself active: studying the attendees at a meeting, for example, and trying to deduce what each might be thinking in turn. His own more voluntary embrace of tedium is that of a dedicated birdwatcher or trainspotter, as evidenced by a filmography that resembles a neatly-labelled set of photo albums (Boxing Gym, National Gallery and City Hall are representative titles from the last decade). In this context, the distinctive thing about Ex Libris is not its 205-minute running time but its focus on people working with information rather than with, say, sardines—meaning they’re grappling directly with many of the same practical questions as the filmmaker.

These questions concern how information is collected, stored, and made available, and above all how any such collection should be organised. While the familiar Dewey Decimal system is largely bypassed, we’re given a detailed rundown on the far quirkier filing system of the library’s picture collection, with royalty assigned its own shelf away from everything else. But this is only the beginning. The many branches of the library amount to an ad hoc classification system in their own right, recalling the Chinese encyclopedia famously described or invented by Jorge Luis Borges: there’s a library for the blind and visually impaired, one for research into Black culture and one for the performing arts. In parallel, Wiseman as a filmmaker could often be described as sorting his human subjects into categories of one sort or another, especially in his montage sequences—though his habit is also to linger long enough on individuals to underline that a label is at best a convenience rather than the last word.

Both the comedy and the formal complexity of Ex Libris arise from shuttling between levels of abstraction, something inherent to Wiseman’s filmmaking and likewise to how any institution functions in practice. Books can be viewed either as vessels of knowledge or as physical objects, or both at once (“The Gutenberg Bible is currently unavailable,” a caller is advised—how else would you say it?). Authors too can be viewed in a range of ways by those who encounter them in the flesh, as we see with the guest stars here (mostly men, aside from Patti Smith). Celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins gets an especially worshipful reception from his flock, in contrast to a lesser-known but more endearing historian of the Jewish deli, who in the funniest scene holds forth to an elderly, not especially receptive crowd on the sexual significance of the pastrami sandwich (“I mean, subconsciously, right? There’s a lot of subconscious symbolism that I’m trying to suggest is going on here”).

Characteristically, Wiseman lets us hear from each of these authors at length, while refusing to tell us what to make of any of it; it’s easy to find resonances with the film’s broader themes, harder to know which of these are strictly meant. One solution would be say that the responsibility of determining meaning lies with the viewer. Another would be to understand the ambiguity as meaningful in itself, especially if it leads us to ponder the library’s intentions along with the filmmaker’s. How far have these authors been invited along to supply specific facts and insights—and how far are they performing a simpler yet more abstract kind of work, representing the idea of the intellectual as such?

So many systems, frameworks, forms of classification, they come close to cancelling each other out. But not all classifications carry equal weight. While Wiseman may not openly “take sides,” it’s hardly an arbitrary choice to include at least five scenes where the history of slavery is discussed from different angles, while juxtaposing groups gathered for different purposes in a manner calculated to bring home that racial inequality remains a central fact about American society. Nor is it chance how often we’re reminded that this nominally public institution relies on philanthropy along with government funding (as we can see from Ex Libris’ closing credits, this is true of Wiseman’s films as well).

Gradually the film assembles its picture, without wholly committing itself to an argument. The library is an anomaly, a paradox in various respects: catering to the well-off and the underprivileged, founded on an uneasy alliance between liberals, radicals and cultural conservatives, hierarchical and democratic in equal measure. Visually it’s the hierarchical side that’s most evident, especially at the main branch in midtown Manhattan with its stone lions and marble pillars, built in the 1890s with money from blue-blood families like the Astors and renamed in the 2000s after the billionaire CEO of a private equity firm. The democratic side is often represented more through words than images, yet not easily dismissed: while the film may not qualify as a wholehearted endorsement of Tony Marx’s faith that “access to information” is the long-term solution to inequality, we’re at least encouraged to view such access as a valuable starting-point.

The basic question, or one of them, is about just how much can be accomplished through privileged good intentions. But the more closely the film is examined, the more the implicit connections between scenes and the consequent potential meanings multiply, to the point where you might yearn for a summarising statement to make sense of it all.

There are Wiseman films that do provide something like this, including his recent, moving Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, which does have a central figure, and is a portrait of an artist. But Ex Libris is a network, not a narrative: the goal is to make us feel that any sequence, almost any image, could be the summarising one. It could be the actual closing scene, which begins with the British writer and artist Edmund de Waal reading a passage supposedly about porcelain, which in the context of the whole film is loaded with ironies far too complex to summarise here. Or it could be Ta-Nehisi Coates a little earlier, reflecting on what reading about mediaeval serfs taught him about his own identity: “That’s the power of the African-American experience, when you come to understand it—it’s actually a statement about the human condition.” Or it could be the young white guy with a baseball cap and a plastic shopping bag, sitting on the library steps next to his girlfriend as she checks her phone, while he holds an American flag out in front of him with glum irresolution, as if he wasn’t sure what he was meant to do with it.

Special note to New York readers: Ex Libris screens 3pm Friday March 7 and 2pm Sunday March 9 at BAM as part of “Aisles and Isles: Films In the Library”.