‘Ex Libris’ an ode to library

If libraries have played a large part in your life and personal development, you’re going to want to head to the Brattle to catch master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s colossal (197 minutes) portrait of yet another of the world’s most important institutions while you can: “Ex Libris: New York Public Library.”

Do you hate staff and budget meetings? Maybe stay away because they are everywhere. But even they lend the film much of its hefty credibility as a fly-on-the-wall depiction of the workings of this vast social machine, and I’m not only talking about the main branch beside Bryant Park on Fifth Avenue and 41st St., with the two massive

stone lions (nicknamed Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) flanking the entrance. I mean the branches in the other boroughs and neighborhoods of New York City as well, where any book borrowed from any branch can be returned.

Libraries are much more than book-lending facilities these days. The New York Public Library provides free preschool, dance classes, citizenship classes, musical recitals, readings, in one case an interview with Patti Smith, courses in Braille and classes for those with other challenges, as well as posh dinners for its political and financial patrons. The library’s picture collection is one of the world’s biggest and has served as a resource to print advertisers and artists for generations. (Andy Warhol was known to “co-opt” from it.)

On one level, “Ex Libris” is also an ode to the Beaux Arts, marble-lined, main library building itself, which opened in 1911 and is a New York City landmark.

(“Ex Libris: New York Public Library” contains no objectionable material.)