Davide Ferrario’s Umberto Eco: A Library of the World documents the life of Italian philosopher, semiotician, and novelist Umberto Eco through his private library, where he explores themes of media and memory, truth and fiction, and information and knowledge, using the library to represent pillars of human memory and knowledge.

Upon rewatching the documentary and doing extra research outside the documentary, this was an insightful film that connected to the course’s broader themes of media as mediators of perception and knowledge through semiotics and material media. Eco’s library is ultimately a lived example of the abstract practices of media theory and embodies how physical media shapes epistemology.

The film first introduced Eco’s library as a living archive of knowledge, a pillar that is paramount to what Eco describes as vegetal memory, referring to physical, memory on paper from trees. He emphasises that the conservation of material media, such as the books in his private library, sustains vegetal memory, and that this type of media that rots, decays, and changes over time makes written knowledge a material body. He uses vegetal memory as a metaphor for the tangiblity of the relationship between nature and human culture as mediated through books and literature. This exactly is what prompted Eco to start his huge archive of books that continues to grow and change over time. In the film, Eco says, “When we say ‘I’ we mean our memories,” to emphasise how tethered the body and self is to memory, and he uses his library as both a symbol and living embodiment of human’s universal memory, turning his library into ann intellectual map of the world through written texts.

Through his library, Eco also explores themes of truth and fiction. Eco collects scholarly articles and rare, antique novels for his library, but he was also keen on collecting fiction books and raunchy novels. For him, fiction was a way to organize truths. When facts and statistics can appear abstract, narratives in fictional pieces offer a new path to the truth, a new framework of understanding the world around us. This was a philosophy Eco stood by for a long time throughout his long-standing, arguably obsessive pursuit on truths and untruths, where he also strongly believed in semiotics and meaning coming from symbols, indexes, and signals. He claims that fictional texts with stories and narrative elements are ‘open books’ that encode cultural truths that facts and analysis often cannot reveal. This is because ‘open books’ allow for reader interpretation beyond authorial intent. In Eco’s library these two types of texts coexisted without any hierarchy, rather as a single intellectual ecosystem. The film itself also balances between elements of fiction and truth, going back and forth between archival footage and real interviews with dramatic readings of Eco’s essays from actors to present how both ways of presenting information is true and equal.

Lastly, the film discusses how Eco’s archive translates to the digital world, where his texts are translated and digitized into moving images. The film captures Eco’s ambivalence on this topic, especially on the topic of cellphones as a means of communication. He often criticized people who use their cellphone as a status symbol and “flaunt their private lives in the presence of all,” claiming they are exhibitionists rather than individuals seeking genuine connection and communication through their phones. He further claims that the world is becoming increasingly flooded with messages that say nothing, and that this information overload can damage knowledge. Tying back to the first theme, he also claims that the contemporary digital era is hurting the ability to preserve one’s organic brain and vegetal memory. 

Eco’s claims on digital communication are especially relevant to today, where access to information is incredibly convenient and instant. While this access is instant and convenient, it often is engaged with superficially and at a shallow level, where no discourse, discussion, or further reflection is ever really initiated. It is easy for students especially to stay in the constant comfort of digital instant messaging, where we end up neglecting physical means of gaining and retaining knowledge. However, film masterfully emphasises Eco’s passion for how the physicality of books mediates meaning differently from digital media and how it sustains vegetal memory through different genres of written work.

This film also ties back to the discussion of material media as important devices in corresponding the human body to knowledge of our environment. This reminds me a lot of the evocative objects we read about and discussed in class and Ingold’s Making. Rather than objects, they are now regarded as things because of our personal interpretation and mediation of the object. The meaning of a thing has transformed and evolved with us, and has afforded our bodies different things. For Eco, the physicality of books have transformed from objects to things, and has afforded him a personal living archive, where it maps memory and knowledge through material media that he engages with daily, not only in individual books, but in his created third-space of his private library.

The film additionally allows for a reflection through the digital moving image format as it tries to mediate Eco’s tactile, material world of books through the implementation of different sections and archival material. It also strengthens Eco’s passion for semiotics, where the form of film itself is semiotic and constantly reminds the viewers that meaning is constructed and ever-evolving, rather than constant. Again, the film’s back and forth between the realism of the documentary genre through archival footage and interviews and the poetic retelling of Eco’s essays further blurs the line between truth and fiction to emphasise how they are interdependent. While documentaries are conventionally associated with nonfiction and truth, this film’s adaptation of Eco’s material world into a digital medium remains an act of interpretation. Sort of like an open film, in which my own reflections and responses now become part of its meaning.

Works Referenced

Eco, Umberto. (2022). Umberto Eco: A Library of the World [Film]. Directed by Davide Ferrario.

Garner, Dwight. “Umberto Eco, Not a Cellphone Exhibitionist.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2007, archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/umberto-eco-not-a-cell-phone-exhibitionist/#:~:text=The%20thousands%20of%20people%20we,in%20the%20presence%20of%20all.