Some thoughts on Belle (2013)

The Bodleian Library, aka London, ca. 1762

I've always argued that the depiction of libraries on film is more cinematically complex than most librarians acknowledge. But whether metaphors, visual shortcuts or locations for unexpected drama, libraries in movies are usually filmed as libraries. Examples in which they stand, physically, for something else are rare, but they do exist.

Interior scenes of the reinstated Irish parliament were shot in Trinity College's 1937 Reading Room for Michael Collins. And on the frequent occasions when the Bodleian in Oxford has been filmed, it has rarely ended up as a library on-screen. The court bounded by the Schools Quadrangle, Sheldonian Theatre and Clarendon Building (pictured above) has been anonymized by its ubiquity. In Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, in X-Men: First Class, throughout Inspector Morse and Brideshead Revisited, actors and actresses walk across this quad, going about their business, going anywhere but the library. Filmed at low level, the surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings in Headington stone could be almost anywhere in Oxford. Perhaps the Library authorities are more welcoming to filmmakers than the Colleges - today a website encourages enquiries. 

The Headington quarry also supplied the limestone with which Eton College and Windsor Castle were clad. Indeed, Hollywood seems to imagine the entirety of England to be hewn from it. Harry Potter's Hogwarts library is, in fact, the Bodleian's Duke Humfrey's Library, its infirmary the Library's Divinity School. The Divinity School also featured as the lobby to the House of Commons in The Madness of King George. Nearly all of the Bodleian's buildings and many surrounding streets stood in for early-modern London in Terrence Malick's overlooked The New World.

So it is with Belle, an eighteenth-century period drama due to be released later this year. Belle is the only film I've witnessed being filmed outside a library. All day long horses and carriages trundled up and down Catte Street, a filmic simulacrum of London in the 1760s. What are we to make of the illusion? Perhaps it simply adds another layer of complexity. Location scouts and cinematographers are able to look beyond traditional associations and reimagine libraries, usually successfully, as alternative architectural spaces. Once again, it seems, librarians could learn something from filmmakers.

Some thoughts about Looper (2012)

Paradoxes are arguments that produce logical inconsistency. They're a good way of demolishing bad thinking, but some paradoxes remain problematic even when the smartest heads try to resolve them. After 2,500 years philosophers are still trying to figure out how the sentence 'this statement is a lie' can be neither true nor false. Mathematicians puzzle over a number of internally consistent logical puzzles that yet appear to be self-contradictory. 

For fans of literature and film, the most entertaining and familiar brain-twister is the grandfather paradox. Imagine I travel back in time and kill my paternal grandfather as a child. Thus my father would never have been born, thus I would never have been born. So I'm not able to travel back in time in the first place to commit the murder. My grandfather lives, fathering my father, who then fathers me, enabling me to travel back in time to kill my grandfather... 

Contemporary physics has answers to this paradox, among them the wonderfully-named Novikov self-consistency principle, the Huggins displacement theory, and Brane cosmology. Time-travel films generally attempt to respect these scientific responses and aim at internal consistency, or neglect considerations of consistency altogether. 

Looper tries to do both things at once. Altering the past changes the future if it's convenient for the plot. What appears to be a clever, idiosyncratic and original ending, in which the film's hero works out a way of breaking the endless repetition of two destructive life-cycles, actually turns out to undermine the entire story by preventing the possibility of it ever having taken place. 

To be fair, Bruce Willis warns us half-way through: 'I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.' Fans of the brief-library-visit-as-harbinger-of-trouble scene will also have noticed Willis' impossibly-convenient break-in to an unconvingly-futuristic public library. Unfamiliar with thirty-year-old IT, he still manages to look up private medical records, cross-reference the individuals within with some kind of residency database, and print off giant maps of their present location before escaping undetected into the Kansas night. In the highly-surveilled future it's impossible to do anything without the powers-that-be noticing, unless a convulted way needs to be found of ensuring that the characters are brought together for the final gunfight. Call it the paradox paradox genre - a film that uses paradoxes to simultaneously drive and demolish the plot.

Some thoughts on The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

I watched The Chronicles of Riddick twenty-four hours ago, and already I'm struggling to recall what it was about. I remember wondering why the principal actor's name (Vin Diesel) sounded more sci-fi than his character (Richard B. Riddick). I remember Mr Diesel turning his head and smirking every five minutes before charging through a dozen professional wrestling types as though they were polypropylene skittles. Some of these monstrous bodies belonged to mercenaries, some to prisoners, some to prison guards. Most, in a film set in a gunmetal-grey meets Cro-Magnon version of the future, belonged to the footsoldiers of a planet-destroying nihilist cult with a peculiar metaphysics.

