The camera that follows the author through his winding shelves as Umberto Eco: A Library of the World opens doesn’t exactly capture the awestruck experience one has when they enter the world’s great cultural institutions. Eco’s packed shelves are for the most part utilitarian, and, arranged so that most spines are obscured or even turned to the backs of shelves, the arrangement looks highly impractical (a friend of Eco’s later explains that only the author knew where everything was). Still, even if at least one digression is a little too cute, examples from Eco’s writings and illustrations from his fantastic collection of rare books leaves plenty to whet the imagination and spur the intellect.
Director Davide Ferrario worked with Eco in 2015 on an installation for the Venice Biennale, and that late-career footage (Eco died in 2016) frames the action, as it were. Eco’s narration spells out the real meat of this picture early: “A library is both symbol and reality of universal memory.” But even if the screen action is primarily that of the mind, there’s plenty of visual interest. From the workaday shelves of Eco’s home collection of 50,000 volumes, Ferrario leads us to more ornate institutions around the world, and dives into centuries-old illustrations from Eco’s rarest treasures.
“The life you conquer with reading does not distinguish between great literature and entertainment,” Eco generously points out in an archival lecture. Don’t let them blackmail you into reading only important books!” But while he acknowledges the value of pulp, even comic books, he dismisses his own best-seller, The Name of the Rose, which he hated. It’s the one Eco book viewers are most likely to have read (present company included), and A Library of the World is a success on at least one level: it makes you want to read more Eco.
Still, the film isn’t just about books, it’s about imagination. Medieval scholars may have had a limited knowledge of the physical world as we now know it, but artists would let their minds run truly wild, and the creatures they come up with were astonishing: as the camera pans up an illustration of what looks like a bat, the creature turns into something with humanoid breasts, and then, lo, it has a cat’s head!
Furthermore, A Library of the World isn’t just about imagination—it’s about information, the material that Eco called “vegetal memory” and the technologies that have both superseded papyrus and paper and made physical media more precious than ever. Eco brings up one element of the digital realm that this critic has tried to hammer home whenever possible: that computer files from even 20 years ago are no longer readable; does the digital age have any hope of existing long enough for future scholars to examine in order to understand our crazy world?
Interspersed through the film are various actors who either perform dramatic readings from Eco’s fiction or dramatize his nonfiction, and it’s here that this Library occasionally strays. One doesn’t especially need another rehash of the William Shakespeare/Francis Bacon authorial controversy, and though that segment is here accompanied by clever animation depicting the possibly dueling authors, it’s maybe a little too whimsical. Far more convincing are the majestic views of ornate libraries around the world. Between Eco’s own words and such lush tracking shots of marbled oases of the mind, when the movie is over, the first thing you may want to do is to pick up a book. This swooning homage to printed matter is for the most part razor-sharp, and if it convinces anyone that physical media is crucial for civilization, then all the better.
Photo courtesy of Cinema Guild
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