A documentary
directed by Jason Rosette. Unrated
(R-equivalent for language and pictures of nudity).
As unquestionably decent as Bookwars turned out to be, it's
still a real disappointment because it has one of the most
fascinating documentary subjects I've seen in a long time.
I visited New York recently and wondered about the
booksellers that were so prominent on the streets. Do they
make a living selling books? A profit? Who are they? Are
they homeless. Jason Rosette's movie tries to answer those
questions and succeeds only periodically. Still, I cna't
say that I'll ever look at street booksellers the same way
again.
Rosette found himself out of film school and completely
broke. Struggling to pay the rent and put food on his
table, he saw no other choice but to take what belongings
he had, go out on the streets of New York and try to sell
them. Since most of what he had were books, he quickly
realized that he'd fit right in with the people who set up
sidewalk tables full of eccentric reading material at
discounted prices.
His discovery was that those people whom we often look upon
with scorn, aren't the homeless bums we might expect them
to be. The folks Rosette met out there in the bookselling
world were a lot of times intelligent people trying to make
an honest living. Many of them truly love literature. One
of Bookwars's virtues is that it manages to genuinely
humanize these often eccentric people, dismantling
stereotypes and evoking something other than pity.
The documentary was shot on video and it looks surprisingly
good, considering that Rosette had to actually sell the
books in addition to filming his surroundings. Color me a
purist, but I still prefer film to video even in
documentaries; this one, however, seems to have been
custom-tailored to the camcorder. Its cheap,
bare-essentials feel is certainly appropriate for the
subject and alleviated all the more by Rosette's deftness
with the camera. He is a film school grad, after all...
The problem, which is in fact so big that it almost does
the film in completely, is that Bookwars is maddeningly
disorganized. Instead of dealing with specific aspects of
his subject at specific times, Rosette chooses to spread
everything out and the result is a bit of a mess. In the
middle of everything, he edits in seemingly random comments
from either booksellers or passers-by that don't have
anything to do with what came before or what comes after.
His intention in doing this may have been to simply "paint
a picture" of the bookselling scene but the result is
sometimes more akin to a Jackson Pollock painting than to a
collage.
In the end, when Bookwars gets into the devastating effect
of Giuliani's "Quality of Living" campaign, it becomes
ponderously Orwellian (a comment is made about a force
within the city, bigger than any one politician, intent on
getting books off the street), but by that time I had made
a real emotional investment in the fates of these
booksellers. Despite the documentary's haphazard structure
and somewhat pretentious wrap-up, it suceeds in its
sympathetic portrayal of these little-known but
nevertheless heroic (in Rosette's eyes, anyway) warriors. I
don't want to say that the movie needed a bigger budget to
do its subject justice -- that would be blasphemy,
considering the subject's nature -- but it couldn't have
hurt. B-
--Eugene Novikov
©2000 Eugene Novikov