In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away we are.
—John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”
If places are the stars of Frederick Wiseman’s films, then the people within them often seem like the extras. This is a consistent criticism of his work: that his films often seem to “observe” situations in detail, but rarely allow a sense of what’s “really” going on in the characters minds, rarely allowing them to explain themselves, their context, their motivations. Almost always, Wiseman’s characters are quite literally anonymous. We see only their public selves – and only snatches of these selves, at that – and are left as viewers to try to identify with or else remain alienated from them. In this way, Wiseman does for the documentary film what Brecht did for the stage: divesting it of the need for an illusory verisimilitude, for an immersion of the audience in an experience, and prioritizing its social utility as a means of conveying information. But of course, as with Brecht, this is not to suggest that the filmmaker merely convey information, least of all in any simple or objective sense.
Wiseman’s 1974 film Primate serves as a useful corrective to those who would still describe the filmmaker’s cinema as “direct.” First, with its assertive, masterful use of montage, it represents a new formal complexity in Wiseman’s work as an editor. From the opening sequence – a rapid, rhythmic succession of portraits of notable scientists, an exterior shot of Emory College’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and then a large, standing gorilla – the viewer discerns a particular voice, a conspicuous point of view, if not exactly an agenda or intent. But second, Primate also examines subject matter that is the most extreme Wiseman had approached since his first film, Titicut Follies—extreme not only in the sense of its often harrowing images, but also in its intricate configuring (and re-configuring) of the spectator’s identification.
Indeed, one of the principal oddities of Primate – and indeed there are many – is how frequently and how precisely it echoes Wiseman’s debut film. The grim, prison-like atmosphere of the research center and its panoptical structure of both confinement and observation are obvious correlations, but certain events documented in the film border eerily on self-reference. In one sequence, a monkey’s stomach contents are extracted through a tube inserted into the animal’s nose; in another, a gorilla is shaved and cut open. Once it undergoes an unnamed surgery, it is then deposited in its cell where it groans in a curiously human way. Indeed, one of the strange correlations between the two films is how closely the subjects of each resemble those of the other: The inmates are powerless objects of study and what often appears to be abuse, while their captors effect an austere, professional, and largely unsympathetic manner.
What’s particularly striking about this dynamic between inmate and scientist, particularly in light of Wiseman’s earlier film, is that it continually problematizes our perspective as viewers. With whom are we to identify: primate or researcher? Both, or neither? Indeed, the very title of the film is something of a pun, referring as much to the apes in the cages as to those in the lab coats, who smoke pipes and take notes on the sexual habits of their captors. In a series of hilariously deadpan exchanges, researchers engage in a lot of earnest talk about animal copulation—some occasionally betray a small chuckle at the discussions of simian ejaculate and how best to extract it, but more often they assume an air of banality and clinical detachment:
MALE PRIMATOLOGIST: … And there’s an erection.
FEMALE PRIMATOLOGIST: A nice erection.
MALE PRIMATOLOGIST: Yeah, a pretty good size one.
As the researchers force the animals to have sex for their observation, or coerce them into a series of increasingly mystifying and violent experiments, the spectator might wonder which of the figures onscreen seems the more human: the animals that are unwillingly shunted from cell to experiment, screeching wildly, or those who mechanically note the animals’ every reaction into voice recorders for the benefit of science.
While some of experiments depicted in the film are entirely harmless and occasionally even benevolent, the majority of research is nebulous in its intent and becomes, as the film progresses, increasingly difficult to watch. By far the most notorious scene in Primate is that in which a squirrel monkey – which, by an unfortunate coincidence is among the smallest and cutest of the primates featured here – is dragged from its cage, drugged, and effectively scalped. Alive but insensate, the animal is methodically and minutely dismembered, its skull hollowed, and its remains discarded. Depending on your perspective (and perhaps your knowledge of primate research), this scene may be either fascinating or unbearably appalling, and its inclusion in the film has led to a great deal of controversy, not so much for its content as what may be deemed its lack of contextualization. Yerkes’ director, Dr. Geoffrey Bourne, has claimed that Wiseman’s film is misleading in that it fails to specify the point of experiments such as this one, an analysis of the monkey’s optical nerve system.
