Frederick Wiseman's Ex Libris: The New York Public Library is on MUBI India right now and it is, without exaggeration or qualification, one of the greatest works of observational documentary cinema ever made — a film about a library that is actually a film about everything a society believes knowledge is for.

 

Frederick Wiseman is ninety-four years old. He has made forty-five documentary films. He does not use narration. He does not use interviews. He does not use music. He does not provide context titles telling you where you are or who you are watching. He simply places his camera in an institution — a hospital, a school, a welfare office, a ballet company, a library — and films what happens there over weeks and months, and then spends a year or more in the editing room finding the film inside the footage.

The result, every time, is something that feels less like documentary filmmaking than like a form of sustained moral attention — a way of looking at how human institutions actually function, as opposed to how they describe their own functioning.

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, released in 2017 and currently available on MUBI India, follows the New York Public Library system — all ninety-two branches — over the course of a year. It is three hours and seventeen minutes long. It contains no conventional dramatic arc. Nobody is introduced as a protagonist. Nobody has a journey. The camera moves from a board meeting about funding to a storytelling session for children to a class teaching adults to use computers to a reading group for the blind to a staff meeting about community outreach and back again, without hierarchy, without the implication that any of these activities is more important than any other.

What emerges over three hours and seventeen minutes is the most complete portrait of what a public institution can be at its best that I have encountered in any art form. The library in this film is not a building that stores books. It is a place where the full range of human intellectual and social need is met without judgment, without cost, and without the assumption that any particular kind of need is more legitimate than any other. The child being read to, the immigrant learning English, the homeless person using the reading room for warmth, the scholar researching nineteenth-century maps — all are present in the film with equal weight because the institution itself treats them with equal weight.

There is a scene approximately ninety minutes in where a library administrator gives a speech to a community meeting in Harlem about what the branch means to the neighbourhood. She speaks without notes, with precision and genuine passion, about the specific services the branch provides and the specific ways it has changed specific lives. It is one of the most moving things I have seen in a documentary film. Not because Wiseman has manipulated me into feeling something — there is no music, no cutaway to emotional faces, no editorial pressure of any kind. Simply because a person is saying true things about what a public institution can be when it takes its responsibilities seriously, and the truth of what she is saying is impossible not to feel.

Wiseman's editing is the invisible art of this film. Each sequence is built around a logic that only becomes visible in retrospect — the way one activity illuminates another, the way the board meeting about a budget shortfall casts a specific light on the storytelling session that follows it, the way the accumulation of individual acts of service builds into an argument about institutional purpose that no single scene could carry alone. He spent fourteen months editing this film. The fourteen months are visible in every transition.

Indian streaming audiences have almost no exposure to Wiseman's work. This is a gap in cinema education that MUBI India is in a unique position to fill — the platform has carried several of his films over the past two years, and Ex Libris is the one to begin with.

Not because it is his most accessible film, though it may be. Because it is about something that every society in the world is currently arguing about — what public institutions are for, who they serve, and what is lost when they are defunded, privatised, or simply allowed to deteriorate through neglect.

Begin with Ex Libris. Then watch National Gallery. Then Titicut Follies. By the time you have finished those three films you will understand something about how documentary cinema works and what it is capable of that no film school curriculum will teach you as directly or as well.

Currently streaming on MUBI India By Republic of Cinema · Documentaries · Republic of Cinema