Watch what these primates do: Frederick Wiseman — with framing from Trollope, Agree, Montgomery

Dear friends and readers,

I have been given pause what we should call ourselves. Last night I watched the most horrifying film I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen some horror. It’s a 1974 Frederick Wiseman film called Primate where he filmed the people or scientists who “do” science at Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta. (I hate to call them that but that’s why they would call themselves and would probably be granted that definition because of their methods of documentation) The daily cruelty inflicted on a group of apes unluckily caught and enslaved in cages is terrifying as you watch them do the meanest, most absurd, brutal, exploitation, and useless experiments on these animals. Researching these animals’ sexuality under conditions of extreme imprisonment, drugging, imprisonment inside various kinds of harnesses, versions of chains, includes forcing a chimp to ejaculate while you feed him grape juice; you keep him in cage, starve him so he is hungry and will come to the front and you put your hand in and do this to him. This is minor. I saw one gibbon beheaded slowly. The people wear doctors’ outfits. They are doing science, continually writing down every thing these animals are coerced into doing in these cages

I then read an chapter printed in a 1989 book by Thomas Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions, where I learned as of that year the Yerkes institute was still performing these acts.

To my surprise I discovered it began with Anthony Trollope’s description of his realistic method IN CYFH? where he discussed self-reflexively how he put his “facts” on a page, what he meant to do in his novels: to make us see and face the real details of the world and see their relations and consequences quite apart from what the characters claim these are.

This is what Wiseman does. Benson and Anderson then quoted and discussed James Agee documentary book on sharecroppers in the depression where a similar point is made about political discourse and how to be effective.

Of course the Yerkes and its supporters have attacked Wiseman as unfair, gross, skewing the evidence. They say their talk was not included, their justifications. In fact they partly are. But these are irrelevant.

Look at what people do. I cannot better Benson and Anderson’s straight descriptions and evaluations:

Primate is 105 minutes long-feature length-and contains, according to an analysis by Liz Ellsworth, 569 shots.8 That works out to an average of eleven seconds per shot for Primate, approximately half of the average shot length of twenty-three seconds in Wiseman’s High School, and a third of the average shot length of thirty-two seconds in Titicut Follies. The unusually large number of shots in Primate is not simply a fact, but a clue, both to the rhythm of the film and to its method of building meanings.

The film opens with a long series of shots in which we may first notice the ambiguity of the film’s title, which applies equally well to men and apes. We see a large composite photograph, with portraits of eminent scientists, hanging, presumably, on a wall at the Yerkes Center. Wiseman cuts from the composite portrait to a series of eight individual portraits, in series, then to a sign identifying Yerkes Regional Primate Re­search Center, a bust of a man on a pedestal, an exterior shot of the center, and then a series of four shots of apes in their cages. The comparison is
obvious, though not particularly forceful, and it depends for its meaning both upon the structure Wiseman has chosen to use-at least he does not intercut the apes and the portraits-and upon our own predictable surprise at noticing how human the apes look.
Slightly later in the film, still very near the beginning, a pair of sequences occur that are crucial to how we will experience the rest of the film. Research­ers are watching and recording the birth of an orangutan. The descriptive language is objective, but not altogether free of anthropomorphism: for exam­ple, it is hard not to refer to the female giving birth as the “mother.”

Immediately following the birth sequence, we watch women in nursing gowns mothering infant apes: the apparatus of American babyhood is evi­dent-plastic toys, baby bottles, diapers, baby scales, and a rocking chair. To reinforce the comparison, we hear the women speaking to the infant apes. “Here. Here. Take it. Take it. Come on,” says the first woman, offering a toy to an infant ape. Then another woman enters the nursery, also dressed in gown and mask. “Good morning, darlings. Good morning. Mama’s babies? You gonna be good boys and girls for Mommy?” A moment later she contin­ues, “Mama take your temperature. Come on, we’ll take your temperature. It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.” Then a man enters and hands cups to the infants. He says, “Come on. Come on. Here’s yours.”

The rhetorical effect of this scene is to reinforce our sentimental identifica­tion with the apes. And this scene, by comparison, makes even more frighten­ing a scene that follows close upon it, in which a small monkey is taken from its cage, screaming, as a man with protective gloves pins its arms behind its back and clamps his other hand around its neck.

After these scenes, every image in the film invites us to continue enacting comparisons, as part of the process by which we actively make meanings out of the images.

Wiseman establishes a dialectic between acts that we are likely to perceive as kindness to the apes and acts that we are likely to perceive as cruelty. Do the acts of kindness balance the acts of cruelty? Is there a journalistic attempt at fairness here? Not really. We understand that in this institution, the apes are subject to human domination, mutilation, and termination. In such a situation, the acts of kindness do not balance the acts of heartless research. Rather, kindness is reduced to hypocrisy, a lie told to ease the consciences of the scientists and to keep the apes under control. Far from balancing the harshness of the research scenes, the scenes of kindness turn the research into a cruelty and a betrayal.