But in a sense, the film does give the researchers an adequate forum to explain their intentions. Halfway through film, there is that most anomalous of occurrences in a Wiseman film: a scientist explaining his work directly to the camera. Later still, Wiseman features a roundtable discussion, in which a group of primatologists champion the utility of seemingly “useless knowledge,” even going so far as to liken their work to the inadvertent discovery of penicillin. “All research is useful,” says one of the scientists, “even though its usefulness is not apparent at the time it’s done.”
For the defender of animal research, this argument and its lucid presentation in the film ought to serve well enough. And yet, it seems clear – though it is by no means conveyed imposingly – that Wiseman remains skeptical or at least unconvinced. But then Wiseman’s job, in a sense, is to observe the observers. Itself a kind of primate research, Primate captures the researchers’ own instinctual behavior: a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, at the expense of the lives and wellbeing of the animal subjects, that is often brutal, relentless, and even absurd. In a stunning and witty final sequence, Wiseman follows the researchers onto a U.S. Air Force cargo jet used for astronaut training. A rhesus monkey is confined to a Perspex contraption and sent into the stratosphere so that the scientists can study its reactions to zero-gravity conditions. In the final shot, the monkey sticks out its tongue.
Leo Goldsmith / © 2008 notcoming.com
On the other hand, isn’t research whose usefulness may not be apparent until later the very principle of documentary? And, in that sense, isn’t “useless knowledge” exactly what Wiseman’s method of documentary neutrality is supposed to give us?
I haven’t seen the film, so I don’t want to push this too far, but I wonder if Wiseman might be more sympathetic to the spirit of scientific inquiry Ñ and therefore himself more implicated in the ethical questions at the root of such inquiry Ñ than you suggest.
I hope I haven’t given the impression that Wiseman is wholly unsympathetic toward the idea of so-called “useless knowledge”—and I quite agree that his own project is analogous to theirs in that it is a type of observational research (even specifically “primate research,” as I mention above) whose use may not be immediately apparent. This is Wiseman’s most explicit film about voyeurism, so I think such an analogy is valid, even invited.
That said, the comparison only goes so far: I would argue, as would Wiseman probably, that the knowledge his films impart isn’t quite “useless”—nor is it arbitrarily observational, as some of the work of the scientists in Primate is. Similarly, while many challenge Wiseman’s ethics as a filmmaker, there are very great differences between his practices and those of the primatologists here. For one thing, though some claim the film is “misleading,” its scenes are not staged in the manner that much of the research here is contrived, controlled, even induced. One might well question the results of research derived from such practices, as one might question the results of analogous practices in other documentary filmmakers. (I might also point out that Wiseman doesn’t dismember any of his subjects, at least not in any literal sense.)
Actually, I think Wiseman may be more sympathetic to the “useless” research depicted in the film – language and cognition studies, for example – than to those experiments whose aims seem all-too-clear. It seems to me that the project of regulating and observing animal sexual practices comes across as quite absurd, as does the final sequence, which seems to reveal the research center’s relationship with the military.
Regarding the scene of the squirrel monkey’s dismemberment, I should emphasize that one’s interpretation of this is likely to be informed by emotion, as mine surely was. But Wiseman is very careful to follow this with the discussion of “the usefulness of useless knowledge.” I discern that Wiseman voices his skepticism of this as a blanket justification for everything in the film, but he refrains from being overtly critical. Ultimately, I believe the film leaves final judgment up to the viewer.
Obviously I take your point that Wiseman’s not completely analogous to the primate researchers, and obviously you know better than me (as usual) what he’s up to on the ethics front.
