*Critic's
Pick
BookWars
Dir. Jason Rosette 2000 N/R
79 mins. Documentary
You've seen them plying their trade in front of NYU's Bobst
Library, at the foot of Washington Square Park. You've
spent an idle five minutes in front of their rickety tables
on lower Sixth Avenue, rifling through stacks of ancient
Sports Illustrateds and Marie Claires. Perhaps you've
wondered, however fleetingly, about their lives: Are they
homeless? Desperate scavengers? Antisocial biblophiles?
Manhattan's street booksellers are a peculiar lot, and
Jason Rosette--who, until quite recently, was hawking tomes
right alongside them--has assembled a fascinating, often
hilarious portrait of their stubbornly independent
lifestyle, as well as their struggle to remain in business
in the face of Mayor Giuliani's quality-of-living
crackdown.
The political angle, needless to say, inspired the film's
provocative title, and scenes of New York's finest
descending upon these innofensive guys and impounding their
merchandise provide the film with a modicum of tension and
drama. But what lingers in the memory, ultimately, are the
idiosyncratic personalities of the booksellers themselves.
While many of them look at first glance like counterculture
casualties, they're surprisingly erudite, far more
knowledgeable about their merchandise than the everage
Barnes & Noble staffer (and not that much pricklier,
really, when you get down to it). A dude named Peter, in
particular, evinces a tantalizing, unforgettable mix of
lieterary saavy and ingenuous eccentricity. Rummaging for
new stock at a garage sale, waxing critical about various
authors and genres, he suddenly spies a ceramic toad and
places it carefully atop the several volumes cradles in his
arms. "I collect toads", he explains to the lens. And
indeed he does, as a later visit to his apartment makes
clear. Not all of them are ceramic.
Oddly, Rosette's laconic narration never addresses the
obvious racial divide: the guys on West 4th Street tend to
be white and formally educated, whereas the Sixth Avenue
sellers, which deal more in magazines than paperbacks, are
primarily black and ...let's call them "less fortunate".
Omissions of this sort make BookWars less sociologically
incicive than it might have been, but it's compulsively
watchable all the same. These book warriors are beholden to
nobody; you may not exactly envy their variety of freedom,
but it's difficult not to respect it.
-Mike D'Angelo