Combine the toppling of these giant 'Necromongers' with Mr Diesel's talent for ironic quips delivered in a voice that's part Lee Marvin, part Barack Obama, and The Chronicles of Riddick makes for an entertaining, if instantly forgetable, two hours when you're stuck on the Oxford-Cambridge bus.

It's just a pity that so much of the film looks cheap, cartoonish, and artificial. One of the only things that looks real is the small library books in the house of Diesel's friend (or was he an enemy? I was never sure) in dusty New Mecca. It's easier to computer-generate a city than a library. Unfortunately the filmmakers spent so much money on the former that they didn't have much left to spend on the latter. It looks like they just moved the same set of books from one shelf to another as they filmed the scene.

Ever wonder where movie books come from? New York, of course, where Hollywood customers of the Strand Bookstore 'can choose from eighteen basic library styles, for purchase or rental. “Bargain books,” a random selection of hardbacks, is the cheapest, at ten dollars per foot of shelf space. For thirty dollars, clients can customize the color. For seventy-five, they can get a “leather-looking” library...'

'No one should be forbidden to consult these books freely!'

The monastery librarian. For some reason, books are
always returned by their due date

The Name of the Rose (1986) 

What's it about?

James Bond dons a monk's habit and investigates a series of deaths in an Italian monastery in the early fourteenth century. It all turns out to be the fault of Aristotle, who had the temerity to write about the subversive power of laughter seventeen hundred years earlier. The monastery librarian doesn't agree with the great polymath, and goes to great lengths to suppress rediscovery of a lost text, bumping off a series of grotesque brothers who have the combined personality of a logic textbook. Can Bond and his adoring young sidekick solve the mystery before the Papacy, Inquisition, monastery authorities, and all-pervading medieval miasma defeat them? Never fear, they have the power of literary theory of their side!

What's it got to do with libraries?

Umberto Eco's first novel tranformed a relatively obscure Italian professor of semiotics into an international poststructuralist superstar. Unlike Derrida, here was a European prof whose books you could actually read. Unlike Foucault, he didn't say awkward things about madness, imprisonment and sex, and unlike Deleuze his name was easy to pronounce and his ideas weren't so obviously loony.

The Name of the Rose was a whodunnit with extended subplots and digressions into metaphysics, the politics of the Avignon papacy, and the supression of the Waldensian, Albigensian and Catharist heresies, among other obscurities. Its hero was the man Eco would have liked to be had he been born in 1275 - a learned, wise, liberal controversialist. Like Eco Franciscan friar William of Baskerville prefers books to women and wine. Unlike Eco, he thrives on the border of respectability and radicalism. Does his name hint that like a Sherlock Holmes story, the digressions provided a clue to the mystery? Or that, at heart, this was merely a silly adventure story? Or that Eco was showing what a genius he was, a dazzling Holmes to his readers' plodding Watsons? Why, all and none of the above. This is postmodernism people.

A 600-page novel gives an author space to excurse on Aristotle's poetics, and lots of time for character-building and plot development. A novel provides space and time to build up an unfamiliar world. A film can also do this. One thinks of the tidy efficiency of Kurosawa's depictions of Sengoku-era Japan or the Coen brothers' ability to evoke all that is necessary about rural Texas in five seconds of landscape.

But director Jean-Jacques Annaud is no Kurosawa or Coen. His film raises many more questions than it answers, and betrays the complexity of medieval Europe under an ever-present patina of mud, dusk and smokey grey. The reason for the murders Sean Connery investigates might make sense if you wrote your PhD on Thomas Aquinas (as Eco did), or to students of medieval textual transmission and historians of papal politics. After 600 pages of drip-fed Aristotelian propaganda, it may also make sense to readers of a sex-and-murder laced historical thriller. But it will not make sense to your average moviegoer.

The library and librarian are central to the plot. But little about them makes sense either. Why is the library designed as a labyrinth, when the only two people able to enter are the librarian and his assistant? Why exactly are so many monks creating illuminated manuscripts - who are they copying them for, and why? How can a large scriptorium exist in an institution whose leadership promotes a policy of literary suppression? How can the monastery library be so famous when it is nearly impossible to access its books?

As the only mainstream film I know of with a concern for monastic libraries and the process of medieval manuscript production, The Name of the Rose has also done much to propagate historical falsehoods. Nearly everything we see about the production, circulation and storage of texts is inaccurate for a fourteenth-century monastery. The 'manuscript adviser' named in the credits is an illustrator of children's books. Monks transcribed books (in their cells, not in libraries) in order to better learn their contents - they did not spend their days drawing pretty pictures for the hell of it. What we're left with is confusion designed as clever provocation, a Hardy boys television mystery with some big-name actors. We get intellectual pretensions, naked girls and chubby monks, and trite banalities of medieval life.

Is it any good?
In the opening credits we are told that this is "A palimpsest of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose." This immediately set off my pretentiousness alarms. Despite all the theatricality, this is a poorly-paced and lazy film which answers none of the interesting questions the plot and setting might be presumed to pose.


Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Written by George Andrew Birkin, Gérald Brach, Howard Franklin, Alain Godard, based on the novel by Umberto Eco
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Conni
Editing: Jane Seitz
Cast includes Sean Connery, Christian Slater, F. Murray Abraham, Helmut Qualtinger, Elya Baskin, Michael Lonsdale, Volker Prechtel, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., William Hickey, Michael Habeck, Urs Althaus, Valentina Vargas, Ron Perlman


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The other 30%

I know it's mumbo-jumbo, but it's in this big old book!

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 

What's it about?
"The Bible speaks of the Ark leveling mountains and laying waste to entire regions. An army which carries the Ark before it... is invincible." The Nazis are in Egypt, on the verge of finding the Ark of the Covenant. Only one man can stop them.

What's it got to do with libraries? 
I don't get conceptual art. I side with the late lamented Robert Hughes in believing that modern art is radical and vital, but has been going downhill for about 100 years. For me, at the very bottom of this hill, next to Tracey Emin's dirty bed, is the 'video installation'. Meandering artworks with baffling names like (Trans)FORM-ation S-3 just don't do it for me. When I watch them I think: 'This isn't art. This is rubbish. I could do this.' So if Messrs Saatchi, Lowry or Gagosian ever gave me some gallery space, here's what I'd film in the hopes that they'd allow me to project it.

A fixed camera mounted on a library desk would record an archaeology professor reading all day long. Whenever this buttoned-up, tweedy and bespectacled prof moved from his books, a tasteful hand-drawn map of the library would appear, a slowly-moving red line showing his route to the water cooler. After eight hours of work, he'd pack a leather suitcase and leave. The camera would move along the desk, on which would sit a Wesson 'Bapty' revolver, a bullwhip, a dusty fedora, and a library catalogue card with 'the other 30%' written in a cursive hand.

My artwork would be called 70% of All Archaeology is Done in the Library, a line taken from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Professor Indiana Jones' first cinematic outing. It even sounds like the name of a video installation.

Real archaeologists have hats, but no whips

Popular entertainment often works by inverting our expectations. Immediately after imparting the soundbite, Jones swaps his class of adoring freshers for a pair of G-Men. The dust-moted air of Yale is replaced by a snowstorm on the Tibetan plateau, where Professor Jones, transformed into the stubbled 'Indy', starts a barroom brawl with a gang of SS men. In movies we expect the unexpected. 

Some say that the Jones character was based on Robert John Braidwood. Others claim their own pet mid-century archaeologists active in exotic places as the maquette. In truth, a more significant influence on the script is the simple fact that a profession that spends its time in libraries, classrooms and muddy holes is an unlikely, and thus amusing, source for heroism. For the same reason, one reason why libraries work well in films is that in real life, paradoxically, nothing much ever happens in them. This is why most cinematic libraries bear very little resemblance to off-screen ones. They're not meant to. They appeal to day-dreams and the inverted worlds of the imagination.

Real librarians are much more rock 'n' roll

It's also the reason why librarians shouldn't get too worked up about their cinematic depictions, positive or negative. These aren't real librarians after all. They are, to borrow a phrase from their greatest chronicler, reel librarians. Cinema is oversimplified and hyperdramatic reality. Indiana Jones spends little time kneeling in a shallow pit with a trowel. I have yet to see a film in which a librarian is shown creating a MARC record. That's okay. Films are not direct representations of any truth. And my fondness for the neorealism of New German Cinema aside, hopefully they never will be.

Is it any good?
Raiders of the Lost Ark is terrific entertainment. Its annual showing on Christmas television throughout the 1980s means that I have seen it more times than any other film. Very early on I decided that I wanted to be archaeologist when I grew up. Until about the age of nine, when I realized that real archaeologists have to spend 70% percent of their time in the library. Hang on...

Director: Steven Spielberg
Written by Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman
Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe
Editing: Michael Kahn 
Cast includes Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, Jonathan Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott


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Why Bruce Wayne will never need a personal librarian.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) 

What's it about?
Batman comes out of retirement to battle the toughest bad-ass villain he's ever faced, the steroid-munching nihilist Bane and his army of subterranean sans culottes.

What's it got to do with libraries?
Library-and-culture fans can find rich pickings in Gotham City. Libraries and librarians have appeared many times in Batman's comic-book adventures. In his ludicrous and parodic televisual existence, the caped crusader (in "A Horse of Another Color") retrieved a priceless portfolio of famous umbrellas which had been stolen by the Penguin from Gotham City Library. Evidently taking inspiration from the flippered fiend, a week later (in "The Unkindest Tut of All") King Tut filched a set of scrolls from the same location. The American Library Association's sample policy document on how to handle law enforcement requests for library records uses the Gotham City Public Library as its hypothetical policy provider.