Let us examine briefly another sequence in Primate. It is the climactic sequence of the film, a little over twenty minutes and over one hundred shots long. In it, researchers remove a gibbon from its cage, anesthetize it, drill a hole in its skull, insert a needle, then open its chest cavity, decapitate it, crack open its skull, and slice the brain for microscope slides. It is a harrowing sequence. From a structural standpoint, Wiseman uses the techniques we have noticed earlier. The images are often highly condensed, with close-ups of needles, drills, scalpels, the tiny beating heart, the gibbon’s terrified face, scissors, jars, vises, dials, and so on.

We are invited to engage in our continued work of making comparison and metaphors: the gibbon is easy to identify with, in its terror of these silent and terminal medical procedures. We are the gibbon, and we are the surgeons. At another level, we see the gibbons’ cages as a sort of death row and call upon our memories of prison movies when we see the helpless fellow gibbons crying out from their cages as the victim is placed back into its cage for a twenty-five-minute pause in the vivisection.

Wiseman has carefully controlled progression and continuity in this section of the film, first by placing the sequence near the end of the film, so that it becomes the climax of the preceding comedy, and then by controlling its internal structure for maximum effect. The sequence is governed by the rules of both fiction and documentary. We do not know until almost the very last second that the gibbon is certainly going to die. Earlier in the film we have seen monkeys with electrodes planted in their brains, so we are able to hope that the gibbon will survive. We keep hoping that it will live, but as the operation becomes more and more destructive of the animal, we must doubt our hopes. And then, with terrible suddenness, and with only a few seconds’ warning, the surgeon cuts off the gibbon’s head. We feel a terrible despair that it has come to this. But the sequence continues through the meticulous, mechanical process of preparing slides of the brain. Finally we see the researchers sitting at the microscope to examine the slides for which the gibbon’s life has been sacrificed. And for us, as viewers, the discovery ought to be important if it is to redeem this death. The two researchers talk:

FIRST SCIENTIST: Oh, here’s a whole cluster of them. Here, look at this. SECOND SCIENTIST: Yeah. My gosh, that is beautiful.
FIRST SCIENTIST: By golly, and see how localized. No fuzzing out. SECOND SCIENTIST: For sure it does not look like dirt, or-
FIRST SCIENTIST: No, no, it’s much too regular.
SECOND SCIENTIST: I think we are on our way.
FIRST SCIENTIST: Yeah. That’s sort of interesting.

The whole operation, which viewers are invited to experience as pitiable and frightening, seems to have been indulged in for the merest idle curiosity, and, if the scientists cannot distinguish brains from dirt, at the lowest possible level of competence. Our suspicions are confirmed a few minutes later when a group of researchers seated at a meeting reassure each other that pure research is always justified, even if it seems to be the pursuit of useless knowledge.

We have already mentioned the sound-image relationships in this se­quence in discussing the structural uses of comparison and continuity. But let us point to some special issues that relate to Wiseman’s use of sound. At many places in the film, people talk to apes, creating a dramatic fiction that the apes can understand and respond to human speech. But in the vivisection sequence, no word is spoken to the victim. This silence is almost as disturbing as the operation itself, because a bond of identification offered earlier is now denied.

The distortion of sexual behavior, in the name of understanding sexual behavior, sometimes reduces sexuality to mechanics, as in the many scenes where apes are stimulated to erection and ejaculation by means of electrodes implanted in their brains, or the scene in which a technician masturbates an ape with a plastic tube in one hand while distracting the ape with a bottle of grape juice in the other. At other times, the scientists seem gossipy, as they sit and whisper about sex outside a row of cages. The effect of the sex scenes is comic and undermines the dignity of the presumably scientific enterprise we are watching.

But along with the comedy, there is an undercurrent of horror, at times straightforward, at times almost surrealistic. Sometimes the horror occurs in small moments: a technician tries to remove a small monkey from its wire cage. He reaches inside the door of the cage and grasps the monkey, which tries to evade capture by clinging to the front of the cage next to the door, an angle that makes it difficult for the technician to maneuver it out of the door. The technician reaches up with his other hand and releases another catch, revealing that the whole front of the cage is hinged. The front of the cage swings open, and the technician grasps the clinging monkey from be­hind, as our momentary pleasure at the comedy of the impasse gives way to a small despair: there is no escape.

Benson and Anderson found the snipping of the gibbon’s head off the moment the film most made them shudder; for me the cruelty of these people was felt most when Wiseman photographed one of the apes operated on and we see him from the back with no clothes, no fur, just shuddering and not a thing is done to soothe, comfort, protect him. And again when the ape operated on so horrifyingly is brought back to his cell, and just dumped there, and the camera catches the creatures intensely distress confused eyes as he lays on the cement floor, and the keeper locks the door on him and walks away.

Oh the film is rightly called Primate. The creatures in charge in their white coats doing these deeds are primates just as surely as the creatures they torture.

This film more than any other shows the wisdom and decency of Sy Montgomery and the “Woman who walked with apes” (Goodall, Fossey, and Gildikas) whose methods are called “unscientific.” They watched the apes in their real habitat, did not attempt to control or change or manipulate them, took into account the apes’ subjective life and studied them from within as a culture. Theirs is the real way to discover truths about these animals.

Birute Gildikas and an orangutan she is genuinely getting to know and understand

Ellen