Critics reviews

It's not all pretty, or even always compelling, but it coalesces into no less than a testament to why we have societies in the first place. All together, maybe we can be better.

My film of the festival is undoubtedly Frederick Wiseman's Ex Libris: New York Public Library. This documentary broke my heart multiple times and I wonder if I have the vocabulary to embrace it as fully as I'd like. Wiseman, with his incredible generosity, in his signature observational mode, taught me once again how to look.

The documentary's title is a clever choice, allowing for several associations to pop up in your head once the film is running. Wiseman shows several different sites of the library, which is not at all connected to one place only. On the contrary, the New York Public Library has 87 branches and although Wiseman's film is pretty long, it shows only a fraction of the work that is being done across those branches. And this work is impressive.

It's radical in its own way, a kind of calculated passivity that exposes the political implications of everyday life. Once again, he ends the film with a beautiful piece of art, this time music—a tendency that can either be construed as optimistic or resigned. It's the punctuation at the end of that fill-in-the-blank sentence, but whether it's a period or a question mark is up to you.

It feels like every new Wiseman film is some sort of culmination of a lifelong Wiseman obsession — so much so that one hesitates to trot out that same conclusion here again. But even on the deeply embedded, fascinated scale of his recent milestones, ‘Ex Libris' feels like a peculiarly vivid elision of subject matter and filmmaker.

One of the mysteries of Ex Libris: New York Public Library is how a movie almost entirely consisting of people sitting around talking on library grounds manages to feel urgent and invigorating... There is a quiet kind of wonderment in Wiseman's latest—at the variety of modes of human expression, at the volume of the records of that expression.

This is not one of Wiseman's most meticulously structured recent works... But the film's boundless enthusiasm for the idea of the library wins the day. "Ex Libris" portrays the New York Public Library system, and by extension all such systems, as a benevolent force in public life, pushing back against anti-intellectual attitudes, breaking down social barriers, and fostering a sense of community in a time of technologically induced loneliness and narcissism.

The movie's air of benevolent calm suggests at times the sense of an official culture of impersonal gentility. If there's a shadow to the splendor and the clarity of Wiseman's idealistic intellectual vision, it's the need for something other than the sweetness of angels. Despite its celebration of cultural treasures, there's little sense that much of the best art is made by people too wild or disreputable to spend time in libraries, even if their work ends up there long after they're dead.

...In his magnificent new documentary, Frederick Wiseman takes his camera into those same halls as well as into more humble city branches. He sweeps into atriums and down corridors, pauses in reading and meeting rooms, and lays bare this complex, glorious organism that is the democratic ideal incarnate. It is an ideal that emerges piecemeal in a movie that starts with a declaration of independent thinking and closes on an exultant and deeply moving self-reflexive note.

Wiseman inundates us with the kinds of mundane details another filmmaker might take for granted. Everyone knows what goes on in a library, right? Yet it's funny what happens when, at Wiseman's insistence, we begin to pay attention. As always, Wiseman, who at 87 is just as structurally rigorous and observationally precise as ever, morphs this institutional study into a story about people. You, in the audience, become one of them. And you walk away all the better for it.

In a less patient, more conventional film, these would just be glimpses. Ex Libris, however, is 197 minutes long; Wiseman loves to let his sequences go on and on. But he also knows better than anybody just how long he can keep us engaged, and as a simple viewing experience, Ex Libris is spellbinding. Wiseman makes us feel like we're there, watching full thoughts expressed at the casual pace of real life.

It's overwhelmingly stimulating, suggesting a college course and a guided tour that have been wedded together as a work of prismatic humanist art... Wiseman's un-emphatic editing... exhibits a willingness to survey each person and corresponding action with the same lucid dignity. This filmmaker is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.