And then there's Batgirl, a fetching vision of modern female superherohood (see, for example, her federally-sanctioned campaign ad for equal pay between the sexes), daughter of Gotham's Police Commissioner, motorbike rider and in her day job, librarian. With remarkable prescience, in the same year as the invention of the World Wide Web she was transformed into the "information broker" Oracle when confined to a wheelchair following an attack by the Joker. The purple catsuit and crescent kicks returned with the launch of her own Batgirl comic in 2011, her PhD in librarianship now replaced by a bachelor's degree in forensic psychology.

The cinematic Batman has a library closer to home, and one that doesn't require incongruous exterior shots of the New York Public Library and a random shelf of books hastily cobbled together in Studio Nine of 20th Century Fox. As befits the resident of "stately" Wayne Manor, the Bruce Wayne of Christopher Nolan's recent trilogy has a study containing a gentleman's library of morocco-bound volumes. In the movies no-one ever reads a book from a gentleman's library, and in any case Bruce doesn't have time for reading, so busy is he with his business, charity, and crime-fighting activities. So he uses his books to disguise a hidden door, and his grand piano as a key. Playing an unmusical combination of notes on the latter triggers a mechanism in the former - behind a bookcase in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises lies the entrance to the bat-cave.

No Gothic castle or haunted house is complete without a revolving-bookcase-leading-to-a-secret-chamber, so this parlour trick shouldn't work for postmodern audiences. Its familiarity and use by Buster Keaton meant that from an early date it couldn't really be taken seriously, and it has generally been confined to horror comedies (good examples can be found in The Cat and the Canary, Young Frankenstein, and The Addams Family). Variations include the revolving fireplace and the gag where two characters go back and forth and keep missing each other because they're on opposite sides, both used in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

That Nolan gets away with filming a secret library door shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed the director's career trajectory from the gimmicky Memento to the mind-bending complexity of Inception. Nolan's Batman films are only superficially superhero movies - at a deeper level they're disguised existentialist essays and ever more ambitious experiments in subjecting audiences to tightly-constructed convolutions. Nolan's films reconfigure the fantastic as the everyday, and the everyday as the fantastic. He gets away with a secret revolving door designed into a bookcase for the same reason that he gets away with making a convincing hero out of an introspective billionaire who likes to dress up as a bat - he is a very clever director. 

We're already primed to think of libraries as places of concealment, where objects (National Treasure; The Librarian), identities (Citizen Kane), and keys to secrets (all of the above; The Ninth Gate) are hidden. We also know them as places of revelation and exposure (Atonement; The Body in the Library), and part of what keeps us interested in the Bruce Wayne / Batman dichotomy is whether it will be revealed. We temporarily forget that bookcase doors are normally cheap jokes because the pace of the film doesn't allow us time to pause and reflect upon how ridiculous it is, because the mechanism for opening the door is original, classy and fun, and because our preconceived notions about libraries are already in sympathy what we see. 

Is it any good?
Though critics swooned at Heath Ledger's acting in the The Dark Knight, imagining something of his tragic death in the performance, for me The Dark Knight Rises is a better film. It is political and contemporary, ambitious and startling. I remain morally vexed by superhero movies, with their implication that ordinary humans lack the capacities to resolve humanity's problems. But The Dark Knight Rises is spectacular cinema, gripping drama, and a poke in the eye to populists, Occupiers, and Tea-Party loons who would dissolve the foundations of politics to reclaim civilization, as though the roots of both words did not, in fact, mean the same thing.

Director: Chrisopher Nolan
Written by Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan
Cinematography: Wally Pfister 
Editing: Lee Smith
Cast includes Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman

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Some thoughts on Prometheus (2012)

Easily the best thing about seeing Prometheus was passing Ken Loach on the stairs on the way up to the cinema. I'm not going to go on about why I think Prometheus is so disappointing, because I'd find it difficult to do so without getting carried away, but also because the spacecraft's library provides a neat microcosm of the film.

The cold and sexy capitalist (Charlize Theron) in charge of the mission has her own (cold and sexy) futuristic quarters with a Swarovski chandelier and Fazioli piano. One curved wall is covered with books whose spines face inwards. 

The fashion for books as wallpaper is an old one, but the idea of turning the books backwards arrived in the style magazines found in airport frequent-flyer lounges only recently. It unwittingly mimics the shelving practice of many late medieval libraries, in which books were stored in this back-to-front way. But as Europe's monks eventually discovered, this is a thoroughly impractical arrangement for anything but a tiny library, and only makes sense if you never intend to read any of your books. It's an unintelligent aesthetic, and one that has been used to questionable effect by the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread in her Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna.

In short, the library is an unresolved puzzle, stylish but confused, an unsatisfying postmodern simulacrum of its intellectual predecessor. Sound familiar?