The Philosopher Kings

What it’s all about is the actual creative process.

— Corby Baker

“I think people’s perception of the custodian is, they’re there because they don’t have another choice.” Melinda Augustus works at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. And she likes what she does. “I like cleaning,” she says, “I like the environment that I work in.” As she speaks, you see why, as she makes her way through the museum after hours, pushing her cart past a grand Mayan royalty diorama or dusting the woolly mammoth skeleton display. In a next shot, she’s sweeping, the camera below her and a huge shark over her, hanging from a skylight. It’s Night at the Museum, the magical part, without all the noise.

As Augustus sees it, she’s lucky to have found this job, so suited to her interests and inclinations. But she’s also aware — much like the other custodians interviewed for Patrick Shen’s documentary, The Philosopher Kings — that most people can’t imagine how she feels or really understand what she does. When she tells a new acquaintance that she’s a custodian, she sighs, the conversation “goes no further.” What they don’t get is how the space itself can be transformative. In her favorite exhibit, she’s surrounded by live butterflies. “They’re so carefree,” she says, as the film illustrates with close shots of wed and yellow-winged insects amid bright green foliage. “If I can get that out of life, then that’s a good thing.”

So keenly attuned to her surroundings, Augustus herself remains unnoticed. This is the premise of The Philosopher Kings, that as custodians “clean up” after others and after hours, they remain largely invisible. The film — which premieres 12 May at Maysles Cinema in Harlem, then begins a week-long run 21 May at Los Angeles’ Downtown Independent — takes its cue from Bill Clinton’s 2007 commencement address at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Asking his listeners to contemplate “the people in the world we never see,” he makes custodians Exhibit A: “Do you have any idea what they make or how they support themselves or their children or whether they believe anyone ever sees them?”

The Philosopher Kings gives you some idea.

As janitors recount their life stories, the film arranges them in loose sections, each introduced by an inspirational quotation: “The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet,” from James Oppenheim, say, or “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost,” from Arthur Ashe. In between, the janitors reflect on their own lives and the film offers strikingly composed images of same: Augustus set against a diorama, Vietnam veteran Jim Evener in a supply closet at the Cornell University nanotechnology lab, aspiring activist-artist Corby Baker sharing ideas with students at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts. At UC Berkeley, Michael Seals heads off to investigate a reported bathroom clog, only to discover that simple flush does the job: “Okay!,” he says, the camera close on his profile as he walks out, victorious. “The toilet gods love me.”

The stories they tell are alternately conceptual, long-suffering, and funny. Augustus remembers her mother, over-medicated during a C-section (for her 15th child), then comatose for 11 long years: “There was an accident at the hospital that changed our lives,” she says. “My mom was taken away from us. By ‘taken away,’ I don’t mean death, though I think that would have been much better.” Oscar Dantzler, who tends the chapel on the Duke University campus (citing a family proverb, “If you cant keep the house of God clean, you can’t keep no house clean”), also looks after the students who come and go: “I like to say they left ’em in my hands,” he says of the students’ parents, “But other people get credit for that.”

Their hopes and ambitions are shaped by circumstances. Luis Cardenas, who works at Cal Tech, survived a car accident that took one of his arms, then decided against suing the uninsured, at-fault other driver. His explanation is of the sort some call “philosophical,” that is, stoic: “Everything that happens to you or whatever is going to happen to you, I think it is already written,” Cardenas says. “I might be wrong, but that is the way I think.”

At times, the film turns obvious: while Cardenas observes that “the most complicated task for me can be something simple, like emptying a trash bag,” the camera hovers close as he replaces a bag using his remaining arm and his teeth. When he insists on the importance of “love,” he holds his young daughter on that same arm. At other times, it works too hard to impose structure, detouring into a litany of relationships gone wrong with a quotation from Socrates urging young men to seek wives. (Augustus’ experience is conspicuously absent in this section.)

One story, that of Josue Lajeunesse, takes the film crew on a trip, when he returns to Haiti after 14 years in the States. During his shift at Princeton University, Lajeunesse more or less keeps his head down, the camera trailing after him from room to room as he explains in voiceover that he sends money home to his family and his dead brother’s six children as well. In Haiti, he’s greeted enthusiastically, as he sets to work on a project to bring water from the mountains to the impoverished village where his father used to live.

Lajeunesse’ experience, like the others here, is beautifully filmed, elegant compositions according them respect and an insistent visibility. Seals tells a story about his son’s expression of anger at him, as this helped him to see in a new way. “At that very point, I realized where my mom was, what she felt and she felt love for us.” This is the repeated point in The Philosopher Kings, that we might all see others — again and in a new way.