Heaven over the fiction section

Oh no, do I really have to look through this pile of clippings about the Dearing Report? Possibly...but first I'm sure you'd rather hear about Librarians in the Movies, a site on the Internet I discovered courtesy of film journalist Nigel Floyd and the LA's Multimedia Group which hosted his session on 'Movies on the Net' session at the recent UmbrelLA conference.

The page is the work of Martin Raish of Binghamton University Libraries. And fascinating reading it makes too.

The Record staff were instantly able to track down their own favourite film portrayal of a librarian. We knew it was Bette Davis but by cross referencing the list of Actors/Actresses who have played librarians, with the list of titles which feature librarians with a speaking part we could track down the title as Storm Center (1956).

Bette plays 'a fiery small town librarian who fights censorship and suppression of free speech by refusing to expurgate a book on communism'.

Look out for the remake set in Orange or Marignane. Or perhaps it could be reshot in America featuring Linda Fiorentino as the feisty head librarian who refuses to install filtering software.

There are other surprises in the actor/actress list including Richard Burton, who is at least pretending to be a librarian in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Catherine Deneuve (Agent Trouble, 1987) who is doing likewise (who would have suspected that beneath the exterior of mild-mannered librarian etc.). Katherine Hepburn (Desk Set) you could perhaps guess at (a positive image nonetheless) but Carole Lombard is less predictable, even if the title (No Man of Her Own) is somewhat more so.

Inevitably there are references you'd quarrel with. Like is there really a librarian in The Big Sleep? I remember two booksellers certainly, but then it is The Big Sleep and therefore it is a scientifically proved fact that nobody knows who's who or what's what, least of all the screenwriter, even if he is Raymond Chandler (some of the time).

Equivalently the 1991 version of Beauty and the Beast is listed on the grounds that the bookseller 'acts more like a librarian than a merchant'.

Most dubious are the grounds on which Jonathan Pryce's bureaucrat in Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil is listed on the grounds that he is 'the closest thing this society has to a librarian'.

Pryce's Sam Lowry works in Information Retrieval it has to be said but otherwise Raish's argument is that 'he is a clean shaven, neatly dressed, middle-aged, unmarried, socially inept mamma's boy'. And that's coming from a librarian!

Also intriguing is the list of movies in which libraries are used as a setting. Rarely is it simply a neutral one, so many of the instances seeming to use the library to represent something.

In Jane Campion's Janet Frame biopic Angel at my Table the 'crowded and musty-looking stacks through which Janet wanders, collecting books' are 'a testimony to the power of libraries and books in an otherwise harsh existence'.

In Fatal Attraction, the library is a realm of safety which underlines the danger that Michael Douglas is beginning to feel.

In Cabaret the library symbolises the distance between Liza Minnelli and Michael York as she meets him there to announce that she is pregnant. It is home to him and alien to her.

Occasionally there is the glimpse of an X-Files-type conspiracy as you discover that in Marathon Man 'Dustin Hoffman hangs out in the Columbia University library. (But it was actually filmed at USC)' whereas in The Graduate 'Dustin Hoffman hangs out in the UC Berkeley reference room (although the scenes were actually shot at USC)'.

Does Dustin Hoffman simply hang about in character in the USC library, hoping that someone will come and make a movie around him?

The site also reminds me that a library was the setting for one of the most extraordinary scenes in modern cinema, in Wim Wenders' Der Himmel Uber Berlin (Wings of Desire) in which 'the new Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is the setting for an early scene in which angels are at work comforting people. Because we, like the angels, can hear the often despairing thoughts of the patrons as they sit alone in their carrels, we realize that the crowded library is the 'noisiest' place in the city'.

Sadly, there is now no room left for to consider the press coverage of the Dearing Report. Shame.

Don Watson

Librarians in the movies

Picture of Bette Davis from Doug Stickney's Screen Sirens Website

Feedback or comments on the contents of the printed
Record or on the Record Web pages are welcomed

record@la-hq.org.uk