Ex Libris: The New York Public Library

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) is available to watch online on iFILM — Frederick Wiseman's three-hour-and-seventeen-minute observational portrait of an institution most New Yorkers walk past without a second thought.

Wiseman spent weeks inside dozens of branch libraries and the main Fifth Avenue building, filming with no narrator, no interviews, no score. Patti Smith performs in the Rose Main Reading Room. Richard Dawkins delivers a lecture on faith and reason. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to a packed audience about race and literacy. Elvis Costello plays a Brooklyn branch. In between: ESL classes for immigrants, laptops on loan, board meetings about algorithms, a warming room that doubles as a shelter on cold nights. The film makes its argument by accumulation — that a public library is less a building and more a city's connective tissue. Not a film for every mood, but when it clicks, few documentaries from this decade come close. Stream Ex Libris online on iFILM.