You may remember your school librarian as a fusty, white-haired woman with horn-rimmed glasses. Or maybe that’s your Hollywood version of your school librarian. Mainstream movies—when they even deal with actual work, which isn’t too often these days—tend to get professions pretty wrong (anyone for some super-suspenseful, gun-toting forensics analysis?). So a documentary about the job of librarian and how it’s been distorted in the movies could be the start of something—nursing could use a 90-minute re-examination of how their profession’s been dressed down or sexed up for the big screen. Then paramedics, lab scientists, archaeologists ...
 

But that assumes The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film does its job well enough to launch a series. And unfortunately, Ann Seidl’s film falls well short of the bookmark. Unlike a good library, or maybe like a badly underfunded library, this low-key film doesn’t neatly order or cross-reference its various parts, lacks a strong, solid core to its collection of information and raises more questions than it helps answer.
 

Don’t judge The Hollywood Librarian by its flimsy cover, either. There are clips of librarians in film here, but they’re tossed in like entertaining intermissions and only briefly catalogued, not contextualized or analyzed. How has the image of librarian on film changed? How much did Katherine Hepburn base her character in Desk Set on her sister Peg Perry (interviewed briefly here)? Why are librarians eroticized? (Only a clip from The Station Agent hints at the thrill of loosening the uptight-woman stereotype: “glasses off, hair down, books flying.”)
 

Are bookish librarians vanishing from the screen in these database days? What about libraries themselves as settings? (My favourite is Somerset’s library visit in Se7en, a scene that eerily glows with the double-edge of knowledge, both dark and luminous, as cop hunts killer in the after-hours recesses of the archived mind of Western literature.) And though prisoners at San Quentin’s library are interviewed, we don’t see any jail shelves on celluloid (eg The Shawshank Redemption).
 

The Hollywood Librarian is geekily intent on showing this wonderful profession loved by those who follow the plaintive call of the Dewey Decimal system, and showing how much hard, often misunderstood work, goes into librarianship. These good intentions mostly make for a Public Service Awareness documentary, though.

 

Seidl also skips around from issue to issue. The marginalized—children, prisoners, the poor—are skimmed over yet vaguely and simplistically connected. There are librarians talking about the job (just one younger librarian, with slightly horn-rimmed glasses and eyebrow studs, is shown in passing), authors (Bradbury, Steinbeck) inspired by their love of books in local libraries, a brief history of Alexandria’s library and the libraries established by Andrew Carnegie, some of those Hollywood clips, then book-burning flares up, then it’s back to the threat of Steinbeck’s hometown, Salinas, closing its libraries. And so we flip on through this poorly collated account.
 

The film’s droning flute or piano score doesn’t help its frequently banal PBS approach. The Hollywood Librarian barely mentions private libraries—what are they? who owns them? what does that mean for the collection and archiving of knowledge?—which seems especially hypocritical when the film’s most engaging subject, Eugenie Prime, talks of the library as that “living symbol of freedom” even as we’re told she’s “Head Librarian, Hewlett Packard.”
 

The only moment more jarring than a corporation’s librarian talking about liberty comes at the end. A brave last effort at a political statement—as much government money goes into library funding for a year as is spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in one day—is followed by the film’s final scene, where a librarian cheerily talks about the work as “a perfect job.”
 

But then, the sharpest critical reader in The Hollywood Librarian is a prisoner in San Quentin’s library. There’s little talk of what libraries are becoming or why there are budget cuts all over the US and what private donations will do to the library system. If you want actual criticism of library practices, such as destroying original newspapers to put them on microfilm, I would recommend reading Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. If you want an incredible true story about history, war and manuscript preservation colliding in one library, I would suggest borrowing Geraldine Brooks’ fictional account People of the Book or checking out her 2007 New Yorker article.