Ex Libris

The legendary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman presents a startlingly moving portrait of an undervalued city institution: the New York Public Library. With an imposing Beaux Arts Fifth Avenue star and 92 dimmer ones in all corners of the city, the NYPL emerges over the course of Ex Libris as a universe unto itself. Surveying its varied terrain, Ex Libris reveals the public library system as a vast repository of books, yes, but also many other things — a resource center in the broadest sense of the term. Wandering its reading rooms, back offices, conference spaces, and echoing corridors, Wiseman’s camera stops to observe some teenagers learning about a colossal archive of printed images once ransacked by Andy Warhol. Elsewhere, staffers patiently converse with patrons on topics ranging from bereavement to the Gutenberg Bible to the presence of unicorns in the world. The library doubles as an advice line, a rec center, a performing arts space, a lecture hall, a center of research and education at all levels of learning — even, in the words of one patron, a stand-in for film school. Above all else, Ex Libris makes plain, it is a civic treasure whose value is difficult to quantify but impossible to overstate.