But for the sake of an interesting comments box: it does seem to me that the particular argument given by the scientist in this film raises a broader question about Wiseman’s work, which shouldn’t be simply dismissed. The question is one of decontextualization: here as in all his films, Wiseman is filming practices and institutions (schools, the military, scientific research facilities, etc.) that have a long and complicated history, a history that includes a great deal of observation, debate and reform. You can say that he just shows them as they are and lets the audience judge for themselves, but that ignores a crucial distinction. Everybody involved in the day-to-day workings of these institutions has a general context for them which the majority of the film’s audience will inevitably lack. Scientists shown dismembering a monkey will obviously look cruel and unthinking, but of course they’re thinking Ñ or, anyway, have thought Ñ a great deal about what they’re doing. In other words, it’s much easier for a filmmaker to depict an unsettling action as unfair or unjustified than the other way around: they merely need to show it, as people don’t typically go around justifying their actions all day long. Whereas it’s virtually impossible to give the viewer a sense of the depth and complexity of arguments for and against that practice or institution over the course of its historical existence without (a) boring everybody silly and (b) departing from the fly-on-the-wall form FW has obviously committed himself to. (I guess he could put in a sequence detailing the history of scientific ethics and the debate about animal testing in particular Ñ preferably animated, or with sock puppets Ѭ†but that would kinda cramp his style, don’t you think?)
Anyway, this is in no way intended as a condemnation of Wiseman, who I’m sure has thought about this decontextualizing aspect of his filmmaking practice as much as anyone: really, thinking through these kinds of questions only makes the films more fascinating. Nor is it really a criticism of your mega-excellent review. Just monkeying around, so to speak.
It’s certainly a knotty point that’s worth unraveling, but it’s also one made knottier by this film, which seems quite distinct from others in Wiseman’s career for some of the reasons I mention above. Actually, when I said above that “the film leaves final judgment up to the viewer,” I really only meant this in terms of the roundtable discussion as justification for the dismemberment. I don’t think the film is quite so neutral or even fly-on-the-wall in other sequences (like the ending, for example). But in the case of the dismemberment and subsequent conversation, Wiseman seems to be using montage to pose a kind of question. It’s as if he’s saying, “Here is something primatologists do, and here are some of their justifications—are these persuasive?”
This, I think, is an interesting example of what it is that Wiseman actually does as a filmmaker—and more specifically, as an editor. These two sequences may have been shot weeks apart and likely had no direct relation to one another when they were filmed, but Wiseman uses them as building blocks in a narrative sequence to pose a question about his subject. To be sure, it’s not an exhaustive treatment of the depth and complexity of the arguments at hand, but I think it nonetheless begs the viewer to react critically – positively or negatively – to the material. Of course, if I’m being honest, I think the layperson is more likely inclined to react negatively—especially the layperson of 2008. But I don’t know that this necessarily betrays Wiseman’s own point of view, at least not in this instance.
This is of course your point, and probably the chief criticism that any documentary filmmaker faces. But what I notice, particularly in discussions of Wiseman’s work, is how paradoxical the criticism becomes: on the one hand, some find his films too passive, because they fail to adequately narrate to you the information that you supposedly need to know to make an informed judgment. But on the other hand, some find them too manipulative in the way they select and organize information. They are neither a Michael Moore film, with an overt point of view, nor Warhol’s Empire, with an omniscient or arbitrary point of view.
Humans and society are interesting bedfellows. As individuals we have an overpowering need to know everything about life, even if we may somewhat corrupt the pure vision of life that society has. And documentarians want to know what the individuals and governments are doing, suspecting always that their actions contradict the noble motives and Prime Directives of our species. Both seem interested in delving into the hidden secrets. Revelation is our reward, whether scientist, film-maker, or film-goer. It is all the same payoff.
If humans all had the necessary background to understand the reasons for this kind of research, and could look without bais at these images, then I suspect the world would be an amazingly disturbing place, filled with highly rational behavior design for the eventual betterment of all mankind. The disturbing nature would only be observable from some imaginary viewpoint no longer present in this utopia.
I wonder if our short-sightedness keeps us from enacting atrocities too unimaginable to bear. Its a
It’s a WHAT?! Just foolin’. Evan/Leo — what’s up? You guys come here often?
Directed by
Frederick Wiseman
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Frederick Wiseman
Posted on
08 June 2008
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Evan
8 June 2008
11:37 AM